Güd wrtr

I’m fortunate to have poems and stories periodically published, but I like to remind people in my writing world that I generally get at least four or five rejections for every piece that’s accepted. Not a bad rate, but I target things carefully to journals/anthologies that seem particularly well suited to pieces I’ve written… or pieces I write to try to suit them. Still, editors get a LOT of submissions (I know… I edit a literary journal, too), so there’s a lot of luck involved in gaining an acceptance.

Every so often, though, someone invites me to submit a piece to something they’re working on, and though publication is not guaranteed, these feel like better possibilities. Such was the case when Jennifer Cox invited me to submit a poem on a harvest theme to the Clonmel Applefest in Clonmel, Ireland, where Jenny lives and works as a poet and writer. For four years she and her friend Eileen Acheson have asked poets to submit their work to be printed on plaques and posted on the outdoor Poetry Trail among the lanes of Clonmel.

I submitted a poem and didn’t hear anything for a bit. Then I got a group email about where the poems would be on display. I had to ask Jenny if my poem had been selected, and she said, of course, which both surprised and pleased me. I’ve had poems published internationally, but this is a first: to have a poem (one of 39 poems) posted on an Irish lane in Tipperary County. (You can click on the photos to enlarge them.) My Irish ancestors would be proud!

I’m honoured (proper Irish spelling) that Eileen and Jenny accepted my poem, “Crush,” which is a version of a poem I wrote as a wedding gift. Tomorrow (Sunday) Jenny will read “Crush” along with other local poets at a spoken word event. Thank you so much!

(You can listen to me read the poem here. Even better, here’s Jenny reading the poem Sunday, Sept. 25, at the Clonmel Applefest poetry reading.)

I picked my way across virgin furrows,
hundreds of unplanted rows somewhere
outside Winters on a breezy June day under
insistent sun, teetering on unsuitable footwear
toward a lean man whose name I cannot
recall, nor the story that sent me there.

A rookie journalist in a neighboring rural county,
I took tea at noon in my pink skirt and low white heels
with service-minded Soroptimists nibbling triangle
finger sandwiches, afterward driving 20 miles
to take an unsteady walk toward a farmer
perched on his high-rise tractor “way out there,”
his wife said, pointing.

What I remember is the farmer’s face astride
a giant beast, snorting through billowing dust
to a gradual halt, as if bridling a stallion that,
given its head, could rear up and buck him off.
The man climbed down from his mechanical steed,
wiped his sweaty brow with a red bandana,
tugged up his work pants, smiled kindly.

“What can I do for you, young lady?” he asked,
as if 20-something girl reporters regularly
found him plowing the rich earth of his family land       
that would, with luck, yield a worthy crop in
a matter of months.

We must have talked; I would have taken notes
in my slender reporter’s notebook. And, when
we finished, he offered me a ride back to my car
atop all that horsepower. Knowing he wasn’t
done with that day’s work—he’d said he had
many more rows to furrow—and not wanting
to delay him, I declined with thanks.

He climbed back up on his stallion trembling
with barely reined-in power, ready to paw long,
shallow trenches into soil. I wobbled my way
back across the field, half wishing I’d accepted his
offer, turning to wave, gratified to see the callused
hand and extended salute of that gentle bronc rider
silhouetted against a bleached summer sky.

I am grateful to YoloArts and their 15th annual Art Farm exhibition of art inspired by the farmlands of Yolo County, California, for hosting the first Art & Ag Poetry Contest, judged by Julia B. Levine, poet laureate of Davis, California. This poem won third place in that contest, and I read the poem at the event’s opening reception. Thanks to Julia B. Levine for selecting the poem and to Janice Purnell, creative director of Yolo Arts, and her team for their work on the exhibit.

You can listen to me read this poem here.

The royal beekeeper takes on the task
after the monarch has passed—donning

his white suit, the hat and veil, traveling
to each hive to tie black bows on the towering

palaces, home to tens of thousands of bees,
informing them their queen has died—

not the winged one in their hive,
but the woman they have never met.

He urges the bees to be good to the new ruler,
to remain in the hive, to continue their work,

to produce honey until death claims them.
He whispers to them the traditional words,

“The mistress is dead, but don’t you go.
Your new master will be a good master to you,”

offering a prayer, trusting that word will be passed
from bee to bee to bee, a million times over.

for John Chappie, royal beekeeper

The last time we were in Victoria, B.C., three summers ago—before, as they sing in “Hamilton,” “the world turned upside down”—it was July 2019, and Dick and I were marveling over our good fortune.

Six months earlier in January, Dick had collapsed in cardiac arrest as we were about to board a plane in Honolulu to return home after a two-week vacation. As I’ve written about elsewhere (you can look at the whole series, Dick’s Great Heart Adventure), Dick’s heart stopped and was restarted after a few minutes thanks to a team of strangers who came to the rescue and the swift application of an AED (automated external defibrillator) that brought him back to life with one massive shock.

That began a series of miracles and lifesavers who put Dick back together again, resulting in a triple bypass at Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu and two of his oldest and dearest friends who came to Oahu to care for him when I had to return home.

So coming back to Victoria—a place we love and have spent parts of summers since 1999—in July 2019 felt a bit miraculous, too. I remember walking around thinking, “It might have been otherwise,” which is the repeated line in a lovely poem by the late Jane Kenyon.

Nothing like a crisis to remind you of how lucky you are. And boy, did we know it.

Driving around the south shore of Vancouver Island is one of our favorite things to do. It’s a relatively small peninsula with an oceanside road that winds through the neighborhoods of James Bay and Oak Bay, and we took the drive—stopping here and there to take photos and soak up the glorious weather. You never know what you’re going to see, I often say as we park someplace to get out and look. Some surprising thing will happen that you would’ve missed if you’d just driven on by.

So when we passed an old upright piano painted with seagoing creatures sitting oceanside at the corner of Beach and Oliver streets, I hollered, as I’m wont to do, “Ooo! Pull over, Dickie!”

He is used to this, so with a bit of protest—“Janis!”—he did so, as I babbled about a painted piano on the side of the road. I got out of the car and walked back to see if it was a real, playable piano. It was.

The piano was angled so that the left side of the pianist faced McNeill Bay. It had a retractable cover over the keyboard (called a “fall”) that immediately drew my fingers. I lifted it and pushed it back into its little garage, letting all 88 keys gleam in the sun. Just for kicks, I played a few chords. It sounded a little like the rinky-tink piano in the pizza joint my parents, sister and I patronized in the early 1970s.

The piano and others painted by local artists were deployed around Oak Bay as part of the Arts Alive program. This one at McNeill Bay was painted by Gillian Redwood, and she calls it “The Salish Sea.”

What charmed me was its funky, imperfect sound… not that it wasn’t in tune… but I felt that as if I lifted the top of the piano and peered in, I’d see its insides heaving with sound, its old hammers compressed and grooved from hitting the strings millions of times, the strings themselves fatigued with age, the tuning pins loosening. Pianos have something like 10,000 parts with mysterious names—unless you’re a piano tuner: flanged shanks, whippins, damper works, a soundboard with a crown.

Like many kids, I took piano lessons, and I was not a successful student. Trying to get ten fingers and a foot pedal going was tremendously hard for me. My little sister was the far better pianist, and her daughter is quite good, too. But I love pianos—their sounds and their feel, the magic that emanates from them by superb players.

And this one, the Salish Sea, had a piano bench with a lid that lifted. Of course, I lifted it. Inside were several pieces of sheet music. I chose one I had at one time played: Gymnopédie No. I by Eric Satie. It’s the first of three related pieces—all in 3/4 time, deliberately slow and deceptively simple… if you remember how to read music. I had to think about it and figure out some of the notes.

But I sat at the keyboard six months after Dick had been brought back to life and figured out, slowly, painfully, how to play a bit of Gymnopédie No. I at McNeill Bay, grateful for the chance to do so with him there taking photos.

During the pandemic, on some of the darkest, locked-down days, I sat at my computer at home and emailed and Zoomed and talked on the phone with my students. So many of them were upset, depressed, scared—as we all were. The world—the whole world, all at once—was undergoing a tremendous shift, a gigantic ending to life as we knew it. And the new life had not yet been born. It was a time of mourning and sadness, and I kept saying to students who bemoaned the shifting tide, “It won’t always be like this.”

More than one student wailed, “How do you know that?”

And I fell back on the Buddhist teachings of impermanence—nothing ever stays the same; change is constant. We don’t always like it, but it’s going to happen, I told them. Everything vanishes. The pandemic reminded us of that in a huge way. The Buddhists say that we should learn not to cling to “the way things are.” It’s not the fact that everything is born and lives and dies that causes suffering; it’s our reaction to it. The idea is that loss can be a catalyst for a profound shift in perception and a transformation of our sense of self. Being willing to let go, to release our attachments (whether to people or animals we love, to jobs or where we live), and hold on loosely helps us be less anxious about impermanence.

But that doesn’t mean it’s fun to live through or that we don’t grieve what we’ve lost. We do; we should. We must endure the hard stuff that knocks the wind out of us, over and over in our lives. “It might have been otherwise” reminds me to say thank you, out loud, again and again for the experiences we’re given, no matter how difficult, how joyful, how fleeting. I often think of my friend Antsy McClain’s sweet song “Scrapbook,” in which he sings: “I won’t cry because it’s over. I’ll smile because it was.”

Today—after a three-year absence during which we so longed to return here—we drove the ocean road and there, at the corner of Beach and Oliver streets, sat the piano. It was covered with a custom, piano-shaped tarp. We drove by and noticed it, then a little ways down the road, I asked Dick to turn around and go back to the piano. I wanted to see it again.

So we did. We gently pulled up the tarp to reveal Gillian Redwood’s sea creatures across the front of the upper panel. To our surprise, the piano had a lock on the fall. The keys were not accessible. It appeared to have been locked for the season. Ah, well.

I later looked online about Oak Bay’s pop-up painted pianos. They’re out in summer through early September, the site said, and well, it is early September.

So I couldn’t play the piano this time, but we admired it and patted it a bit, then carefully replaced the tarp. Releasing the attachment to playing it, I was able to leave only a tiny bit disappointed. The music is still there in the piano. And it’s in me.

And I resolved, as I did three years ago, when I get home, to dig out my copy of Gymnopédie No. I, find a piano (or on the marimba in my living room) and relearn that song—a reminder of gratitude for life’s unexpected delights scattered between the difficult and sometimes downright awful, life-changing moments… like finding a piano by the sea, waiting.

Georgann Turner’s version of meeting Jan (written in 2012):

Twenty-four years ago I was getting ready to go do a “junior year” abroad. I was no spring chicken. I was thirty-six years old, a divorced mother of an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, and a bit of a late bloomer.

I LOVED school. I had just won a journalism scholarship and received it at a meeting held at a journalism teacher’s house. Her name was Jan Haag. And she was younger than me. We liked each other, so she kept inviting me to her classes even though I wasn’t enrolled in any of them. She knew everyone. She was also the editor of a magazine and her guest speakers were amazing—Pulitzer Prize winners, famous photographers, name brand journalists. So we got to know each other a bit.

And one day I said to her, “I’m going to Wales. If you write to me, I’ll be your best friend.” And I think she thought I meant it.

As it turned out, she had a trip planned to Wales around the same time that I was planning to arrive there. I’d only been there less than a week when she popped in for a visit. After that, we started writing to each other. And the first letter I got from Jan was an epiphany—I heard her voice. I understood what writing was—it was putting your voice on the page. So when I wrote to her, I put my voice on the page. And it was easy. I just talked to her.

•••

Jan’s memory of this:

The way I recall it, Georgann suggested that we write to each other when I was visiting her in Swansea, Wales. She and Jena had just arrived and were living a two-story flat where, to get heat, they had to insert coins in a device on the wall like the kind you might find on washers and dryers in laundromats. I was traveling through the UK by train in the fall of 1988 with my best childhood buddy, Sue Lester, when Georgann said (in Sue’s presence), “If you write to me, I’ll be your best friend.”

I may have this wrong about when and where she delivered that memorable line. But we both remembered her saying it because it was typically Georgann funny, and it made us both laugh.

Sue didn’t take offense, as I recall, and, because I liked Georgann, too, I came home and went to the post office to buy single sheets of thin blue paper called Aerogrammes. I think they cost about 50 cents, which was pricy postage at the time. You wrote on one side of it, then folded it into a rectangle, licked and sealed the gummed sides, and addressed it to your friend overseas.

We sent our Aerogrammes back and forth across the pond for the two years that Georgann was in Swansea finishing her bachelor’s degree in politics. I still have her letters—her voice bounding off the page, a fine writer, though she didn’t know that yet—great treasures that they are. They chart the beginnings of our friendship that neither of us imagined would last for the rest of her life—as she adopted three children, first as a single parent and later with her second husband, Ron—more than 30 years of love.

As she would’ve said, “How lucky were we?” Very!

for Georgann, on the first anniversary of her death

While I wait for you to die, I putter
next door in the old house rendered new
after its occupants passed years ago,
the neighbors having rehabbed it into a quaint
guesthouse. I cannot help make comparisons
between the creaky floors on which I pad
and you, brittle and sweaty in your bed,
as the temperature soars inside and out.

Every morning I head for your house,
pick up the leash off the hook by the door
to the garage, find the old dog sprawled
on the dining room floor. You used to have
to step over him to put food-laden bowls
and platters on the table. Now he is the only
one who occupies that relatively cool space.

He, too, is literally on his last legs—arthritic
and prone to falling. I follow his slow progress
outside to the little house next door where I alight
for now. He prefers the freshly mown grass there
to the patch in front of his own house. “It’s good
to get out,” you observe in a rare moment of
wakening. It takes me a second to realize
you’re talking about the dog. “He likes to read
the news left by other dogs.” I chuckle, good
audience that I am.

Your husband lingers at the doorway of
the small room where you are enthroned.
“Don’t forget the blackberries,” he says,
the one in charge now, who looks after you,
a daughter and two granddaughters—cook,
chauffeur, pain meds dispenser, cat and dog
caretaker. “Oh, yes,” you chime in. “They
should be getting ripe now.”

I’ve been reluctant to take up a bowl
and plunge into the blackberries wrangled
into rows by the neighbors, though I’ve been
invited to since I got here. It is early for blackberries;
I can see the ruby jewels from my bedroom
window. They need more time on the vine,
and I’m not certain I’m ready to bear
the inevitable scratches that come from
pursuing such sweetness.

“Would you like some blackberries?” I ask,
you who are eating so little, whose guts release
so quickly what you ingest. You extract the little
opioid sucker from your mouth, hold it up:
“This makes everything taste bad.” It has long
been so, the cocktail of pain meds that has
taken your teeth, your appetite and not a little
of your mind. Wanting as much time
as you can get through this rocky passage,
you’ve paid for it with every lost pound,
shred of memory, bit of balance.

“Still,” you say, popping the sucker back in,
“a blackberry or two might be nice.”

And that sends me into the vines, willing to bear
the tiny wounds, searching for the purplest ones,
settling for slightly violet-red. If you could make
it outside to stand nearby with your own bowl,
you’d hand me a fat berry to sample. I let
kindness melt on my tongue, lingering in
the midst of an overheated day, the tall pines
stilled, no wispy bay breath drifting by.

I wonder how they’ll taste to you.

You can listen to Jan read this poem here.

Without thinking, I steer toward it,
needing to see that swath of strength
making its way through the artery of Delta
to the sea.

I always find you there.

Under a blue-sky June dome I travel back
decades to a time capsule once anchored
hard by this river where you waited for me.

When the car dead ends into the levee road,
faith stretches a long lazy arm before me,
cobalt calm on the surface,
turbulence churning below. I pause,
knowing that to turn left and follow
the road south, crossing one bridge,
then another, I could reach that sweet spot
where we found communion
far from the world.

You are not there, but I carry us always.

So I turn right, tuck you back
into my heartspace, trusting
the undulation of asphalt before me,
of young peaches ripening
at the bottom of the levee on my right
and the perpetual river on my left                 
to carry me home.

Published in Goldenrod Review

You can hear me read this poem here.

Always after dark when the pool
floods with underwater light,
the very definition of aquamarine,
so that it feels like stroking through
turquoise.

Alone, there’s no need to stay in one lane,
which is fortunate since every summer
I must relearn how to pull and scull evenly,
especially on my back, so as not to torpedo off
at such an angle or bash into a wall, a step,
a railing arcing silver into the water. Even
in the pool my perennial klutziness manifests.

But after the annual reorientation of a land
mammal returning to a liquid state,
my laps straighten themselves out, body
memory taking over what the mind cannot
direct. From water we long ago emerged and
to water we return, especially at the end
of superheated summer days, to cool ourselves,
to switch off thinking, to float—blessedly float—

and find ourselves supported by something greater,
something simpler, always held.

As best I can tell, the last time Don DeVorss and I saw each other was probably at our high school graduation—Oakmont High School, June 1976, in Roseville, California. We’d gone through elementary school as well as high school together—living within a mile or so of each other, riding the same buses, sharing friends in common—but never in each other’s immediate orbits. I remember Don in high school as a tall, gifted athlete playing basketball and running track. I was the girl drummer in the marching band, directing the pep band at home basketball games, working on the school newspaper.

After high school we veered into our grownup lives—Don becoming an architectural and landscape designer with his own business, marrying a lovely woman named Julie with whom he has three grown children, and living on the other side of Folsom Lake from where we grew up. Me writing my way into journalism, marrying Cliff, living and working in Sacramento, losing Cliff when he was 48 years old, then partnering with Dick.

What Don and Cliff and Dick have in common, though, are tricky hearts that needed some work. Cliff with his nifty clicking artificial aortic valve installed 17 years before he died. Dick collapsing in cardiac arrest in 2019 and being brought back to life thanks to an airport defibrillator, then having a triple bypass in Honolulu. And Don, whose heart began to fail because of a virus he acquired in Mexico, felling him with a heart attack and leaving him close to death—until, years later, someone else’s heart gave Don a second chance at life.

And, coincidentally, Dick and Don both had their chests opened by heart surgeons—one in Honolulu, one at Stanford—in January 2019.

Dick and Don and I met for lunch this week in Folsom so we could hear the amazing story of Don’s transplant, his bout early in the pandemic with Covid, and how he and Julie have started a wonderful nonprofit called Donor Gratitude. It’s all about, as it says on the website, “People saving people.”

Many transplant recipients never meet their donors (there are, in some cases, living donors) or their donor families, but, Don says, “I hope and pray that someday I do.” Don and Julie wanted to provide a way for organ recipients “to thank all of those who make the ‘Gift of Life’ possible,” according to the website.

The Donor Gratitude website is a place where people can share their stories about organ transplant and to help donor families heal from the loss of a loved one. Don’s heart came from a 32-year-old man (the same age as Don and Julie’s oldest son at the time) during a 13-hour surgery that put his donor’s healthy heart into Don’s then 62-year-old body at Stanford Medical Center.

It was a long journey back to health for Don, as well as for Julie, his primary caretaker, who works in Blue Shield’s Human Resources Department. He got Covid-19 two weeks into the shelter-in-place order in March 2020, but because of the immunosuppressants to prevent rejection of his donor heart, they helped control the cytokine storm that kills many Covid patients. “So it’s probably because of my transplant that I didn’t die of Covid,” Don told a writer for Blue Shield.

So Dick and I—as well as our dear friend Cora Johnson—met Don for lunch in Folsom and talked hearts. Dick and Cora have been friend since their college years, and Cora was one of two dear friends (with her best friend Connie Raub) who flew to Hawaii to care for Dick after his heart surgery in January 2019.

To put it mildly, Cora Johnson’s got a lotta heart. For more than one reason.

Cora’s late husband, Bob Johnson, had a heart transplant in 2001, and both Johnsons became very active in organizations such as Donate Life and Mended Hearts. They donated literally thousands of hours and dollars to both groups, also getting to know Bob’s donor family and participating in fundraisers for years to raise scholarship money for the high school that Bob’s donor, Tim Baptista, attended in San Francisco.

Don and Cora had a lot to talk about. She drove down from her home in Minden, Nevada, for the day to meet Don and present him with a Donate Life medal in honor of his new heart. He gave us Donor Gratitude T-shirts and bracelets, as well as lots of smiles and hugs all around.

We’re eager to help Don and Julie as they create more awareness about organ transplantation. These two, who have built more than one business together, are now building what they call the Bridge of Life through Donor Gratitude to connect those who make organ donation and transplant possible.

There’s a place on Donor Gratitude’s home page where people can share their stories—anonymously, if they prefer—and the DeVorsses encourage anyone involved in organ donation to do so.

I’m only telling a small part of Don’s story. He tells it even better on the Donor Gratitude website. It’s one miracle after another, as Cora and Bob’s journey was, and as Dick’s and mine was. Angels come from everywhere to conspire on your behalf, I tell people, and Don’s story is full of those folks, too.

This month I’ll be 64, and I often look around, thankful about how fortunate I’ve been in my life. I’ve walked through my life on the shoulders of so many good people, from my grandparents and parents who literally made me to dear family and friends. But all of us are also surrounded by folks who are seemingly strangers who show up at just the right time and place to help, influence and sometimes literally save our lives.

Don and Julie have a lot of those people, too, and Donor Gratitude is just one way they’re thanking them and providing a forum for others to do the same. If you know folks who have been organ donors or recipients, or families of either, you might suggest that they look at Donor Gratitude. The DeVorsses’ generous hearts are all over the site, and, indeed, are all about spreading thankfulness.

I’m so glad to be in the orbit again of this childhood friend, and to be able to hear Don’s story and become enthusiastic fans of the DeVorsses and Donor Gratitude. We ❤️ you!

By Pat Schneider

May you hear in your own stories
the moan of wind around the corners
of half-forgotten houses
and the silence in rooms you remember.

May you hear in your own poems
the rhythms of the cosmos,
the sun, the moon and the stars
rising out of the sea and returning to it.

May you, too, pull darkness out of light
and light out of darkness.
May you hear in your own voice
the laughter of water falling over stones.

May you hear in your own writing
the strangeness, the surprise of mystery,
the presence of ancestors, spirits,
voices buried in the cells of your body.

May you have the courage to honor
your own first language, the music of those
whose lives inhabit your own.
May you tell the truth and do no harm.

May you dare in your own words to touch
the broken heart of the world.
May your passion for peace and justice be wise:
Remember—no one can argue with story.

May you study your craft as you would study
a new friend or a long-time, much-loved lover.
And all the while, lost though you may be in the forest,
drop your own words on the path like pebbles

and write your way home.