Missy the Deer

I’m being stalked by a mama deer and her new twin fawns. She thinks I have the answers, to what, I haven’t a clue. It’s not about food. She keeps checking me out. Following my voice. Trying to figure out what humans are about. Perhaps she’s writing a PhD thesis on our vagaries.

I couldn’t believe it when the mama deer brought the baby right up to me so I just sat down on the ground and slid in the dirt by my car and watched them. My camera was in the car. I was too afraid to breathe—let alone, move, so these photos were surreptitiously taken after she had moved along.

I had to run across the road to chase a neighbor’s bully cat away, and damned if the deer didn’t gallop along, and follow me to see what was up, with her confused babies trailing behind her. What an entourage—me, stomping up a cloud of dust in flip-flops, my cousins’ cat with her newfound Dutch courage chasing the bully cat, followed by the mama deer and her twin fawns chasing after me. I felt like I was auditioning for Dr. Doolittle. 

The things you do in order to get a photo. But most of the action was when I didn’t have my camera in hand. Sometimes you just have to be there.

Remembering Donald Sutherland

I first met Donald Sutherland on the big screen in 1967. I was in Bijou, Lake Tahoe, watching The Dirty Dozen. Most of the movie was beyond the scope and comprehension of a 13-year-old, as going to the movies was still a big deal, but I remembered his face. 

During the late 1970s I became close friends with Donald‘s sister, poet-painter Boschka Layton (née Betty Sutherland) who looked a lot like Donald—those eyes, that wry, wicked sense of humor. Every time I saw Donald on the big screen, I couldn’t help but think of his sister Boschka. They were like peas in a pod. So Donald’s death reverberates on many levels.

Donnie, as Boschka/Betty Sutherland always affectionately called her little half-brother, was someone I heard funny stories about as a child. Donnie was a sickly child (polio, scarlet fever) so to entertain him, Betty and her older brother “Jamie” John, also an invalid who suffered from TB, used to write little swashbuckling plays that they produced. So you might say he was bitten by the acting bug at a tender age.

Quirky Donald, with 200 movies under his belt, was unafraid to take on any role, no matter how big or small, and he made it indelibly his— from his nonspeaking cameo bit in The Dirty Dozen, to Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H to the Machiavellian President Snow in The Hunger Games.

Kiefer Sutherland wrote, “With a heavy heart, I tell you that my father, Donald Sutherland, has passed away. I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that.”

Sutherland was familiar to younger audience as President Snow in "The Hunger Games", he sought out the part.

In a GQ interview, he said,"The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn't make any difference, I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it."

In a recent AP interview, Sutherland reflected on dying onscreen, for real.

"I'm really hoping that in some movie I'm doing, I die — but I die, me, Donald — and they're able to use my funeral and the coffin," Sutherland told the AP. "That would be absolutely ideal. I would love that.” AP, Mercury News

A consummate actor to the end. The passing of a legend. A true Celt, he chose his exit on the summer solstice. May the light of a thousand bonfires light his way. Heartfelt condolences to the family. Max Layton, Jess Layton ❤

GRIM REAPER

At the beginning of summer solstice,
the tall grasses sizzled in the morning heat,

that snapped and hissed like snakes as I swung the scythe. 

When the shining blade bit hidden metamorphic stone,

the pendulous power reverberated back up the arm like an echo. 

My flanks and arms ached with the long history of a slow dance,

as I wielded the ancient tool, unchanged since the Middle Ages. 

Soon the horses will come down to graze on the bright grass. 

The stout oak-handled scythe, long since replaced 

by a plastic lime green battery-powered strimmer, 

to fell the wild oats and rattlesnake grass reaching skyward.

After a long, wet winter, they are taller than me.

The horses are long gone, at night the deer will browse 

and check on my slow progress as I clear the upper fields. 

Generations of tree swallows attempt to return to the eaves, 

sealed off for decades, genetic memory that deeply embedded.

The crows are upset because I put up the summer tent,

at dawn they share raucous displeasure from the safety of trees,

a hawk circles the deep valley and keens for her lost fledglings, 

the woodpecker drills and probes the depths of the dead pine.

Douglas firs grizzled with lichen, encroach upon the vestiges 

of open space where my grandmother once tended the garden.

Poison oak and coyote bush protect saplings of live oak and pine.

I wake to a primeval silhouette of bachelor deer on the tent walls.

Last winter, a limb from the dead pine sheared off the corner eave 

of the old house, leaving it raw and exposed to the elements.

Nothing much left of the garden except volunteer cherry plums, 

a dying pear tree we cannot save, even with severe pruning,

and the golden delicious apple tree is so far gone, 

only a thin cambium ribbon threads the roots to branches, 

the heartwood of the tree exposed, hosting shelf fungus,

the black cankers having already done their job decades ago. 

How many decades are measured in this garden, the cultivation 

of lifetimes, but the wilderness returns of its own volition.

On Facebook lockdown for two more days

I am still on Facebook lockdown for two more days in quasi-jail (I can like comments, but can’t comment), punished for editing one of my own comments on horses. You try spelling Przewalski’s horse correctly on the first or second, try. It’s nothing like  how it’s pronounced.

When will this ridiculous Facebook AI censorship bot patrol stop, or at least be upgraded to be a useful tool to fight hate speech and racism, versus a stupid cause, like spelling or grammar. I am dyslexic, or as they say, neurodivergent, and I struggle to write clearly. It does not come easy.

Who is being protected from my aberrant behavior, that is, from correcting my own comment too many times? The punitive measures of the Facebook Alt-father is like being sent into a closet for something that you didn’t do. 

I’ve been sent to jail for posting a photograph of Einstein’s desk, a photo of a leucistic chicken and a horse, myriad spelling errors, a video  of friends singing Gregorian chants at my cousin Mike Collins’ memorial, the list goes on. 

There’s no rhyme nor reason, and certainly no learning curve. And  these punitive measures don’t cure us of any habits because none of us actually knows WHY we were sent to Facebook jail to begin with, and there is no way to challenge their utterly asinine decisions. 

Whatever happened to let the punishment fit the crime? Clearly, I am a bad article.

Yet another epic Facebook fail, this time over Przewalski's horses

So, editing one’s own comments goes against Facebook community standards. I was correcting my typos, which were partially Facebook’s fault. I was responding to someone’s comment and then went back to clarify the difference between a purebred Przewalski's wild horse and the modern horse and possible crossbreeds or, to be hyper-correct, hybrids.

I added, “The Przewalski's horse is stocky, short, and pot-bellied in comparison to its domestic cousins. It has a spiky mane like a zebra. All Przewalski's horses have a light belly and darker back, with a dark stripe on the back from the withers to the base of the tail. They also have more chromosomes,…” etc. 

Just as I added the clincher, a hybrid Przewalski's horse and modern horse results in a horse with a floppy mane—a DNA indicator, like donkey ears on a mule—Facebook shut me down. Understand that I am dyslexic, or as they say these days, neurodivergent, so I struggle to write clear, nuanced sentences. Writing does not come easy, I have to work at it. I edit everything early and often

Could someone please explain to me how this editing process could possibly go against community standards? Other than Facebook is allergic to facts versus fiction. I was not over-posting or spamming or over-sharing. I certainly wasn’t being obnoxious or belligerent. I was correcting and clarifying one comment. I am allergic to typos. So, yes, I do fix them whenever I spot them. Well, bollocks I say, because I can. I will not be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of unintelligent comments. and I will not let the sleeping typos lie.

For some peculiar reason Facebook constantly changes what I write— especially after I post a comment —so I have to edit my comments early and often. Gaslight much? I am beginning to suspect that Facebook AI bots are anti-intellectual, because it puts me in jail every time I am on a scholarly bent. No name-calling, not being derogatory, merely facts— Sometimes with supporting links. This time it was about horses.

The last time I most memorably was thrown in Facebook jail was for posting a photograph of Einstein‘s messy desk on the anniversary of the day he died. Facebook, of course claimed it was going against community standards, and that it was pornography. The only real pornography I could see was the formula written on the blackboard: some segue of e = MC2.

 It looks like I can post status updates on my own page, and like posts, but that’s about it. See you in a week. Be very, very bad, all of you. Be obstreperous. Edit and change your posts early and often. Down with the fasciestest regime. stet.

Oh, and for the record, I document everything—because I can.

We’ll Always Have Parrots!

The United States was once a haven to many native parrot species, but we managed to kill them all off within two centuries, except for two species. The thick-billed parrot (aka the thick-billed macaw, or conure) and the green parakeet are the only living members of the wild parrot family still extant in the US. So, the uptick of expanding feral parrot flocks thriving in LA and San Diego is pretty cool—even if they aren’t native as they are fast disappearing from their native ranges.

The green parakeet habitat ranges from Southern Texas, into Mexico and Nicaragua. When I was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in the Lacondon jungle, young boys would try to sell the caged birds to the tourists. We would make jokes and tell them in Spanish that we would buy one when the green parrots were ripe. They sheepishly got the joke, Spanish being their second language as well.

There are nearly a dozen permanent feral parrot species residing in the urban wilderness of California. San Diego’s wild parrots divide their time between Mexico and the San Diego beaches, LA has the most diverse large flocks of wild escapee parrots, and San Francisco runs a close second. Homeless musician Mark Bittner wrote a book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill which was turned into a PBS documentary of the same name by Judy Irving in 2003. The two met, fell in love and were married in 2008.

The San Francisco parrots, the chatty cherry-headed conures or red-masked parakeets, are native to northwest South America, especially Ecuador and Peru, while the mitered conures hail from Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. And apparently there is one lonesome blue-crowned conure in the mixed species flock as well. These raucous and saucy urban creatures have resided on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, since at least the 1980s—possible escapees from a pet store. 

THE DANCER ON THE LEOPARD ROAD

—an ekphrastic poem after DCastro's The Dancer

The eye of the sun leopard follows the dancer,
her saguaro arms raised high, the oculi, the false eyes,

like oilspots on the road, follow her every move,

while ox-eyed daisies sway in the aqua air 

filled with dreams of red jalopies of another era 

that take to the skies like a swarm of bees 

seeking a new home on the horizon. 

The open road disappears into the distance 

mountains pierce the sky, letting all the air out 

until we droop like flat tires waiting for a bicycle pump

to clock a little more mileage under our belts. 

The hazel-eyed sun and its sunspots—beauty marks—

watch us as the exuberant dancer cartwheels up the road. 

But there are also ghost dancers on the plains. 

A woman carries a parcel while her sisters rise up 

like a dense winter ground fog hiding in the rushes. 

And the dancer on the leopard spotted road 

with her three legs, and starburst chamise,

is prancing like a runaway circus pony, 

while spinning vortices or black holes 

are waiting to draw us all in.

6/7/24 CPITS workshop with Jessica Cardenas Wilson

The Milkman

Sometimes I feel like a friggin' gameshow host lost in my own reality show, you know the kind where Vanna White comes out all dolled up, stalking across the set in impossible high heels, and her red polyester dress has its own chorus of crazy going on like cicadas in the wings shrieking up a storm. Only I am never dressed for the part.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how I got here, why I was chosen for this particular drama, and what the premise is. Someone forgot her notes, luckily for me, faking it is second nature—not like those anxiety dreams when I was in second grade. 

I often dreamed that I took off my snazzy red woolen coat I've had since I was four. It's a bit too snug and threadbare—only I forgot to put on a dress. I’m wearing knickers and one of those wife beater undershirts, trimmed with lace and a tiny bow on my chest to feminize it. It could be worse, I could have been in my pajamas. 

Realizing my error, I hide in the alcove, afraid to come out of the closet—so to speak. I can’t stay in there all day. The teacher is taking role and is about to mark me tardy. Story of my life. Either I’m always missing the bus, or I forget to dress for the part. 

Everyone else is properly clothed and primly sitting at their desks with hands folded, the teacher too. I can’t go out there. Is there a sweater, or a pillowcase art smock I can borrow? She calls out my school name. The I'm in trouble name. Not my family name. All eyes are on me. Stagefright is real.

The teacher is both judge and jury, she calls my name, so I slip on my red woolen coat with its frayed red silk lining and black velvet collar, to join the class. She is annoyed, and will stay annoyed with me for the rest of the school year, no matter what I do. 

She thinks she is hiding it well. But I can tell. I will flub my lines. It will become a familiar pattern. I will become excellent at subterfuge and hiding my inadequacies, always dressed for the wrong part—not like the other kids who seem to have a grasp as to what is going on. 

This fugue state will be my modus operandi all throughout school. I'm a bootstrap kid. Myself and I. And the cats. Only later will I discover that the real director of this particular reality show is called dyslexia, not the indifferent teacher. But no one will cotton onto it. They will leave me sitting alone in a corner, punishing me for what I cannot seem learn, never asking why. And so, I will become an excellent actor, fooling everyone, including myself. The mimic.

Danette and Gail are teacher's pets. They always know what to wear. Cute little frocks nicely ironed, and crisp skirts, so they look like upended tulips sitting in the first row. Dennis, the dreamboat, slicks back his dark slicked pompadour carefully with one hand. Later, I realize it’s a studied gesture probably practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. 

He smells like his father Dean, the milkman who is a stand-in for Rock Hudson. During summer I loved Tuesday mornings when he drove up the dirt road to our house in the old Lucas Valley milk truck. I’d come flying down the road in my PJs with my long pigtails wagging behind me. 

He’d pick me up and spin me into the air until I was airborne, breathless. I giggled and it felt like I was soaring with the birds until he put me down on the ground. Did he also do this with his own kids? The other kids on his milk route? I suspect so. The model was at hand.

One time he asked if we want anything other than the usual 2 quarts of milk standing tall in glass jug. I dreamed big and added orange juice and cottage cheese to the list, not realizing my grandmother would have to scrabble next week to pay the bill from my impromptu purchases. Math was never my strong suit.

I sat on the wooden milk box and ate the cottage cheese with two fingers, washing it down with orange juice straight from the bottle. I had no idea how I would explain any of this to my grandmother. See, it was my job to collect the milk before the crows got to it. They would flip open the milk box and peck off the foil and cardboard cap to get to the cream. Strange to think of those black crows wanting white milk. The cats lined up waiting for the spoils.

Sometimes we forgot to collect the milk. It would turn to cottage cheese right in the bottles under the hot summer sun. She’d complain about it, and then strain the curdled milk in cheesecloth, feeding the whey to the hungry cats who scrambled into a furry pile with spats and hisses. Sometimes she made paper-thin pancakes for dinner stuffed with cottage cheese laced with lemon juice and sugar. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned.

Sometimes in winter when we forgot the milk overnight, the little foil caps that were perched on top of frozen cream expressed out of the bottle, looking like long-necked swans. I didn’t have a father or a mother figure so Dean the Milkman was like a surrogate practice dad. He was a model, so I could be like the other kids. He said he didn't have a little girl, just two boys, Dennis and Steve. I tell him that Dennis is in my class. Can I be his little girl?

I always looked forward to seeing the milkman. A story that his son, Dennis, would never learn. He will also never know that I had a crush on him all through school. I didn’t want to jinx the situation. But the situation jinxed itself. Driving back up Lucas Valley Road after the bars had closed, Dean flipped his beautiful boat of a white convertible into a ravine.

Dennis hid behind a curtain of grief, dressed in black for the rest of the school year. He still smelled like Dean. I was in a fugue state and thought of my red coat. What about the milk, who would deliver the milk to our door? Who would toss me into he air? It was a closed casket ceremony, said my grandmother. The spotlight shone on Dean like a reality show before the final curtain dropped.

6/6/24 WOW—Wide Open Writing with Franny French

The detritus of memory

Lately I’ve been writing this story in my head from the days before I became a writer, always reminding myself to remember, remember. Whether it was the way the fog rolled in over the mountain, with its chill breath, or the litany of things I saw during the day. Wild animals carried the highest tally, or something my grandmother showed me: how to build a Saint Bridget Cross from the tule rushes that grew in hedgehog clumps following the water table in the upper garden.

I’ve been writing this since I first began to wander afield, collecting an inventory of plants I had no names for, leaving off from where my grandmother, no longer able to accompany me on our early morning walks, no longer instructed. For example, the names of plants. I had to wait an entire lifetime to label and categorize them. All of those jigsaw puzzles of memory became placeholders, waiting for identification, for what knowledge I did not yet have a place for in my head. My eyes remembered those nameless plants, I tucked them away in my mind, a treasure chest to unpack at the end of a long life.

I’ve been waiting for the circle to find its beginning and end, the Ouroboros of memory and history jockeying for position during those liminal moments where you’re neither neither awake nor asleep, where dreams and reality merge like mist, and you can’t tell where one memory or dream left off and another one began.

I’ve been waiting all this time to live my real life, though I’ve been living it all along, but it always felt like it was on hold, waiting for the right moment. What right moment? Maybe it was because I was afraid of change and caution was my handicap, I was always keeping things in obliettes because nothing is ever guaranteed, other than life nor death—other than the struggle between the here and now and the there and then.

Lately I’ve been sharing the stories of the past with new old friends, thinking surely that wasn’t me I was describing a lifetime ago. The inside and outside worlds colliding, head on, and I wonder about all those dropped stitches constantly unraveling the tapestry of our lives, those dropped threads leading us in other directions.

Lately I’ve been gathering in the narration of a life hidden in the dungeon of memory, wondering why I am still here. It seems like there is little to look forward to, but then I realize it’s a habit I’ve dragged with me from the earliest days. The if not now, then when, the what if motif of regret. But there is always the now.

Lately I’ve been collecting the detritus on the shores of darkness, finding odd solace there. The creatures I see become unnamed talismans: a lizard, a young gophersnake or the tree swallows seeking the eaves of my grandmother‘s house. The vents were closed off a half century ago, but home is genetically imprinted in their memory banks, and though untold generations have come and gone, they still swoop and practice landing, banking upward only to be met by steel mesh. I remember the day their babies fell out of the nest and we found a tall ladder to return them to the eaves and the inconsolable parents, swooping and crying.

I am lost and have no ending for this piece. The mosquitoes have been drilling into my forehead, reminding me of the fallout of a wet winter.  I can’t stop thinking about pipevines, for example, the only source of food for the pupae of the rare black swallowtail. How slender the thread of life is. Or the return of the bluebirds after a half-century of absence. The partial reversal of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Near extinction is always at hand.

Lately I’ve been letting go, perhaps returning to the void where we no longer matter. As I face the deep grass of the upper field that must be cut before the arrival of summer, is a race against time because after a long wet winter, the grass is still too wet to cut. And when I when I was young, weed-eaters didn’t exist, so I used a scythe—that father time image—and that zing and waltz of felled grass became an ingrained song of the field..

Lately I’ve been remembering about all the almost lovers I was too afraid to let in, let alone, to let out. I mourn for my amethyst earring gone missing—something I’ve had since I was a teenager, whoever finds it will not know the stories it carried from Inverness. Or the ring of Italian gold, the band so thin after a lifetime of wearing it, like a shaft of sunlight, the chip out of the stone reminds me of a playful kick meant for my rear from Neil as we walked about around above Lake Merritt. I should have left him then, but I waited 20 years to make a move. I wear it to remember, and the pungent odor of wcut grass brings it all back home.

6/6/24 Write On! with Susie Terence

Submitted poems & prose

Submitted two new, and one old poem to Mendocino Women Poets Spirit of Place 2

BIO: Maureen Hurley is a Northern California photographer/artist/poet whose work is widely published in print and electronic media. She’s won awards for her work, she was nominated as the first Sonoma County Poet Laureate, and received several Pushcart nominations. Former photojournalist for North Bay alternative newspapers, her work has appeared in The Paper, Coast Peddler, Ridge Review, and artist tabloids, ARC/ Rural Arts Services, with editor Ken Larsen. She spent considerable time in Mendocino County during the 1980s and 1990s—especially on Navarro Ridge, Albion Ridge and Fort Bragg. She has poems forthcoming in Peace Press, and her photos will be featured in an upcoming documentary on Berkeley street-poet, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit & Stone.

FIRST LIGHT

NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

PRAYER FLAGS

and to the Wide Open Writiing Blog

Seamus Heaney's Last Words (May)

and The Milkman (June)