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Pink dogwood blossoms (photo by Dick Schmidt)

After what has felt like nonstop work since my college and so many others stopped seeing students, shut down and converted to online teaching, I finally got outside on a lovely spring day. I took a lovely 2-mile walk around the park-like grounds of the Woodside condo complex in Sacramento this afternoon with my sweetie, who has lived there since the early 1970s.

Dick has been struggling with leg pain, but thanks to a lower back brace recommended by my sister, the PT (yay, Donna Just!), he’s feeling so good that we were able to do our usual 2-mile walk at about two-thirds speed as usual… the two of us, out in nature in T-shirts (not jackets), stopping to admire and shoot flowers on our iPhones (as we do).

We are aware of our great privilege with one of us retired and not unhappy to mostly stay inside as the other one works from home. (I am a Zooming fool now, people, and I ran five writing groups this week from my home office and laptop.)

We’re supporting small, local restaurants we love by getting takeout food (thank you, Evan’s Kitchen for the yummy meatloaf sandwiches today and Nopalito’s for the always-tasty taco plate and burrito yesterday—not to mention Joe Thompson’s Crisp Catering for fine dinners.) We ache for people who are sick, for people who have lost loved ones to complications from the coronavirus, for those who are scared and sad, who have been forced out of their regular routines and, like many of my students, lost their jobs. We have friends who work in the medical field, and we pray that they stay safe and healthy.

While we keep those who are struggling in our hearts, neither of us is sick or in pain today, and we call that a big win—along with the pretty pink dogwoods bloomin’ their fool heads off.

Woodside dogwood tree and residents (photo by Dick Schmidt)

#lifeisgood #ontherightsideofthedirt

(for Joe Thompson and the Crisp Catering crew)

The man who delivers my dinner docks at my house
at 11:30 a.m., steps out of his land vessel with
two aluminum-foiled containers, wearing
a tired smile and his chef’s trousers enflamed
with images of carrots, tomatoes, squash
and the new sweatshirt his wife just had made for him:

Jan Haag
(after W.S. Merwin)

You caregivers hand-holders hospice people, people who comfort
You cooks chefs servers sandwich makers pizza tossers, who feed us
You delivery people truck loaders postal workers sorters drivers, people who bring us things
You doctors nurses medical workers pharmacists front-line providers caretakers attendants, who risk all to care for us at our worst
You cashiers shelf-stockers grocery store workers bankers, who wait on us
You salespeople retail workers, who sell us what we need
You first responders EMTs police fire protectors security people, who protect and serve
You custodians janitors housekeepers, who clean up after us
You teachers principals counselors professors aides, who teach us now at a distance
You receptionists assistants go-fers, without whom so many could not do their jobs
You techies computer geniuses electronic fix-it folks, people who keep us connected
You farmworkers pulling crops from fields, you who pile those crops into pallets for truckers
You truckers who bring those pallets to distribution points; you unseen people who bring food
You who pick up our garbage recycling green waste, who dispose of our detritus
You mass transit workers who move us around on land on sea in sky
You Army Navy National Guard Coast Guard Air Force people, who give your lives for us
You linemen pole climbers petroleum workers dam workers, who deliver energy
You ministers priests rabbis nuns monks imams pujaris, people who remind us of the holy, the mystery of spirit
You instrumentalists singers dancers songwriters, people who bring music
You artists photographers painters sculptors movie makers ceramicists, who make images that lodge in our hearts
You writers poets journalists novelists memoirists authors broadcasters editors publishers bloggers communicators, who give us words that feed us, sustain us in times when we cannot touch or offer the comfort of a hug

All essential you, the essence of us

We see you. We are grateful.
We are saying thank you, the poet* wrote,
thank you in the waning light,
thank you as darkness falls.
We thank you as we wait for day
to break again.

*W.S. Merwin, “Thanks,” from Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

I have cut this man’s hair for years… decades, actually… and just because I’ve got the sniffles (allergies? cold? something we don’t want to think about?) doesn’t mean I can’t take up scissors and comb in my backyard for the first spring haircut of the year.

My back yard really is the best place to cut hair—the hair jibbers, as we call them, float like white feathers to the green grass. One cat finds leaves to bat around under the big sycamore tree that shades most of the yard; the other cat takes up a watchful spot on the deck. It’s a lovely place to be on a spring afternoon.

Once we haul out one of the tall chairs and the good haircutting scissors, I go to the task of making Dick look younger, which he does after every haircut. And you never know when one of us might decide to go topless.

I feel fine—just sniffly, despite all the vitamin C and other good immune-boosting stuff I’m putting into me a few times a day—but when the client shows up with face masks, you gotta wear the face masks. (He eventually took his mask off so I could cut his hair in the back.)

I have cut Dick’s hair in literally dozens of outdoor locations over many years, particularly when we travel. We’ve left his hair jibbers in Yosemite, on two sides of the Pacific Ocean, on an island in Canada, to name a few. Last year, after he came out of the hospital in Honolulu, I cut his hair in a carport in Pearl City as rain poured before I flew home. He stayed for another two weeks with his dear friends Cora and Connie caring for him.

But cutting hair while wearing a mask is a first for us both. These are far from typical times for all of us, and many of us will not be able to see our hair people for some time. (Shout-out to my excellent hair wizard Susan Stewart, who has cut Dick’s hair, too, when I was incapacitated… and, not surprisingly, far better than I!) I am no pro. There are times when I utter an “oh, shit,” while cutting Dick’s hair, which, he likes to remind me, is not something you should say in front of a client. But he has the most forgiving hair that, even after my scissors have gotten to it, makes him look younger and tidier.

You may have heard of the fine novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez, “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Now we have “Haircut in the Time of COVID-19.” I’m sure we’ll have more new experiences as we shelter in place in the days and weeks to come.

Be well!

First day of spring
I step onto the front porch
to greet the stranger who has come
to retrieve my old sofa. Free,
I’d said on social media, resisting
the urge to add, to a good home.

When I ask if he’ll use the sofa
in his house, he hesitates.
“For a friend,” he says in an
inflection that prickles my brain
with stereotypes about people
with such accents.

I may be giving my longtime
furniture friend to someone out
to make a buck, my brain jabbers,
rather than to, say, a woman who’d
also asked for it online—
a woman, I imagine, who might
have settled the sofa into her life,
put her children on it, maybe a pet
or two, watched TV programs
in languages both familiar and new.

But I chose the first person who said
he’d come get it, thinking that was fair—
he’d asked first—before I remembered
that nothing this week is fair, especially
an indiscriminate virus seeking hosts
anywhere it can.

But then, I thought, maybe the man
with the accent needs the money.
Maybe selling my castoff will help
feed his family. Maybe he will
give it to a friend.

I wanted to ask, but instead,
at my urging, he climbed into the bed
of the pickup so I could take a picture
of him and the younger man who came, too—
the one with more facility in the language
I think of as mine—the two of them,
sitting on what had been my sofa,
smiling.

And as the truck rolled away a distant
era of my life, I turned to go back
in the house, looking up at the trellis
over the driveway. There, just today,
the first bursts of purple—baby wisteria
making its way into the world.

In two weeks,
the blossoms will disappear,
the trellis awash in bright green leaves
that will last, I hope, all the way
to the end of summer.

(For Dick)

Go ahead—it’s the one day in four years
when we can, the extra day tacked on
to February when seemingly impossible
things are possible: when ladies can propose
to gentlemen, when any man who refuses her
must buy her a dozen pairs of gloves so
the spurned maiden can hide the embarrassing
lack of a wedding ring—or enough fabric
to make a skirt. Just like St. Patrick refusing
St. Brigid’s proposal, offering her a silk dress
and a kiss of consolation.

It’s the day in 1940 when Hattie McDaniel won
her Oscar for her performance in “Gone With the Wind.”
The day we could, if we were in France, read
a newspaper published only once every four years.

The day the founder of U-Haul was born,
a man who has moved millions—literally.
The only day we could possibly down a
Leap Year martini at the Savoy Hotel in London.

Though the Scots think it unlucky to be born
on this largely invisible day, in Anthony, Texas,
Leaplings born on Feb. 29 gather to celebrate.
As do the northern Italians, who commemorate
l’ann d’la baleina, the whale’s year, when
the behemoths were thought to give birth.

In Taiwan, grown daughters return home with
pig trotter noodles to ensure their parents’
good health and fortune.

Let’s take a running leap into the next four years,
holding hands as we thank the previous ones
for delivering us to this place of grace and good
fortune, as we jump into the next adventure
of this lucky, lovely lifetime together.

for Dickie

I watched you walk through
windward-leaning cypress,
head toward the edge of a seacliff
into the light, a familiar silhouette
angling away from me, the long shadow
of life extending behind you,

and I thought again, no, not yet,
just as I did last year when you
made an unplanned departure,
felled by something you couldn’t
see coming, only to be returned—
kicked back to our side—to finish
what you started.

So this year, on the anniversary
of your homecoming, at a beloved
spot overlooking waves that travel
from horizon to shore, you headed
into the light through slender poles
of trees, then paused at the edge,
looked back over your shoulder
and gestured to me.

C’mon, you said without words.
Come see this.

And I followed you.

The Sea Ranch, Feb. 15, 2020

Shootin’ the sunset on his 77th birthday, Feb. 13, 2020.

We are delighted to spend Presidents’ Day weekend at The Sea Ranch, as we do most years. Last year, of course, Dick was recuperating in Honolulu after his cardiac arrest and subsequent triple bypass surgery. He spent his 76th birthday there with two of his longtime friends, Connie Raub and Cora Johnson, who arrived from their homes in Colorado and Nevada, respectively, to care for him when I had to come home to teach.

Now, on his 77th birthday, he is stronger and feeling better than he has in years, and we’re once again in one of our happiest places on our side of the Pacific Ocean (though, of course, we love the Hawaii side of the Pacific, too). We celebrated Dick’s day on the drive to The Sea Ranch with crab sandwiches and good clam chowder at Fisherman’s Cove in Bodega Bay. And as we drove north on Highway 1 toward Casa Pacis, the sweet cottage on the coast where we’ve been fortunate to stay many times, we were tickled to celebrate another birthday together. It’s another marker in this journey back to wellness for Dick, this birthday. And we are so grateful for it.

We were also tickled that one of my journalism students, Express editor-in-chief Rose Vega, wanted to do a story about Dick’s Great Heart Adventure, as I’ve called it. (The Express only does stories with ties to Sacramento City College.) It turns out, of course, that Dick’s two rescuers do (as followers of this blog know)—Salesi Maumau, who performed CPR on Dick at the airport, is a former City College Panthers football player and student, and Claudio Alvarado, the RN who tended to Dick at the airport, now teaches nursing at City College.

That the Express editors decided to post the story on Dick’s birthday today tickles us. (Great job, Rose! And yes, I’m a wee bit biased in more than one way.) It is the cherry on top of our already bountiful sundae of a year, following the first anniversaries of his rebirth (Jan. 15) and triple bypass (Jan. 24). The good stuff just keeps coming!

Happy birthday to you, dear Dickie. And as the song often ends… and many more!

Photo: SeaWorld San Antonio

Every year on January 30
I smile at the notion that I have
gained a half a year,
remembering when I lorded
those six months over my sister,
felt superior to younger classmates,
looked eagerly toward gaining the next
digit at the end of July, when—lucky me—
there would be a party that often involved
hopping the fence across the street,
making our way down the hilly path
to swim in the lake.

And now, halfway through my 61^st year,
I understand what my elders moaned
about in my youth: that years grow wings
and do, indeed, fly, that we pick up speed
on the roller coaster of life, that we
look back and wonder where it all went,
wish we could restart and truly enjoy
the ride, return to languorous days
at the lake with our friends, then—
damp towels slung over shoulders
that had no glimmer yet of the burdens
they would one day carry—
head back up the dusty trail toward home
where a cake and presents, and, it turned out,
the rest of our lives, awaited.

Thanks to Antsy McClain for the inspiration. 

Chris Ohta of Hawaiian Airlines

Oh, my. What a sweet gift arrived from our friends at the AED Institute today. We were so moved by this 2:25-minute video assembled by the Hawaiian Airlines corporate communications team. They met us at the Honolulu airport to greet us and interview Dick just before we headed home on Jan. 15, the first anniversary of his cardiac arrest.

Chris Ohta, the Hawaiian Airlines guest services clerk who ran for the AED, shines in this video… as he well should. His quick thinking made all the difference.

We’re honored to be a part of this video and so grateful again to Hawaiian Airlines for their kokua and aloha last year and this one.

Watch it once, and then maybe again.

Dick being interviewed for the video.