Güd wrtr

Dick and I have been coming to Victoria, B.C., so regularly now for the last decade that as soon as we exit the MV Coho, the ginormous car ferry that brings us from Port Angeles, WA, across the pond to Canada, we check into our hotel room and head out for tea.

Not the high-falutin’ one at the Empress Hotel. No, we take tea at the James Bay Tea Room, a block behind our favorite hotel (the Royal Scot, with its fiberglass, kilt-wearing bear in front) that sits kitty-corner behind the Legislative Assembly building… aka Parliament. It really does look like the original in London, so it makes sense that it would have an English-style tea room nearby. 

I remember being lured inside the James Bay Tea Room by the promise on the white board under the black and white awning of “full tea service.” I hadn’t had that since I was in England in the late ’80s. Dick and I went inside to the tinkle of a tiny bell and were struck by the simple square room lined with photos and portraits of the royal family from the Duke of Windsor and his brother, King George, to lots of images of Queen Elizabeth and even more of Prince Charles and Princess Di.

The James Bay tea service and me.

(Someone has grudgingly, it seems, added a photo of Charles and Camilla on their wedding day in a low spot on the wall.) On a high shelf sat brass plates and cups, cherished teapots, pewter trays and geegaws. Small tables with blue tablecloths and proper napkins waited patiently. The only thing missing was a waitress with a Cockney accent.

We go now for the tea service, including scones and tarts and clotted cream, about 4 to 5 p.m., meant to tide over hungry folks until the evening meal, about 9 p.m. Dick likes the shrimp sandwiches and the Coke. Me, I’m all about the tea and brown and white bread triangles of egg and tuna salad, as well as those tarts and scones. It’s not that the food is all that great—it just feels like England to me. England and Mollie and Barbara and Jim.

I had the great good fortune of going to England in 1978 on a college trip that dreary January with a Sacramento States professor of English history named Dr. James Straukamp. My friend Gina and I sat in his Tudor/Stuart history class in the fall of 1977 and came to love the older, balding former priest who wore funny plaid ties and tasseled loafers. He had been a Jesuit priest working on his Ph.D. in London, so he knew his stuff. Jim was wickedly smart, esoteric and funny, and when he announced he was taking a group of students to London for two weeks over the winter break, I immediately signed up.

I’d never been east of Lake Tahoe at that point. But I’d been saving my summer job money from my lifeguarding/swim teacher/synchronized swimming coach gig, and my parents allowed me to use it for the Big Trip. Since the group was departing from Los Angeles, it was decided that I would head down a couple of days early and stay with my godmother, Jo Corbin, and her partner, Dr. Ella Mae Sanders, whom we all knew as Sandy. It had never occurred to me that they were a couple until Jo and I had a conversation about two English friends of hers she thought I should visit over several free days on my trip.

“You’ll love Mollie and Barbara,” Aunt Jo told me sitting on their big sofa in the living room. “They met a girls’ school years ago. Mollie taught art and maths, and Barbara was the headmistress. Mollie is still an artist—a very good painter.”

I drank this in for a bit. Then Aunt Jo said, “They’re not a couple—they’ve just lived together for years.”

That was when I realizes that Jo and Sandy were a couple, not just roommates, though we never mentioned it again.

The funny thing was that Mollie and Barbara—I came to understand in following years after my first visit with them and subsequent visits they made to my parents’ house—were also a couple. They may not have had a romantic relationship, but they kibbitzed at each other like old married people and knew everything there was to know about each other. 

I adored them almost immediately because they welcomed me, sight-unseen, into their Tudor-era, thatch-roofed cottage a few hours outside of London. I slept on a feather bed that was so soft it felt like a cloud and had to duck under the timbers of the doorways to make sure I didn’t bump my head. They trotted me around their part of the world to see, among other things, Cambridge (I immediately wanted to transfer there) and taught me to drink shandies—lemonade and beer. I didn’t take to shandies, but I did to tea. Not the drink persay, but “tea” as an afternoon meal. I’d never heard of clotted cream, but when I first plopped a spoonful into my teacup and tasted it, I was hooked. I’d never seen a scone or slathered jam (not jelly) on a tiny muffin-like thing, but I was an eager learner. 

I felt like I’d fallen into Shakespeare and both Brownings and every English author I’d ever heard of—but with cars and, thank god, toilets. That, plus the fact that Straukamp was a walking encyclopedia of all things English, and he could read the Latin in all the churches, and he took us to Winchester Cathedral where, I realized, I was standing on the very spot where Jane Austen was buried. I never wanted to leave. 

Mollie knitted me a “woolie” that I still have, though it doesn’t fit very well, and she and Barbara introduced me, the budding writer, to the essays of George Orwell and the poetry of Rumi. They took me to old bookshops where I bought my first copy of a book published in 1889. For two pounds, as I recall. Mollie and Barbara seemed ancient to me at the time—they were probably in their late 60s when I met them. Yet they were funny, very smart and well-read, and they changed my life.

They are both dead now, as is Aunt Jo. Jim Straukamp is still living in Sacramento with his longtime partner Bob (long ago giving up the church for the love of a good man, Jim used to say). But he is struggling with Alzheimer’s and, I understand from a mutual friend, his brilliant mind is no longer accessible. He changed my life, too.

So this week when I sat in the James Bay Tea Room, I raised my cup and silently toasted those dear friends who gave me England and so much of the person I became. They fostered a writer and a budding Anglophile.

And Victoria, the closest place to Sacramento that feels like England, brings me close to them all. I bet I wouldn’t have to look too far to find a pub that could make me a shandy. Mollie and Barbara and Jim would all approve.

I admit it: I am nutty about books. Spending time in a rockin’ bookstore ranks right up there for me with Jik Jak ice cream at Burr’s (chocolate with a hint of cinnamon and nuts). Or noodling around on the marimba, figuring out songs I used to know years ago. Or singing loudly in the car. Oo! Or having my feet massaged. These things give me pleasure and make me feel alive in the best possible way.

So when Dick and I realized that we had some extra time built into our traveling schedule around Portland, I dipped a tentative toe in the water. “Welllllll,” I offered. “We could maybe make a stop at Powell’s.”

It is a measure of how much this man loves me that he barely paused before he said, “Yeah, we could do that.”

On my 40th birthday, we were in Portland, and Dick gave me what might just be the best present of all time: a day at Powell’s. A whole day in a three-story bookstore that sprawls over a square block. Not just any bookstore—one of the best on the planet, a self-proclaimed City of Books. John Balzar, writing in the LA Times, said, “There is simply no place in America like Powell’s. No bookstore is so big or so meticulously organized, and none has such a psychic hold on so large a community.” Or on me.

And Dick said on my 40th birthday when he surprised me with a full day at Book Heaven, “You point; I buy.” It was better than Disneyland. Once inside, I became so absorbed and lost in the stacks I had to take breaks, my eyes got so buggy looking at and through books. We zipped out for lunch and dinner and probably spent a total of nine hours in there before I gave up. 

It was not just that I got to buy any books I wanted. It was that Dick understands that places like Powell’s are cathedrals of literature to me, the best kind of libraries because you get to keep the treasures forever, if you like. Yes, I have too many books and not enough bookshelves. But I don’t keep every book that comes into my life—only the most special ones. Really. Words are what I play with, what I coax out of others, what I breathe—so amazing bookstores and libraries hold special magic for me.

So here we are at Powell’s, where they’ve set up a nifty little green screen that you can pose in front of, and a nice young man takes your photo that he will email to you. (How high-tech is this?!)

Dick and Jan in front of the green screen.

We spent “only” an hour and a half at Powell’s on this visit. That’s when our free parking space was going to turn into one that required money—no big deal, really. We coulda popped for parking. But we were traveling, and Dick knows well that I need some kind of deadline, or I could spend the night in Powell’s.

So I started in the Green Room, which is where the cashiers live, looking through books on sale and found two paperback copies of “Fluke” by Christopher Moore, which I couldn’t find anywhere, even on Amazon, for heaven’s sake. And since I’d given my copy away and I really needed another one, well, there were two. I put in my plastic basket new hardbacks of a few old P.G. Wodehouse books because the editions are just so lovely, and I’m a huge Wodehouse fan. I picked up a 1950s edition of To the Lighthouse because Virginia Woolf has inspired a missing chapter in my novel. I chose a few obscure literary journals because I like obscure literary journals. I oversee one myself.

I was happyhappyhappy for those 90 minutes in Powell’s, and Dick was happy because he says he likes to see me happy. It is one of the best birthday presents I could have in anticipation of my day, Friday, July 30. I will be 52, which is what I’ve been telling people for most of the past year. For some reason, 51 just feels like an odd number. (It is an odd number, Jan…) I’ve been saying, “I’ll be 52 on my next birthday.” And here it almost is.

Running my hands over the spines of books in a tremendous bookstore was a great way to begin this year’s celebration. Thank you, Dickie!

On our way north to Canada, Dick and I stopped in Mt. Shasta, the small town that sits 3,600 feet up the flank of the great white mountain the native people once called Uytaahkoo.

Shasta the mountain last erupted about 200 years ago, but geologists consider it “dormant,” which means it will erupt again. Every drive I’ve made north, I like to stop in that cute town and drive up to the high school, from which there’s a gorgeous view of the mountain. I look up at the second highest volcano in the United States (14,179 feet tall) and wonder if someday that town will be like Pompeii, buried under a pyroclastic flow of lava.

That sounds rather morbid, I know, but Dick and I are fascinated with volcanoes and feel lucky to live so close to such a big one. We also love going to the Big Island of Hawaii and spending time at Kilauea, which has been erupting continuously since 1983. I’m kinda nutty about rocks, big and small.

This time in Mt. Shasta, however, besides admiring the mountain (far less snowy than when I saw it in early June), we wanted to visit a spot Dick hasn’t seen in fifty years—the headwaters of the Sacramento River. In the summer of 1960, Dick’s parents and their three kids made a long driving trip to Canada to visit friends on Vancouver Island. Dick recalls his dad stopping in Mt. Shasta to show the kids the origins of California’s longest river, one of two that flowed through their hometown.

Dick remembers taking pictures of Big Springs and being told that it took fifty years for the water to work its way through the lava and come out in the Mt. Shasta City Park. He no longer has those photos, but it seemed appropriate that since we’re returning to Vancouver Island this summer to commemorate that trip and reunite with family and friends there that we also look at the place our river begins.

It took us awhile to find the park out of town to the north. When we got there, it was obvious we’d found the right place—not just because of signs that said, “Headwaters,” but because we saw at least a dozen people walking to and from them with containers for water.

Dick at the headwaters of the Sacramento River in Mt. Shasta City.

We stood and looked at the springs gushing out of dirt—no pipes at all—making a small pond that pools and then falls into Big Springs Creek. We, too, collected some water and drank it—cool, clean, very clear. Dick took photos of what we realized is the first waterfall of the Sacramento River. And it struck me that the water we were now drinking began as snowmelt about the time the Schmidts stood on the same spot fifty years ago. 

I pointed this out to Dick, and we smiled, thinking of his parents, Elizabeth and Christoffer, and their three children, wondering what they might have experienced here on a summer’s day in 1960. One of them only remembers taking pictures that day. He did that again, as a tribute to the power of a great mountain and the powerful love of a small family, both of which live on in rock and memory.

It takes a village to get me out of town. I’m not kidding. Actually, yesterday it took my driver, three good women and the Army Corps of Engineers to get me out of town. Well, one of its core members anyway.

After spending much of my summer of doing Other Work (aka Not Teaching at My College), I am finally off on vacation, driving up to Canada with my guy and traveling buddy Dick. I have to leave town to stop working—or at least stop working on Other People’s Projects so that I can work on My Own. I really like working on Other People’s Projects—it’s why I do them—but I have a novel that’s been waiting for almost a year for some finishing touches. So when I travel—especially to British Columbia where my novel is set—I finally do My Own.

This is so exciting I wiggle like a happy puppy at the thought of it.

But first, in the week preceding departure, I decided to: have lunches, coffees or dinners with seven different friends; spend time with the BF in the hospital; help clear out parts of our journalism trailer at school so it could be used as part of a huge track event; feed cats in at least two locations daily; take a friend who suffered a stroke nine years ago out for lunch and a haircut; led the last Saturday writing group session for the summer; attended a Suttewriters/AWA Sacramento picnic; hosted a friend overnight; went to a play; attended an 80th birthday luncheon; got my hair cut; worked out details for planting part of my front yard with my brother-in-law; bought new bookshelves at IKEA with my nephew and his housemate, and packed.

No wonder I’m so tired.

And when I have so many things on my mind, so many balls in the air as I juggle, it’s no wonder that once I leave for a trip, something gets forgotten at home. Usually it’s easy to replace—toothpaste, tennis shoes, vitamins—or do without. But last night, as Dick and I sped up I-5 after having quick deli sandwiches for dinner at Granzella’s in Williams, Calif., an hour from Sacramento, my excited heart plummeted to my shoes.

We’d just passed a billboard that said something about birth certificates. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I caught that part. And I thought, “Hey, I don’t need a birth certificate, I’ve got a brand new passport.” And that’s when I had that sinking feline (imagine a cat curled into a bathroom sink)—uh, oh. Big uh, oh.

Because that shiny new passport that I’d applied for just at the end of the school year was resting comfortably in a file drawer at home in Sacramento—a good 90 miles away.

Since 9/11, you can’t get into Canada with a U.S. driver’s license. You have to have a legit passport. I know this. I’ve been to Canada pretty much annually over the past decade. That’s why I had to renew the old passport.

I gulped before I said it out loud: “Oh, shit.”

Dick looked at me. “What?”

“Oh, shit,” I said, not wanting to believe I had done something so stupid. I thought fast—if I had someone FedEx me the passport, could we still make the ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria Monday morning? Nope, probably not.

I looked at Dick, the man who has driven me and paid for all these trips to fly me around the Pacific northwest and British Columbia to research and write this novel. The man who has loyally taken photos in heavy downpour and rare 95-degree heat of the former paper and pulp mill town of Ocean Falls, which we reach by float plane from the end of Vancouver Island. The man who has stood by not only this but also just about every offbeat, hair-brained project I’ve gotten myself (and often him) involved in since 1992.

“I forgot my passport,” I finally said.

Dick, who is the kindest soul I know, just said, sounding very disappointed, “Oh, Janis.”

We drove north for a few more minutes as I speculated aloud about how to fix the situation, discarding the FedEx idea, among others. Finally, I knew: I was gonna have to ask for help. I was gonna have to look stupid in front of friends who would be happy to help me… if I would just ask.

This is hard for me. For some reason I was born with a gene that makes me think it’s my job to Be There for others (see previous post). I get paid to Be There for others as a professor and advisor at my college. Yet again and again, I’ve had occasions when I simply need a little—or a lot—of help from my friends. And I have the best friends who are so eager to help, friends who would love to do favors for me, friends who think they owe me favors, though I can’t imagine why they think that.

And that’s when three women and the Army Corps of Engineers came in. As Dick exited the freeway and headed back south again, I called my across-the-street neighbor and Cat Care Goddess, Sonya, and told her. Asked her to go into my office and retrieve the passport. Which she did, finding the new one, not the old one. I thanked her a bunch of times, and she said, as she is wont to do, “No problem.” Sonya even offered to meet us someplace with the passport, blesséd friend that she is.

But I had already called my friend Timi (who is a she) and asked, “So what are you up to this evening?”

Timi, who has lent me her Lake Tahoe “cabin” (really a lovely three-bedroom home with in-laws’ quarters), on more occasions than I can remember so I could both get away for a bit and work on the novel, said, “Not much. What do you need?” (I love Timi.)

It turned out Timi, her husband Rick (who is a Major League Guy with the Army Corps of Engineers) and their youngest daughter Jessica were between their home and a storage unit schlepping stuff. I explained my predicament, then asked if I could prevail upon them to pick up my passport from Sonya, then meet Dick and me at the Sacramento Airport gas station with it.

“No problem,” Timi said.

“I hate to ask…,” I began.

“Are you kidding?” Timi said. “I owe you a hundred favors.”

I could not, for the life of me, think of one. “Really?” I said, thinking of the lovely cabin on the west shore of Lake Tahoe.

“Absolutely,” Timi said. And we settled on a time when Dick and I could race back down I-5 and meet them at the airport.

We did, they did, and after Timi handed me the passport as she, Rick and Jessica sat in their very full Honda Passport, I handed the passport to Dick, who put it safely with his in the little blue pouch he carries for such occasions.

I thanked Timi, Rick and Jessica profusely, of course, as I had Sonya on the phone. They drove off toward Sacramento, and Dick and I took off to spend our first night of this journey in Redding.

I am grateful for the kindness of these people who help me in ways that seem simple to them and hugely profound to me when my dwindling number of marbles get scattered. They help me retrieve the marbles, put them in a protective pouch, send me on my way. I would not be who I am without them. Without all of you.

As they say in Hawaii, mahalo nui loa. Thank you all, so very, very much.

So the BF and I were having a conversation the other day—she tucked into yet another hospital bed and me sitting on the foot of that bed—about a book she wants to write. “It’s about being there,” she said, making me think of the 1979 movie starring Peter Sellers. “You know—being there for people, people being there for you.”

She said this on her third day in the hospital last week. She’d landed there because of continuous vomiting, partly caused by an infection and partly caused by the oral meds she was given for the infection. Back in the hospital, hooked up to an IV and infused with the right drugs, she was starting to look and feel better. I was there for her, yes, but then, she was there for me, too. Ours has always been a nicely reciprocal relationship. Without even trying, really. It’s one of the reasons we’re BFs. It’s easy.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “It’s what we do.”

“But the book would be about ways people are there for others—ways that work, ways that don’t,” she said.

“Ways that don’t?” I asked.

She pushed her round tortoise shell glasses up her nose. She looks a little bit like a female Harry Potter in those glasses, only with auburn hair. It’s very cute. “Like when people send me emails saying, ‘Call if you need anything.’ Or ‘Let me know when you’d like to have lunch.’ ” She snorted. “As if.”

This makes sense only if you know how sick the BF has been—so many days in so much pain she could barely move from bed to bathroom and back again. And she’s not the type to call for help outside her own family. Many of us are not that type. But many more of us, when we get the news of someone who is ailing or lost a loved one, are spectacularly unsure about what to do.

“It seems to me it depends on the person who needs someone to be there,” I said. “For example, I love it when people bring food or cook for me since I’m not so good at that.”

The BF smiled at me. Years ago, she asked me, not unkindly, “How do you feed yourself?” when I called to ask her how to scald milk. I was making custards for the first time, and the recipe said “scald,” and I wasn’t sure what that looked like. The BF said it was when the hot, steamy milk in the saucepan had a bit of scum on top—or at least, that’s how I remember it.

It was 1999, and I was making custards for my guy Dick’s mommy, Elizabeth, who was in her final stages of life. She made wonderful custards, Dick told me, so I asked her about them. She said she had just followed the recipe that had come with her new G.E. electric range when the family moved into a new home in 1952. I borrowed the book from Dick’s sister, Marge, and asked her advice, too. (I have long said that I will eat anything Marge Thomspon puts on a plate—she’s a fabulous cook!) I photocopied the recipe, and resolved to make Elizabeth her own custards. I even used her 1950s custard cups.

I’ll never forget the look on Elizabeth’s face when I brought in the custards in their small white baking cups with plastic lids. Very proper. Very (as the Canadians spell it) civilised. Elizabeth was hardly eating anything then, her little 88-year-old self shrinking into the sheets. A week earlier she had talked me through the recipe, but when I arrived with them, she looked as surprised as a little girl getting her first bicycle. “Custards?” she said. “For me?”

Well, yes. For her. And that tiny woman ate two of them, practically inhaling the creamy vanilla bites. Ladylike to the end, she savored the custards and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. As her granddaughter Rebecca liked to say, “You’re so cuuute, G.” (the G. standing for “Grandma”). She was, too.

So it was with her own custards that I was able to be there for Elizabeth, one of the team of family angels who hovered around her in her final days. She died peacefully—faded away, really, not sick at all—one late night after I’d sat at her bedside reading marked passages from her Bible to her. I still feel honored that I was the lucky last one to sit with her.

“Let’s ask people how they’ve been there for others,” said the BF the next day in the hospital. She sat up in bed, slurping one of the custards I’d brought her. She got to go home that afternoon, too—I like to think the custard helped a bit, though I supposed one shouldn’t discount good antibiotics and anti-nausea meds.

“Let’s ask them how others have been there for them,” she said. “What’s been helpful? What’s not been helpful?”

So we’re asking, the BF and me: How have you been there for others? How have others been there for you? Give us (as Jeanie Keltner, one of my favorite English teachers, said to one of my grad school classes) “ankadotes.” Talk story to us. You can do this in the comments section of the blog or in email form. We really want to know.

In the meantime, here’s Elizabeth’s recipe for custards. They’re easy—I promise. Make them for someone you love. They have magical healing properties.

Elizabeth Schmidt’s vanilla custards
(from the recipe book that came with her new G.E. electric range in 1952!)

6 servings                                 8 servings
2 ¼ cups milk                          3 cups milk
3 eggs                                         4 eggs
1/3 cup sugar                           1/3 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt                      ¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla                   2 teaspoons vanilla
sprinkling of nutmeg             sprinkling of nutmeg

Scald milk in saucepan. Break eggs into 1 point measuring cup or small pitcher. Beat slightly with fork. Add sugar, salt and vanilla extract. Blend. Add scalded milk slowly to egg mixture while stirring constantly. Mix well. Pour mixture into custard cups. Sprinkle nutmeg over top of each custard.

Place custard cups in deep baking pan filled with a half inch of water. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes. Remove cups from pan. Let them cool. Refrigerate.

I should say here that while I consider myself a reasonably “serious” poet, I play with poetry a lot. I think of the goofy, not-so-serious ones that I write as “pomes.” Dorothy Parker called hers “doggerel.”  These are the snippets that show up in the writing group or in whimsical moments. They are not meant to be great, profound pieces of poetry, full of fresh language and original metaphor, just exercises done for fun.

In my experience, poets can burn out from the self-imposed pressure of having to write “good poems.” To mess around with words in a metaphorical sandbox, throwing some up in the air and seeing where they land, calling that a “pome”—that’s some of the great fun of writing.

Here’s a pome that came out of the last meeting of my Saturday writing group. I brought paint chips with some nifty names and shared them. Some people wrote about particular colors or memories associated with those colors. I wrote a list pome using some of the names I liked best. Love the sounds of these colors!

Paint chips

First hear the greens:
Etna Green
Wine Bottle
Jalapeno
Tousled Grass
Dancing Leaf
Go-go Green
Mist-ify
Whispering Pines

Then play the blues:
Bay City Blue
Wine Country Twilight
Half Moon Bay
Biloxi Blues
Lone Wolf
Sonoma Sky
Tahoe Blue

Toss in a whisper of Cascade Gray
A creamy First Ascent
The adobe of Amber Stone
And the dirt brown of Earth Bed

Listen to the purples hum:
Eclectic Plum
Prairie Purple
Mystic Grape
Plumes
Beach Blanket

And the pinks:
Sing So Sweetly
Rich Confection
Love’s Token
Crushed Berries

Finishing on a high note:
Jazz!

Last Friday, July 15, would have been the 94th birthday of one of my dearest dead loved ones.

I knew this as I sat in a big chair in the Kaiser chemo suite with my friend Judy Parke, who was sleeping on a gurney as her infusion of Herceptin flowed into the port in her upper right chest. I often tell Judy that she’s the poster girl for metastasized breast cancer, particularly every three weeks when we spend time in the chemo suite. I go with her to the infusions as often as I can. It’s a good opportunity to visit. She talks, and I scribe, writing down what’s been going on for her in her journal.

Last Friday, I watched Judy sleep since afternoons are her nap time. Usually her infusions are in the mornings. Robert, the rare male chemo nurse, turned off the lights in the cubicle, brought Judy two blankets, and she curled up and drifted off, her bright orange hair peeking out from the white blanket covering most of her. I wrote in her journal about the latest news: a new lesion in her brain, a trip to the ER that didn’t go well. She’s been doing this dance for four years—the cancer had spread to her liver and bones—and yet she’s still here after a mastectomy and a combination of Western medicine and alternative treatments. A walking miracle.

That’s when I thought about my friend Julie, another woman I’d known with carrot-colored hair and cancer. How appropriate that I was spending part of Julie’s birthday in a chemo suite with another friend battling cancer. She would have said, “Honey, there are no accidents.”

They didn’t know each other, but Julie and Judy have more in common than their hair color and me. They have both fought the good fight against a powerful disease. And when I think about what has sustained these women, it comes to two things: faith and perseverance. Each has had an unwavering belief in God. Each has been fearless about pursuing treatments that took harsh tolls on her body. Each has resolved to live as long as possible.

During the last six months of Julie’s life, I spent one or two afternoons each week in her home, giving her son Bobby a bit of respite from his caretaking duties. I was happy to be there, soaking up as much time as I could with a woman who was like a second mother to me. I remember wondering aloud if I was practicing for cancer later in my own life.

“Oh, honey, no,” Julie said. “This isn’t your disease. But you’re going to be around it a lot.”

I didn’t question that statement. Julie believe many things, stated them as unequivocal fact. I was never quite sure what to think. Toward the end of her life, as she was caught in that hazy, morphined place between this world and the next, she was touching my hair and whispering, “pretty.” Then she looked into my eyes with her piercing blue ones and said, “Honey, you’re an angel.”

When modesty pushed protests from my lips, she shook her head. “It’s not a compliment,” she said. “It’s a job description.”

Julie died in 1998 after her long battle with rectal cancer. She half-joked that the cancer resulted from trying to poop out two ex-husbands. Julie was a holistic health nurse—in fact, she was one of my mother’s first holistic health teachers in the 1970s at UC Davis. She worked for an M.D. named Carl Simonton who had people with cancer practicing meditation and visualization to help them heal. A good number of patients did, solidifying Julie’s belief that mind, body and spirit work together to produce miracles.

To me, Judy is one of those miracles—still here, fighting the good fight, using every means she can find… including more than one angel. I am honored to be one of them.

One morning at the AWA training in Alamo, I woke up with this in my head:

Throw out the bad
and keep the rest.
In the heart of the good
lies the very best.

I don’t usually dream in rhyme or wake up with poems, though I envy people who do. And this seems a bit trite to me as a piece of poetry. But I do love the sentiment. It’s not original, and now I’m trying to see if I inadvertently swiped it. (I don’t think so. It’s not turning up on Google anyway.)

What I’m learning again is that words, images, lines show up for us if we’re open to receiving them. Certainly writing groups and good prompts help, but I find that if I sit quietly—sometimes in meditation, sometimes at stoplights—and I request an image, it comes. (See “Requesting the Poem” under the “Poems” page of this blog for more on that.)

Sometimes images show up because we throw words up in the air and see how they fall down around us. My colleague Chris DeLorenzo introduced me to a fun exercise that plays with words to create unusual adjective/noun combos. Try this:

• Sit in a circle with a friend or two or three, and give each person two 3×5 cards. (The more people, the more fun the exercise!)

• Ask each person to write six nouns (people, places or things) on one card—it’s more fun if they’re interesting nouns, not just “dog” or “cat,” though those certainly will work.

• Then ask each person to write six adjectives (descriptive words that are typically paired with nouns) on his or her other card. Don’t try to make the adjectives match the nouns. Again, fun adjectives make things more lively.

• Then have everyone place their noun cards in their left hands and their adjective cards in their right hands. Tell them, “Extend each arm to the person next to you in the circle, and hand your noun card to the person to your left and your adjective card the person on your right.” (You do this, too!)

• Each person ends up with two cards of new nouns and new adjectives. Tell them to start making lists of unusual noun/adjective combos from the words they’ve been given. Play with the words so they have intriguing pairs to choose from. The funnier/wilder, the better. “Kinky tractor.” “Chartreuse roller skate.” “Playful granite.”

• Have each person share, say, three of their combinations aloud. Encourage people to write down the ones they’d like to borrow.

• So now, from the big list of nouns/adjectives, write into one of the combos. Or perhaps play with several of them in a poem.

This frees up our logical brains in ways they don’t necessarily want to be freed. It loosens the often too-tight writing muscle and gets us to play in the sandbox of vocabulary, to mix metaphors. It reminds us that writing is fun, dammit, and we take it much too seriously.

Here’s a poem that arrived at the Alamo training after we all shared some of our pairings. I bet you can easily spot the funky combinations. Have fun! Don’t stifle the laughter!

Blue bunion

Point me toward that playful skyscraper.
Watch me step out with intelligent ankles,
frenetic toenails and one blue bunion
in my satisfied shoes.

I carry an altruistic horseshoe
and an indigo flystrip for luck.

Let me take this city
armed with angry chocolate, sassy tofu
and a rude Maybelline lipstick.

For I am a mischievous roller skate
and one sexy zucchini (though some
might call me an inept Jelly Belly
full of strident baloney).

I am a pearly caterpillar,
a tall rolling stone of twirled rhinoceros.
I am hot Kleenex, baby,
into which I blow a virtuous booger.

It is almost 10 p.m., and I’m sitting outside an old carriage house in Alamo, Calif., typing away on my computer. I can access the wi-fi out here, and a very friendly pale orange kitty named Rusty (he’s faded rust) energetically rubs against my left arm and the laptop as I write. I am a sucker for friendly kitties, so this is not a problem, though I came out here to work on a poem.

I anm here in my new role (as of last year) as an instructor of new group facilitators for Amherst Writers and Artists (see the Prompts section across the top of my blog). My colleague Chris DeLorenzo and I are training a dozen women in the finer points of leading writing groups in this method. We live and train in what truly was once a carriage house–two of the former horse stalls are bedrooms and the living room is where carriages used to be housed.

Since last November, I have participated in four AWA trainings—two of them here in Alamo at this gorgeous Westminster Retreat Center—up against hills faded yellow with summer grasses and old, old oaks crouched on the steep slopes. I have come to quite like this place and its solitude. Behind us, a good hiking trail winds up Las Trampas mountain. I took it to the top last fall, but I have not yet had time to do so on this visit.

Chris and I spend our days with these dozen women—all of whom will make terrific facilitators—allegedly teaching them. But in fact, as with all collaborations, they are teaching us, too.

What I see again as these new group leaders try their wings in practice sessions is how bright and talented people are, how well they flourish when encouraged and given good attention. I also learn new ways of saying things to writing groups that I’ve said in the same old ways. There are a hundred ways to thank people for their writing, to hold a safe space for writers, to offer a prompt and close the circle when it’s time to end. I am learning from these students who are also good teachers. I am grateful.

Rusty has leaped off the bench now and has gone on to prowl the night. This morning, one of the cats here left a field mouse for Melissa, the manager, near the manor house up the hill where we take our meals. I wonder what treasures, what gifts Rusty and his mates might find in the night. I am eager to see what gifts wait for me—as we say in AWA, what stays with me, what is strong—as the last two days of the training unfold.

In the last post, “New poems,” I included a poem that I’ve put up on the blog before. Those with sharp eyes might note that this is a revision of that earlier poem. If you click onto the blog itself, you’ll see a new poem there called “Grow.” And there are still other new poems under the “Poems” heading across the top of the page.