Güd wrtr

When it’s your birthday month,
gifts show up daily—often
a photo card emailed with
some version of your face
(so many years of face to
choose from) on it.

And one day you come home
to find a box with a bright blue
hair dryer waiting for you,
the older one having lost
its high speed, to which
you can relate.

Because this is what he does,
the man who says he loves you
in a hundred ways: He makes
sure you have your favorite
hair dryer—two of them—
at his house and yours,

all the hot air you’d ever need,
with your smile on electronic cards
that remind you how long
he has loved your aging face,
how long you’ve loved his,
the best gift of all.

•••

(Mahalo, Dickie… aloha nui loa)

…sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing…

—Galway Kinnell, from “St. Francis and the Sow”

•••

All the years I stood before students
in classrooms, I reminded myself

that I was not their ultimate teacher—
though I doled out assignments and grades.

And, if I remembered, I’d say that my job
was to teach best what I most needed

to learn—often nothing about writing
or putting out a newspaper or publishing

a literary journal, not how to write an essay
or a poem or make a photograph.

The best teaching, I learned, is often what
what we reteach ourselves—that we have

voices worthy of the page, even if we
imagine that we don’t. That our words

matter. That we are lovely beings,
coming just as we are to the world,

to the table, to sit with each other
and listen, as someone reads,

and we watch them flourish
from within, giving us the great gift

of themselves, which now becomes
part of ourselves, a sweet blessing

as we hold their words gently,
listening to each other as we

bloom and bloom again.

(for Gail and Amy)

Odd things appear
on the kitchen windowsill—
this week two apricot pits that,
if I had a compost pile, should go there,
or perhaps tossed with the loose tea
in the flowerbed where the rangy volunteers
might find some sustenance
in my leavings.

I watch the golden pits dry more each day,
skeletal ovals that produced something
luscious from Gail’s tree in the backyard
where we gather to exercise on Tuesday
mornings, this place of abundance
that she and Amy have made together.

I savored those apricots, wanting to
bite into them at their peak of sweetness,
feeling their gold fuzz on my lips,
not imagining that a week later
I’d still have the essence of what
made them, pearls from people
who share what grows around them,
whose arms, to my surprise,
open upon my arrival,
and mine open, too.

Recall, friend,
the thaw, the lift
of elaborate freeze,

the throb of salt,
the steam
of belong.

Chant the cycle
of ache, the curl
of caress.

How the blaze
flew into overwhelm,
with no regard

for you, who gave
all to the one
who would abscond

with your heart.

•••

(for Deborah Meltvedt—my wicked trivia queen-poet friend who
loves to play with words, with stunning results—on her birthday.)

(for Donna and our parents)

I never expected to see it,
much less run across the road
on a trip home through
the mountains,

but came upon it veering off
Omo Ranch Road, this forested
piece of property our parents
bought decades ago,

sold to the neighbors
after our mother died,
a parcel I saw only once
upon a long time ago.

But there it was:
Slug Gulch Road, the green sign
proclaimed, aiming tree-high
below the pines.

And as the one behind
the wheel in what had been
my mother’s car, I said,
“Gotta see this,”

though I didn’t know where
their former five acres lay.
Still, faith drives more often
than I do, and when the road

wound past the neighbors’
name on a mounted sign,
I knew that the pines stretching
skyward next door

and the soil in which they
grew once had our parents’
names embedded in it. I
stopped, got out, took photos

of the new “no trespassing”
sign, the reminder that we have
no claim to this land—nor
do we want to.

But squinting into the sun
fireballing through the trees
on a summer afternoon, I
wasn’t sure what cosmic forces

had conspired to bring us together
here, only that we had somehow
gathered in this spot for just
a moment,

before I drove on
into the rest of this life,
the one they gave me,
the one I thank them for

again and again.

In the beauty of holiness,
like dew from the womb of the morning,
in silence and mystery,
I have begotten you.

—verse adapted from Psalms 110

•••

Beauty arrives every day,
the holiest of things shrouded

in silence and mystery, emerging
from the womb of the morning

where we cannot see—unlike those
whose vision enlivens in the dark,

the owl sitting sentinel, ready
to push off from its perch

to hunt what moves in the night.
The bats that do likewise,

then return to their lair to sleep
when the sun appears.

Any number of creatures
do their best work at night,

in the sheltering space of
shadows, while other

daytime beasts bask in
the fresh light birthed daily,

all of us created by what has
begotten us, the very definition

of silence and mystery.

•••

(for Joan Stockbridge)

Dear Mr. Ross:

I wish I could have been there
a century ago, sitting in what I imagine
was your decidedly un-hip apartment,
you brainstorming from a sprawling,
padded armchair, your wife Jane
at the typewriter—the two of you
birthing a magazine with input from
assorted writer and artist friends.

I fancy myself among your hip crowd,
which, of course, you did not call yourselves,
because you weren’t yet the literati
of New York, the ones anyone who was
anyone wanted at their parties.

I’d have given anything to sit next to
Mrs. Parker, as you called Dorothy, even
if she hit me with one of her zingers,
and listen to Mr. Benchley joyfully trade
clever lines with Mr. Woollcott. And over
there, quietly in the corner, Andy White,
the wizard of short essays, still decades
away from penning Charlotte, the spider,
and his beloved Katharine, the sterling
fiction editor, who shaped some of
the best writers of the 20th century.

And if, by some chance, I could have
had a word with you, I’d have asked
if there might be a spot for me on
your soon-to-be beloved New Yorker,
the magazine destined to weather
a whole century, the best of the best,

whether you could foresee it or not,
your dream come true, one that
so many of us admire to this day.

Sincerely yours,

Jan Haag

•••

Harold Ross (a high school dropout-turned-newspaperman from Colorado who read dictionaries and Fowler’s “Modern English Usage” for pleasure) founded The New Yorker magazine with his wife and co-editor Jane Grant (the first woman reporter in The New York Times city room) in 1925. That was after Ross had been to war and edited the Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, after which he served as editor of three other New York magazines.

The New Yorker thrived under Ross’s leadership until his death in 1951, becoming a source of in-depth reporting, political and cultural commentary, fiction, poetry and humor, which it maintains to this day.

When putting up a fence, consider adding
a potential opening—maybe a gate
that doubles as a doorway,

swinging in, swinging out to allow access.
Or perhaps build an entire wall of doors
that might open and shut at will,

each different from its neighbor,
each wearing a unique knob, some
with screens, others with a window.

Possibly add birdhouses to the doors—
perfect for miniature structures
where feathered friends might decide

to take up temporary residence, forage
for twigs in the garden, fluffing up their
own selves for nesting softness.

Let this be an opportunity to
perhaps, instead of constructing
impermeable walls, create openings,

encourage the pass-throughs
of this one and that one, leaving
entrances and exits open to all

with a bit of whimsical welcome,
a friendly invitation mixed with
great heart and a smidgen of hope.

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.