Way back in the previous century, I soloed Saturdays in the office of an international wire service, posted there to cover the newfangled California lottery.
I’d have the TV on, glancing up from my huge CRT monitor at the Big Spin, a game show-style program where lucky Californians hoping for a big win got to twirl a huge roulette wheel mounted vertically for the camera— all the force of their hope thrumming through their arm.
Lucky ones went home with something, though nothing like the millions now coursing around the state as people put money down on a series of numbers that they hope will make them rich.
Now, on a Momday of driving and dropping her off at appointments, as I fuel up her car, the vertically spinning numbers stop precisely at $47. And when I go inside to claim my three dollars in change, the clerk hands it to me saying, That’s lottery ticket kinda luck.
I chuckle, head back outside to look again at the digits lined up neatly on the pump, and think, Why not?
I go back inside with my three bucks and say to the same clerk, What kind of tickets can I get for this?
She laughs, points to the $2 scratchers, then the $1 ones, or, she says, I can also have three shots at the big jackpot, hovering around $500 million at the moment, though I’d have to stand there and choose a hopeful combination of numbers.
Needing to retrieve Mom, I land on the fastest option—two brightly decorated scratchers—imagining how long the odds might be to even win back my three bucks.
Good luck! grins the clerk.
And before I even get in the car, before I scratch those little cards, I behold the delighted smiles and squeals of people who once spun the big wheel on TV and went home with a little more cash in their pockets and a little more faith in their brilliantly lucky stars.
Nope, no winners on these cards… (Photo / Jan Haag)
(for the good folks at Vic’s Ice Cream in Sacramento)
The thing is that it’s real turkey, carved off the bird, all the way to the carcass, like the afters of Thanksgiving
when you hack off a piece of white meat, slap on it on some good sourdough and layer it up with, say, with your favorite (savory) greenery and maybe a tomato, not to mention the close-to- your-heart condiments.
Vic’s does this. Burr’s used to.
How we miss Jim Burr’s old spot across town, its windows long covered in paper, no sign that ice cream and sandwiches will ever emerge again from our go-to place,
where parents took kids after school, after baseball, before Halloween runs, where folks our age took their ancient parents until they faded away.
Now we’re the old ones.
And now Vic’s is for sale, and we worry that if it sells, it will get cleaned up and fancified, the turkey will morph into slimy, store-bought stuff, the ice cream no longer conceived in the back room,
the counters presided over by teenage judges wielding scoops and issuing cones with authority they won’t otherwise acquire for years.
Everything changes, of course; businesses, too, have lifespans, coming and going—the going often much sooner than we’d like.
But isn’t that life?
So we hustle ourselves over to Vic’s and snag the last booth in the snug shop to watch red-shirted baseball kids twisting on the stools at the 1940s counter, high school girls giggling loudly in the booth behind us.
And when the turkey arrives for me, and the hot dog sliced onto fresh sourdough for you, we sigh after our first bites, aware of this precious moment, wanting to somehow store more than sandwiches and ice cream into our cellular memory.
We leave a big tip for the tall boy with the fabulous ’fro who flashes two thumbs up when we tell him how great everything is.
“See you next time,” he says when we pay at the tablet on the counter where the cash register used to be.
We catch that hope like a gently lobbed ball, and return it. “Yes,” we say. “Till next time.”
Jan with turkey sandwich and fudge ribbon frost at Vic’s Ice Cream / Photo: Dick Schmidt
I wonder sometimes if I am writing the same poem over and over. If I’ve lived in the rooms of the lines so long, I’ve left crease marks on the furniture.
—Maya Stein
•••
Perhaps this is why I don’t invite many people in for a visit. Not just because of
the too-much-stuff issue, or because someone might step into a bit of hairball
one of the four-leggeds left on the floor, and I missed, but because a sharp-eyed
guest might notice the pile of “lovely”s in the corner—one of my overused words—
not to mention my tendency toward three-line stanzas, linguistic tripods
holding up the coffee table. And oh, dear, though I sweep regularly,
I’ll never clear out all the love poems to a dead husband, or the ones to
the gloriously resurrected partner, or, for that matter, the gratitude
oozing from every houseplant that has seeped into me and onto
the page for so long, you could say that we are more than a bit
overwatered. But I like it this way, up to my knees in metaphor,
redolent with repetition, not to mention giddy with alliteration.
I wouldn’t trade it for a squeaky clean, spotless life, free of cliché
Don’t like it. Gonna stare it down. Make it leave. It’s not leavin’. Why’s it not leavin’?
Wha’cha doin’, you guys? Tryna chase this thing away. Give it the hard stare. It’s not leavin’. I know. Why’s it not leavin’? Dunno.
Maybe it can’t fly. It got here somehow. Just gonna sit here till it goes. ‘K.
How long we gonna sit here? As long as it takes. How long’s that? It takes as long as it takes. ‘K.
•••
Small, sandy-colored burrowing owls live underground in burrows they’ve dug themselves in grasslands, deserts and other open habitats where they primarily hunt insects and rodents. Wyoming photographer Pete Arnold set up a GoPro camera to shoot at regular intervals on the edge of a nest of burrowing owls near Cheyenne, and, among thousands of images, a trio recorded this memorable selfie on June 28, 2024.
Burrowing owls outside Cheyenne, Wyoming / Photo: Peter G. Arnold
(Richmond, BC, near Vancouver International Airport)
Clearly in the YVR flightpath, walking around the lovely pond, I cannot miss the great jets thundering overhead on their way into the sky.
Why, there goes one now, winking and gleaming against the soft blue and puffy white.
The wedge of Canada geese on the pond seems oblivious, though when a constellation of their brethren circles overhead eyeballing a potential landing spot, a flurry of feathered activity ensues,
the birds in flight angling in for a water landing with effusive squawks and splashes, far from graceful, but effective,
which is what I imagine human pilots must think on occasion when their touchdowns check in a bit bumpy.
But there they are, a poem descending with so much grace, safe landing on the planet that all of us in-flight souls call home.
(Top) Canada geese coming in for a landing at Minoru Park lake, Richmond, BC., and (above) making a splash landing. Photos / Jan Haag
As I look out on a familiar street at the grocery as Sunday shoppers pick up food for the week ahead, I sit at a table for two as one.
I do not mind.
He has been a good sport, sipped more than his share of tea this week and nibbled tiny sandwiches that to him do not constitute a proper lunch.
He will be happier with his pulled pork sandwich from the Irish pub.
Besides, this gives me a chance to have tea with you.
The young server brings my rose tea in an Alice blue pot, a pretty strawberry cup and saucer waiting. She asks if I would like milk or cream, and I say cream, because it seems a bit more decadent, and, besides, I think you would choose cream, too.
The small sugar bowl on the table contains a tiny spoon whose bowl reads Jasper, Canada, and is topped by a silver beaver looking most industrious.
We would smile at that, and I would tell you about my grandmother‘s souvenir spoon collection, as well as my own that she started for me when I was a girl.
Yes, I still have them, likely tarnished, though wrapped tightly and put away safely. Somewhere. More of the things no one will want someday.
Well before you made your exit three years ago almost to this day, you had your husband box up items you wanted me to have, many of them writing prompts for your own groups after I trained you to lead them.
I kept those, too, have set them on the table in the loft, amused to see what sparks words for writers, some of whom who knew you.
I’m sure you would like that, too.
Although I had not planned to have tea with you today, figuring I would sit here solo, here you are, as present as if you were still embodied.
That makes me so happy I can’t begin to tell you.
But you know that, too, don’t you?
•••
(For Georgann Turner upon the third anniversary of her death, Aug. 17, 2021)
Tea at Piggy and Paisley, Victoria, BC / Photo: Jan Haag
(I stop my quick walk when, looking down, I see words chalked in white, fading into sidewalk)
Poem by Honey Valley
(then a line of words in blue chalk, mostly worn away, unreadable, and three more lines)
Do you hear that? the engine of your machine whirring hard
(good lines, Honey)
That’s the sound of your heart thump thump
(and then, because Honey clearly likes repetition)
Do you hear that? Lean in Pause
(squinting, I have to turn around to see her final shoe-scuffed, upside-down word in blue, I imagine, for emphasis)
PAUSE
(and I do, with a smile, walking back up the sidewalk to the beginning to read this Honey of a poem hopscotching down Menzies Street on a sweet Victorian afternoon)
•••
We bid a fond farewell to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, as we head home to Sacramento today. We’ve spent a lovely fortnight here in some of our favourite places, walking and eating (fish! so much good fish! Tea! Nanaimo bars!) and visiting with friends, old and new, in Victoria, in Sidney and in Campbell River.
Güd wrtr 