Güd wrtr

A departure for today… instead of a poem, a reminiscence of our friend and former Sacramento Bee colleague Walt Wiley, who died July 13. Sending much love and gratitude to him and to his many loved ones, especially his devoted family.

•••

I cannot quite wrap my head around two facts: that next month it will be 20 years since Walt Wiley, one of the best journalists ever to pound a typewriter, retired after about 37 years as a reporter and columnist for The Sacramento Bee. And the fact that his old journalistic friends like me must now put a -30- around Walt’s name—the newspaper code for the end of a story.

Walt Wiley died in Sacramento at age 86 on July 13.

I am certainly not one of Walt’s oldest buddies or colleagues, though I met him when I worked at The Bee as a copy editor in the early 1980s. And I was not a regular at the too-early breakfast gatherings Walt and other former Bee folks (Steve Gibson as well as my partner Dick Schmidt, among others) convened in the last 15 years or so at the Tower Café and Café Bernardo—though I did make periodic appearances as a former “girl reporter” (my term that made them laugh; these thoughtful feminists would never have used such an chauvinistic phrase).

But I was a great admirer of Walt’s writing, especially in his Roads West days, when he’d travel through western states looking for unusual stories and even more unusual people to profile for The Bee. And in Walt’s last three years at The Bee, writing a weekly column that consisted of smallish “items,” I was delighted to be one of his sources when the well was running, if not dry, then low.

Walt compared his job to the Greek myth of the boulder-pushing fellow named Sisyphus, telling former Bee colleague Bob Walters that a columnist must start rolling the rock up the hill every Monday, only to find it at the bottom the next week.

I was teaching journalism and advising the student newspaper at Sacramento City College when Mr. Wiley (as I loved to call him) would ring me at my old-fashioned desk phone and say, “Haag? Wha’cha got goin’ on out there? I’m suckin’ wind here.”

This never failed to make me laugh, knowing that he needed another item or two for his column, as he checked in with sources all over town who might have just the right tidbit. I was delighted when I could offer him some campus-based ideas.

Naturally, I invited him to the college every semester to talk to my journalism students, who loved his Texas twang that Walt never quite lost, along with his great stories. In return, they’d share some of what they’d dug up on campus—and quite a number of those pieces became items in Walt’s column.

So it was, when Walt’s last column ran in the Bee on Sept. 1, 2005, I was surprised and touched to find my name in a who’s who list of local folks who had offered him potential items from time to time. I can’t recall a journalist printing the names of people who’d offered those precious snippets of information—some of which worked for his column, some of which didn’t—but there was Walt naming more than 20 of us.

I’d been a journalist at newspapers, an international wire service and a magazine, and I’d never thought to compile a list of sources, much less to thank them publicly. But that’s the kind of classy guy Walt Wiley was.

He was also a fine writer, as well as a careful reporter, though he pooh-poohed that. From a story he freelanced to The Bee eight years after Walt retired about spending a summer as a volunteer campground host at Lassen Volcanic National Park:

“…My last day on the job a German shepherd ventilated the back of my blue jeans (and the underlying flesh) just as I was preparing to head home.”

That’ll make you want to read on, right? (Also “ventilated” is a pretty nifty verb.) I also got to hear Walt read when, on many occasions, he trudged up the steps to an old midtown loft where I hold writing groups, and he sat in and wrote “for fun.” The quotes are his. Like many reporters of his era, Walt wrote for food, for a paycheck. He didn’t generally write “for fun.” But he did now and then because someone urged him to, knowing he had great stories he’d never had published.

I published a couple of them in a small chapbook I put together annually for the people who write with me. Walt didn’t think much of his pieces, though he got a kick out of being included with (and I think this surprised him) some excellent writers. It was certainly not his pinnacle as a writer, but it reminded him that he wasn’t done as a writer, that he still had words to put on pages.

I never stopped reminding him of that, no matter how much he “pshaw”d me. And that’s how I’ll remember Mr. Wiley—as a fine writer, as a careful, responsible reporter, as a gentle man of great character and humor. May his great voice (suckin’ wind or not) live on.

Perhaps it’s the tree of my dreams
grown larger, the horizontal branches
that cradled me now softened by memory.

Or is it the dreaming tree, that long gone,
leaning oak in my childhood back yard?
I have known many other trees,

loved plenty of them—whether visiting
and giving them a friendly pat or
living near these vertical neighbors

photosynthesizing carbon dioxide
and water into oxygen to formulate
the very air we breathe. They stand

in my front yard, summering—
the great Japanese maple and the little
green fans shimmering on the gingko.

I love to tarry beneath the towering
sycamore in the back, its umbrella
of shade lingering over two houses.

It is the great-grandmother of the block,
one of our oldest ancestors, having
lived here far longer than we have.

And the neighboring sycamores, too,
planted in front yards up and down
street after street, dreaming

their arboreal dreams, shading us
as they have for nearly a century,
when this city was much younger.

We hope they survive us.
We hope they continue to
hold up the sky.

•••

Remembering Julia Ellen Cook Behrman Portz,
born this day in 1916—mentor, friend and spiritual teacher—
who taught me the finer points of meditation while sitting
in a great oak tree in her back yard.

It feels as if you’re being given an extra life to live.
—Dara Barrois/Dixon*

Or maybe it’s the third or fourth or hundredth chance—
you’ve lost track, as you should. Doesn’t matter.

It feels as if you’ve been given an extra life to live,
granted a reprieve or been excused from duty.

Perhaps you were pulled back from the precipice.
Or, shoved over the edge, you have clawed

your way back up because (and you know this now)
someone up there was waiting for you,

calling down encouragement, or offering a hand
to help pull you back among the living.

Because you thought you were dead,
or about to be. You thought you’d never survive.

Maybe you didn’t want to. But you did.
And hey, it’s not that you owe the world anything,

that you “learned your lesson” or now you’ll
do things differently. But you can, if you want.

Your one wild and precious life has been extended,
and you don’t have to know how you’ll live it.

All you have to do right now, just this minute,
is to walk or roll or crawl to an open door

and, like the dogs, sniff the air and get yourself
outside. If there’s sun, close your eyes

and look up. Smile. You don’t have to say it—
the thank yous will ooze through your pores,

or raindrops will tap dance on your sweet face.
It doesn’t matter—it really doesn’t—how many

days or months or years you have left.
You have them, lucky you. Lucky us,

we who get to love you a little longer.

•••

* Dara Barrois/Dixon—the wife of the late poet James Tate—said this about compiling her husband’s poems into a posthumous collection, “Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate.”

And with gratitude to the patron saint of poetic wisdom, the late Mary Oliver, for her oft-quoted phrase, “your one wild and precious life” from her poem, “The Summer Day.”

With a headline like that, how could I not click on it?
I mean, I could start my own list:

The I’m-growing-hair-where? places—
The top of my right hand, on my big toes.

The it-aches-why? spots, and don’t get me
started on all I forget… though, to be fair,

that’s been my lifelong poet brain,
which a friend gently suggested might be

ADHD, which would explain a few things.
No, the article listed the “shift and drift”

of our teeth, especially our bottom teeth,
which a dentist pointed out to me decades ago.

“Everything moves to center,” he said,
and he wasn’t kidding.

Also our voices change—men’s get higher,
women’s lower (that pesky testosterone,

sure, but also flabby vocal cords—who knew?).
And, of course, we know that we shrink—

men lose about an inch, women two.
Why does that not apply to middles?

Not just spine compression but falling
arches, apparently. But here’s the good news:

Migraines can diminish after menopause,
which is a huge blessing, since peri-menopause

brought them with such fierceness that
I thought my brain was rebelling against

every unkind thought I’d harbored,
every lie (white or otherwise) I’d told,

every act of betrayal, which spurred me
to take stock of all those little boats

moored in the anchorage of my mind,
and, one by one, make amends.

I’m still making them, probably for
the rest of my life, but the headaches,

when they come, are no longer
giant tempests raging, just smaller swells,

which remind me to send lovingkindness
sailing into the world, even when it’s hard,

because (good old me has learned) that’s
when all of us need it the most.

•••

You can read The New York Times article that inspired this poem here.

Serenity Hills, 1981

In my dreams I’m there,
scuffing my way over blackened earth
still smelling of scorch,
of the fire days earlier that cleared
every foot of open space of rolling landscape
where I was about to live.

Somehow the neighbors got their horses to safety,
the firefighters saved the houses,
even the little studio attached to the garage
that three days later I would call home.

That summer night I was 40 miles away,
tumbled into bed with a volunteer firefighter,
who, had he known, would’ve also taken up
hose and ax in those burning hills
in his grimy turnout gear and ashy boots.

Instead, the spark between us flared
into a kind of heat new to us both,
having no idea what we were igniting,
no concept of what we would be together.

And, on the cusp of everything to come,
walking through aftermath the color of crows,
carrying a bit of his shame that he had failed
his fellows, along with my own what ifs,

I knew that neither of us would have
done it differently,
even if we had known.

The neighborhood weighs in,
the online chat buzzing
like old-fashioned phone wires:

Good morning! Does anyone know what
happened to Imogene, the homeless woman
who lived in the park?

The responses zing with speculation,
and what they lack in precise spelling
reveals a level of concern that I share:

My boyfriend just told me the other day
she was down by the school but I’m not
to sure about that as I drive often

around there and haven’t seen her.
Hopefully she got serveses
and off the street.

How many of us have stories about
this neighbor who lives rough,
as they say in England?

This woman whose name and face
are known to so many—how many of us
have offered her a meal? A bed? An ear?

She was in the park on a bench close
to the street during the day and at night
on the bench on the sidewalk.

Thanks for checking in on her.
She’s been there a long time. She’s
quite nice and loves my dog.

Somebody probably complained
and made her move, so sad.

We live across the street from
the park. And she has been there
for at least 13 yrs.

I am close by and have been wondering
the same, any update? Was she moved
by someone or by an agency?

We all have more questions,
no answers. Concern, but not enough.
And how awful we will feel

if we learn that Imogene has died—
perhaps in that park, beneath
a bush where she often slept.

Even the neighborly dog she loved
may fret as the thread lengthens,
as comment after comment says,

How sad. What a shame.
I, too, drive by the park with bottles
of water and a sandwich, just in case.

On foot, I look around, on benches,
under bushes. But no Imogene
to be found, which leaves me,

like other well-intentioned
neighbors, feeling helpless,
a bit guilty, imagining

what we could have done,
how, with just a little more effort,
we might have made a difference

for one of us.

Though I thought I did so years ago,
I am walking away from that house
once bound in anger and argument,
where the two in charge

stayed embroiled, even on the day
the first of them died, where
the one who remained tried
to argue with anyone who would

take the bait. I swam away
as the worm dangled before me,
refused to nibble most of the time,
though it was so tempting to bite.

I began to make a home inside myself
the moment I left the place that shaped
the lumpen clay of me into the me
who walked into the world,

who resolved to not to return,
not to be like them, to be kind, not
sit in judgment or fling harsh words
at those I was supposed to love.

I have not always succeeded.
I did return. I tried to listen with
an open heart even as flaming arrows
came my way.

I did not try to dodge the projectiles,
worked to welcome them,
allow them to morph into kisses
of forgiveness—

murmuring a rosary of thank yous
for that house, for those who made me,
for all of it, a prayer for the rest
of this lifetime of grace.

They nestle inside like a hundred
tiny puppies waiting to be born,

snuggled so tight they can hardly
be separated. But my visiting friend

from Canada studied the dried
pods dotting the gangly husks

of formerly green stalks. She,
who understands the nature

of flowers and other growing
things, took home some of

the nickel-sized bundles to
her garden. I imagine her

peeling open the husks to
free the bounding seeds,

letting them burrow their
way into rich northern soil

and set about becoming
hollyhocks. If I let my pods

remain, they will burst as if
on a timer, programmed

to literally spread their seed
like overeager males everywhere.

I have never planted a hollyhock
pod, not one eensy seed,

but they have somehow found
their way to my little plot of soil,

surprising me each spring when
fresh stalks begin to rise like

green pencils. Yesterday I cut
some of the dried stalks

still ornamented with pods and
tossed them into the green bin.

Others I’m leaving so I can
witness the reliable cycle

of growth and aging into
death and resurrection,

a needed a bit of reassurance
that we’re not done yet,

that there’s new life still
to come.

•••

For Sue Reynolds and her marvelous Canadian garden.

…it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.

—Mary Oliver

Awakening earlier than you’d like,
somber, sober, shielding your eyes

from the insistent dawn, you
dampen your face and sigh.

Look at this fresh morning
breaking out like a happy rash

into this—yes, unfortunately—
broken world. You have no way

to fix any of it, but you are here,
alive in this moment, and it is

morning again. You woke into it,
a thing both serious and miraculous,

really, when you think about it.
Despite it all, a tiny piece of you

dares to love this broken world,
wants to linger in the great gift of it,

to say thank you, out loud,
to the sun, which has risen again.

Look into the new day,
squinting, if you must, smiling,

if you can. This brilliantly fresh
morning is reaching for you,

and you, lucky human, get to
step out into it.

•••

Mary Oliver excerpt from “Invitation”
in her collection, Red Bird © 2009, Beacon Press

Every year on his birthday
Ringo invites his fans
to send peace & love

to the universe,
a concept that’s never
left him,

one that should never
leave us—not out
of optimistic idealism

but because love
really is all there is.
All you need is love,

love me do,
give me love,
give me peace on Earth,

as the Fab 4 sang
right into our
ever-loving hearts.

•••

Happy 85th birthday, Ringo, from fans like me everywhere!