Translating "Chun" from the Irish: a triad of sorts

Yesterday, a stranger sent me an Irish saying:

Chun go léir na laethanta anseo agus ina dhiaidh
Is féidir iad a líonadh le cuimhní cinn
Fond, sonas, agus gáire.

I couldn't find it on the internet, so I turned to Google Translate to see if I could glean more information from it. Google translated it as:

For all the days here and beyond
They can be filled with memories
Fond, happiness, and laughter.

Dissatisfied with the translation, using Google, I broke it down word-for-word.

Chun go léir 

na laethanta

anseo 

agus ina dhiaidh 

Is féidir iad

a líonadh 

le cuimhní cinn 

Fond?  is this a typo???

sonas, agus gáire. 

And then I made a rough interlinear translation:

For/to all/entire days

here (in this place) and before (after) (to come??)

afterwards can, be able, They can 

fill memories/recollections/, pain, or an ache in the head, fond/ahead/accumulate

(why fond again??? and in English?); good luck, good fortune, happiness, and laughter. 

I thought of how "chun" or "in order to" (in the direction of, or arriving at, to/towards), an elusive preposition, was always the bane of my existence during Irish class... It was like a rusty gate hinge in the language. And here I was without the blasted WD-40.

And then I remembered that the preposition "go" or that, which can also mean until, also becomes something which never comes (a shapeshifter), a verbal particle when hitched to a verb or noun. Like "go leor" (galore—or plenty, and enough—which is also a kind of magic, or right enough, as my granny would say).

I translated it as:

To all the days now and to come
may they be filled with fond memories
of (fond) happiness, and laughter.

And then I did another Google search. Damned if I didn't find it under Irish Toasts & Quotes, translated almost exactly the same as my version.

To all the days here and after
May they be filled with fond memories, happiness, and laughter.

The original translator went for the rhyme-scheme with "after" and 'laughter." But he broke the pattern of the triad in the process. 

Then using Google Translate, I back-translated it to the Irish to see what it would come up with. I got:

Chun go léir na laethanta anseo agus tar éis
Is féidir iad a líonadh le cuimhní cinn
Fond, sonas, agus gáire.

Here's the original again to compare them: 

Chun go léir na laethanta anseo agus ina dhiaidh
Is féidir iad a líonadh le cuimhní cinn
Fond, sonas, agus gáire.

So the only difference was "ina dhiaidh" vs. "tar éis" which was "before/afterwards/later" and "back/following/the past/after. "So, it seems my choice of "to come" was closest to the original Irish, despite the fact there are no infinitive forms of Irish verbs. (Also, in order to be able to (chun!) use an Irish dictionary, you have to be able to unpack, and strip the word back to its original form. Easier said, than done. This is where Google Translate comes in handy. It's not picky.)

The only fly in the ointment was the word in the last line, "fond," which wasn't translated into an Irish word in the original copy I received, and even with Google, and with back-translation, I couldn't find the original word. Fond is not on the Irish dictionary I used, and I don't think it's an odd form, perhaps, old. And if it really was fond, why was it written in English? Puzzling.

To be able to say that one is fond, of something requires a different word and sentence construction cinn: from Old Irish cin (“love, affection; esteem, respect”). Tá cion agam air. Him, fond (at ag (preposition, 1st person), on/upon it/him (air /preposition). Or cinn could merely mean advancement, or accumulate.

Using MacBain's Scottish etymological dictionary, I stumbled upon the word fonn, or land, Irish fonn, Early Irish fond; so, if I'm right, then fondness has little to do with the correct translation in that last line, but the idea of land, or homeland does. It deepens the aphorism considerably.

To all the days now and to come
may they be filled with fond memories
of homeland, happiness, and laughter.

But, the idea of fondness is already embedded with the word cinn. Why would it be used twice? Besides, if it was a modern variant of an Old Irish triad (which begin with the word, "Three"), it would need the setup of three nouns, or ideas, not two things. Still not quite satisfied, I again trolled MacBain's etymological dictionary, and found another archaic definition of fonn—a tune, Irish fonn, melody/tune, desire, delight...

Sadly, I am not a very good student of Irish, and my sense of Irish grammar, noun declension, base forms, and sentence structure, is shaky, at best. But without adding more articles and particles, this translation rings truest—even though in modern Irish, the word would be foinn. My reasoning?  because clann was originally spelled cland in Old Irish, a borrowing from Old Welsh plant, from Latin planta.... Note the -d ending: d/t are sounds-twins.

I'm not quite up to cracking open my Rudolf Thurneysen's Old Irish Grammar (one of the most expensive books I ever bought, and least used). But it's now online. Sort of. Not the right word, but note that the word fond does exist in Old Irish. From him I learned that Medieval Irish scribes refrained from doubling consonants in unlenited words as it wasted precious parchment space.

In Irish Word database, I found the modern Irish word for fond is ceanuil, among 20 other suggestions. That doesn't help much, other than to also verify that the Irish word fond exists. It is not a typo. The concept of fondness, in Irish, depends upon the exact usage, whether  you're planning on loving, or drinking it.

The fact that I can't find fond in modern Irish suggests that this saying is an Old, or Medieval  Irish aphorism, not a modern one. But I can't find it online. Inconclusive. A pity that I am too shy to ask my Irish teacher Dan Melia  if this is correct interpretation. But I think it is very close to the original (if I could find it...) Here's hoping my use of fond wasn't a faux ami.

I am also resisting the urge to make the first and last lines rhyme, as it doesn't rhyme in the (original) Irish. To come vs beyond, or after. There are no infinitive verbs in Irish. So, to come is technically wrong as well.

To all the days now and to come (or, after/beyond/following)
may they be filled with fond memories:
tunes, happiness, and laughter.

I guess the word "chun" wasn't the bane of my existence, after all, as it merrily led me down the tangled path of translation. "In order to," one foot in front of the other. The grating sound of a rusty gate hinge, was merely the tarnished metal of a dying language polishing itself anew again.

SEE ALSO:
An Irish Blessing
Clan vs Clann

Grimm Parents

I guess we can thank the Brothers Grimm for the image of the evil stepmother motif. But I never had one. I had a Bohemian mother who was challenging parent, not a bonus in the traditional sense. She became an increasingly absentee parent by the time the Summer of Love rolled around. A Cinderella mother made of ashes and illusion, she became the evil stepmother, divorced from reality. During this time my grandmother was my real mother. My father was the eternally absent parent, the only place he could reliably be found was on a barstool in the Mission, well married to the bottle.

My spring forward is sprung

Oh Gawd, so that's what's wrong, it's Daylight Savings...and my internal clock is yowling like a cat caught short in the bathtub. And I'm in a right royal rage which doesn't help matters at all. If I don't gnash or maim someone first...no filter is in place, not even a UV one. Yes. I'm afraid my beddy-bye was more like 3 AM last night, making for a 9 AM rise for a 10:30 teaching job. Not liking it at all. I fell completely behind the times. My timing's literally off. My spring forward is sprung.

Dear Google, about those 404 errors on Blogspot

Dear Google Search Console Team,
aka sc-noreply @ google.com

Thank you for writing to me to inform me that here are so many problems with my blogpage. And that 404s seem to be on the rise. I must admit, I thought your email was a phishing email. So, I sent it to the Spam folder. But then I did a little research, and your letter seems authentic. Though there are numerous hacks listed, this does not seem to be one of them. I may be wrong. If, so then this is a record.

To: Webmaster of http://mohurley.blogspot.com/,
"Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on
http://mohurley.blogspot.com/ that return a 404 (not found) error. This can be a sign of an outage or misconfiguration, which would be a bad user experience. This will result in Google dropping those URLs from the search results. If these URLs don't exist at all, no action is necessary."

First, I had no idea I was a webmaster of my own bloggy kingdom. Does it involve whips and chains, cane-back chairs, kinky black and red leather and lace? Help! I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this information. I click on most of the links and nothing happens.

Some of the blogposts I could access from your provided links, and remove the dead links. But most were dead links, with no redirect, and because they were a jumble of letters, I have no way to even guess what blog post they're referring to. Alpha-numeric word salad.

In the process of trying to make it all work, I discovered a feature on Blogger, to hide bits of blogs. A spacer that creates a divider, for further reading: "Read more...". I'm in hog heaven, as I tend to heavily footnote my writing—(I suspect those excessive links are part of the process that you've taken umbrage to. But now I can hide them from the main article. And those first drafts of poems I tend to save at the bottom, can now be hidden from the finished poem. Fraloo-fralay! But I digress....

Some hot links provided year, month, title, so I was able to access those posts and fix the dead links. Thanks a lot Santa Rosa Press Democrat for revamping your archives and leaving me with a plethora of dead links...

Speaking of "bad user experience," when I "fixed" my Atacama Civilizations piece for you, Blogspot created yet another null page. Scared the crap out of me, as I thought it was forever deleted...

You, dear Google, automatically created that 404 page, not me, when I hit the "fix" URL link. Oops! Luckily I did a search and discovered it was still there. But now I will have to hunt down all my cross-referenced post leading back to that URL and fix them. Talk about cross....


This was the original working URL


When I 'fixed" the URL, it changed, creating yet another dead link.


I had to hunt down the piece, fix cross-referenced posts with a new URL.

And while we're at it, when I upload an URL link for a photo, it should not say "Upload a URL" but Upload an URL. You can't have two unaccompanied vowels snuggling together like that. It leads to the fambly tree going straight up. Besides, it's easier to say an URL versus A (uh) URL, URL, URL, Duke of URL.

Second, several of the old pages you listed as having something wrong with them, were blogposts that I had written, and YOU, dear Google, stalled on the Publish upload, and then wiped my posts clean. As in void. The blank white page.

I was able to recreate most of the lost posts from scratch, but I still mourn for my lost post on Medieval Irish calligraphy and writing—as a lot of deep research went into that post—only to have it disappear. Poof!

Ditto that with my Boschka Layton memorial piece... Have you any idea what it's like to have to recreate a very long and detailed blogpost (2 to 5K words) from scratch?

Ditto that with my Viking Redhead post (my most popular post, pushing 80,000 hits). I'm terrified to even open it to correct the dead URLs, let alone "fix"anything. You've erased it no less than three times during the upload (Publish/Update button) process after I made corrections.

The Viking-Irish Redhead Gene Myth Mar 23, 2009, 52 comments

78757

I finally got wise and made a backup copy in TextEdit, before I hit that Update button. So, you can see why I'm not willing to open that particular post to fix corrections. I might lose it and all the comments its garnered.

Speaking of "bad user experience," you, Google, have not been very good to me over the years as a creator of unique blogger content...Blame it on my slow DSL, or some odd configuration at your end. But it's not been s smooth, or effortless sail. And yes, I have written to you many times. Sometimes I even see my suggestions implemented... But mostly I yowl into the void of cyberspace.

Then there's this:

Search Console
Increase in “404” pages on http://mohurley.blogspot.com/

It looks like the majority of those 125 null pages were when I moved posts to their correct creation dates in Blogspot. I don't see any way to add a redirect, but won't this eventually fix itself?

It seems silly to go to a non-existent page (that I can't even access) and add another redirect page when the page is merely moved to a different date within Blogspot. Won't the web crawlers eventually catch up? Besides, it's poetry. Who even reads poetry?

And yes, I do see that this email is a No Reply @ Google. But I had to get it off my chest. It will probably wind up as a blog post. You know how that goes. Squeaky wheel and all that. Thank you. I do feel better now.

Fondly.
MH


Dear Google, Now Blogger?
Dear Google, Using Google Photos is Painful
Dear Google, Using Blogger is a Painful Experience...

Fixing the Victorian sprung door latches

Tired of the hall closet door opening and bopping me at any given opportunity, I took apart and fixed the broken Victorian skeleton key door knob/latch assemblies. Fascinating, and simple contraptions, the brass spring was broken in both the closet and the bathroom doorknob assembly. So I replaced them. Despite being in situ for 88 years, the old locks (which ere recycled from an even older house, judging by the fin de siècle patent date) were surprisingly clean inside. 

I admired that Victorian craftsmanship even if the springs didn’t last more than a hundred years. It was a pleasure to close the closet doors and hear that satisfying click. Added bonus, the bathroom door handle has a chrome turn key, which I discovered the hard way that you have to remove it too before you can remove the doorknob assembly. A how do it work? kind of morning. Something so satisfying about taking apart old technology (hidden under decades of paint layers) and to free it from its paint prison, only to discover it has ornate brass plates, and the bathroom one has chrome-plated brass door plates. How cool is that? 

So bummed that I used the screwdriver and fillet knife to gouge away the paint. Oh well. Learning curve. Now we can close the doors and latch them, and now they won't swing open on a whim. I also swapped out the glass door knobs too. I also shaved the door tops down and waxed them with soap so that they would easily close. Kicking the shit out of the back door to close it is no longer an option with all this rain, the wood has swelled up so much, it sounds like a wrecking crew is at work when I open it. 

The house has shifted quite a bit in the past five years and it's a struggle to get all the doors to open and close. After a big earthquake, the front door wouldn't close, or lock, and our apt manager trimmed so much off the botttom of the door that the mice could sneak in under the front door. So I had to "fix" that too. Now, I take a drill to the lock bolt slot and shave away some of the metal. Someone asked me why I was fixing the locks. Didn’t I live with Neil? I replied, I'm afraid I'm the go-to fix-it (wo)man, the cook, the char lady, the laundress, the gardener, the personal shopper, even the IT person, etc., the dailiness of living is just not Neil’s fortę. Three doors down, three more to go.

Bay Area Generations reading 42 at the Bellevue Hotel, Oakland, photos

John Oliver Simon began his worldly travels in 1942, from the red diaper bullpen of New York City, to scribing poem-broadsides to sell on Telegraph Avenue. While at Cal, he was active in the Free Speech Movement; he read with Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Kenneth Rexroth. Since 1971, he has taught poetry to kids, with California Poets in the Schools, where he has passed the poetry baton onto his granddaughter. In the 1980s, he began translating poets from Mexico to the farthest corners of Latin America. He picked up an NEA translation fellowship along the way. And the City of Berkeley honored him for his 50-year-contribution to arts and culture, proclaiming January 20, 2015, as "John Oliver Simon Day."  —Maureen Hurley

 Maureen Hurley emerged in 1952 from the ravine that trickles from the bloody green wordstreams of Eire out of the poverty creeks on the backside of Tamalpais where her mother hung out for a thousand years in the No Name Bar with Jack Kerouac and Bob Kaufman. Schooled in her craft with California Poets in the Schools, she has carried her lyre from Chernobyl to Lake Titicaca. She holds an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State and has been awarded eight California Arts Council artist in residence grants. She lives in Oakland.   —John Oliver Simon

Google Photos link

Laissez les bons temps rouler! Photo

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Nothing like Shrove, or Fat Tuesday pancakes for dinner, My grannie always made pancakes for dinner. We were so excited. It was Sunday morning verging on Tuesday night. No funny papers. But even still, it was exciting.

My grannie made everything from scratch. Not even Bisquick snoozed in our pantry. But you can use any quick-bread, or pancake mix and adulterate it. Make some pancakes using buttermilk, oil and pancake mix, then add way too many eggs. 

If the recipe asks for one egg, I add three or more eggs. You can also add a little seltzer water, or ginger ale or anything bubbly to add a delicate airiness to the pancakes. Batter should be runny, let it sit a half hour, or longer, to thicken up.

Grease a big pan with butter, spread the pancake batter thin, like crepes. I use a soup ladle. Stack 'em up on a warm plate. You'll need to add butter to the pan for each pancake. Half a pat. Salted butter is too much. Ruins the delicate flavor.

Filling: mix cottage cheese and Greek yogurt, or sour cream, vanilla sugar, zest and juice of one lemon, OK, so spike it with maple syrup too. Spread on pancake and roll it up like a cigar and smoke it.

One year I went wild with flavored Wensleydale cheeses, studded with dried apricots, and lemon rind. They were delicious, but way too heavy and boggily filling. Stick with cottage cheese and tart it up.

Filling no. 2: spread pancake with Mexican extra fat sour cream (it has a much better flavor than American sour cream) on a pancake, then smear it with good raspberry preserves. I like seedless preserves vs raspberry jam. (I hate blueberries, but that could be a hit. Or huckleberry jam if you can find it). Roll it up. Sprinkle with vanilla sugar. Olé! 

Filling no. 3: spread pancake with butter, really good marmalade or jam. Eat. 

Deluxe edition. Drink one glass champagne, or spumante between each step, and don't forget to take a sip or two as you liberate each pancake from the pan, of course. By they time you have enough for a meal, you won't care what day of the week it is. 

Shrove it Jack!

Getting your Kip

Someone posted a list on how to get a good night's sleep. At best it's a hodgepodge list of cobbled-together pseudoscience. It's also making a lot of cultural assumptions. Which got my goat. Or my rhetorical flycatcher.

Here's the list.

Tips for good sleep include:
Eliminate caffeine.
Avoid naps.
Don’t drink alcohol.
Don’t eat a large meal near bedtime.
Exercise.
Try to go to bed and get up at the same times every day.
Reserve your bedroom for sleep – no TV, piles of laundry to sort or even books. If you can’t sleep, get up after 20 minutes.
Go into another room and read or listen to music until you’re sleepy.
Avoid bright lights and electronic screens before bedtime.

At first glance the list looks good, and some of it's fairly sound advice, except that napping is good for you, unless you're an insomniac.  (We do love our lists. They make us feel so organized...)

I would move Exercise to the very top of the list. Exercise during the day (not in the evenings after work). It releases endorphins. Exercise at night will certainly rile you up. 

Eliminate caffeine. Or just don't have any after after 2 PM. That includes chocolate. Yes. (Gasp!).

Avoid naps. You decide. Some people thrive on naps. Depends on the culture too. Me, I can't nap and I don't like falling asleep too early because I will wake up at 2 AM raring to go. I sometimes get my best work in during the middle of the night. 

Don’t drink alcohol—let's amend that one: after dinner. Why cut alcohol out completely unless you have a problem with it? Seems silly. I can see getting blottoed before bedtime could be a problem, but a glass of wine with dinner is good for the heart. It releases endorphins. Just like exercise. And chocolate. What should be on that list is no sugar (in the evening) because sugar, like caffeine, interferes with sleep. As does chocolate. Yes, chocolate.

Don’t eat a large meal near bedtime. Well, duh. Digestion and sleep don't mix well. Eat your dinner at dinnertime. Unless you're in Spain, or anywhere in the Mediterranean, then eat your dinner during the day and your supper late. But then, take long afternoon naps, call them siestas.... Oh wait, you're still sleeping after a big meal...

Move this list to another culture and the paradigm falls apart. How we divide our day with food and sleep is entirely cultural. There is no one correct method.

I did some research on sleep patterns since the Middle Ages It turns out this eight hours of solid sleep a night is a post-Industrial Revolution thing. And all kinds of myths have arisen around the concept of what constitutes sound sleep patterns. Most of them are bogus. (See my reading list below.)

The point on that list that rankled me most was: Reserve your otherwise empty bedroom for sleep and have nothing in your bedroom, including laundry, or books...that is so post 20th c., and a first world notion. For whom is this sleep list meant for? It strikes me as very Northern European Anglo-centric. Waspish, even, with a Puritanical hangover. Laundry causes sleeplessness? Oh my. There's an embedded judgement in there.

If clutter were a factor causing sleeplessness, then no one would be able to sleep in their bedrooms—since at least the Middle Ages. In fact, during the Middle Ages, most people didn't even have bedrooms. Or beds. Besides, you can't see those clothes hanging on hooks and book avalanche invading your sleep space when the lights are turned off—unless you have very good night vision.

I've lived on other countries, and slept in some odd places. My bedroom in Leningrad was also a well-stocked famine pantry. I slept on large vats of canned foods, the cupboard above my head was stacked with dried bread, dried garlic and onions hung from the walls. (I won't mention what it was like sleeping in the Indios' best company beds in Andean huts.) Most people in the USSR didn't even have separate bedrooms, the living room couches converted into beds. I doubt that it's changed much.

Ditto that in Japan where the communal living space converts to sleeping space. Where everything is beautifully austere and clutter-free. I could go on...

And what about we artists in our live/work spaces? Clearly clutter has little to do with getting a good night's sleep. Messy rooms, messy desks, equals a fertile imagination. No books? What's with that? My old poetry professor David Bromige propped his bed up with overdue library books. (Don't ask how I know, and no, it wasn't me).

I get the idea—remove anything from your room that you might be stressing on. But that sounds like a case of evoking sympathetic magic as UC Berkeley’s folklore anthropologist Prof. Dundes might have said.

The idea of an empty bedroom equals a good night's sleep, also evokes the austerity of a nun's or a monk's cell. For the record, they never slept well. Or even through the night. There were novenas to be said, water clocks to be reset in the middle of the night. Other offerings. And that instruction: Go into another room to read...how we repeat the past. That's exactly what the monks did. They said their prayers then crawled back into bed for their second kip.

And the current pseudo-science notion that anything electronic (blue light) including a Kindle, an iPad, your computer screen (or TV), disrupts or interferes with sleep patterns is unsupported "science." The whole "blue light spectrum" theory is one person's hunch, no scientific studies have actually been done on it, and it keeps getting repeated as a fact...until it becomes "fact." Personally, I think she had a grudge against K-Mart's Blue Light Special.

Now I love incandescent light, it's comfy, reminiscent of hearth fires and candlelight. I'm no fan of LED or florescent light, and I don't like the blue color range. So you'd think I'd jump on the electronic blue light bandwagon. But I don't think it disrupts one's circadian rhythm to the point of creating insomnia.

I'm still toying with how it ties in with the idea of light boxes and SAD. Or if that's its origin. Besides, by now, almost everyone uses those energy saver light bulbs, right? Hello? Blue light? Yep. So having that table lamp on is emitting the same color spectrum as my iPad or laptop?

Someone at Apple read that same theory and now since the installment of iOS 10, my blasted iPad starts glowing like an orange pumpkin with indigestion at sunset because of the so-called blue light theory. First few times it happened I thought I was losing my mind...Why is the screen glowing orange? No, I'm not getting sleepy. Is there something wrong with my eyes? TG I found the app that caused my iPad to glow so strangely....

That said, I agree that TVs and electronics can keep you overstimulated at night when you're trying to doze off...but they also seem to have the opposite effect on me. Put on a boring show and it’s....zzzz.

What probably messes with our sleep patterns more than anything is our fear of not getting a good night's rest. We've been told that we need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep—or else. Just like we've been told that we need to drink eight glasses of water a day—or else. There's not science behind either notion. There is no magic formula.

While we do need at least eight hours of down time, how we get that sleep, as long as we get both REM and lighter sleep (or deep rest), and we're not tired, then all is good. Unless you're Margaret Thatcher operating on four hours of sleep a night while running a country, That's not good. (I don't want to know the sleep habits of the Orange One.) But there is such a thing as sleep deficit. Hey-ho, hey-ho, it's off to work we go probably messes with our sleep patterns more than we care to admit.

Snyx? Did I miss something? I wasn't asleep, really...

Lemon Meringue Merengue

Though down for the count with a headcold, yesterday I decided to make lemon meringue pie for my sweetie, a birthday and Valentine's Day tradition that had fallen by the wayside. But in an uncharacteristic pique of cabinet cleaning frenzy, I had thrown out the old yellow box of Kingsford cornstarch with the recipe on the back, and the elderly Albertsons's box only had glazed chicken recipes printed on the back and sides, which was not useful.

So I cracked open food-encrusted (sign of a good cookbook, is the resident food patina) Silver Palate Cookbook, so lovingly inscribed to Neil from Ingrid Gerstmann so many decades ago. A housewarming present from 1991—when he moved to this cottage. I thought of sweet Ingrid in NY, how she knew Neil from the theatre, dahlingk, how I went to school with her, and how small the world really is.

The scalloped pie crust baked (if only I had kept my grannie's spare dentures, the scalloping process would have gone much faster). Thanks to Jim Henin's old poem, my mind wandered far afield.

I gathered Meyer lemons from the tree. Because of the recent rains they had doubled in size, they looked like schools of bloated yellow pufferfish trapped in a green net made of leaves. Meyer monsters the size of oranges. Forget canary-sized. Or pamplemousse. More like Pamelona. The running of the bulls.

I peeled the rinds of three large lemons off in small wormy slivers (forget the 1/2 teaspoon of grated lemon zest—we were going for the full Diet of Worms with the lemon zester to make up for lost time.) I juiced them, but because of the rains, they weren't very sour. So I added another lemon or three  until I had a large cereal bowlful of juice and rind.

I threw in 3 heaping tablespoons of cornstarch into the bowl of juice and rind to let it soak. And then I looked for little swimmers—TG it was weevil-free. Nothing much likes cornstarch except maybe blankmange pudding and chicken glaze. That was way more juice than what the recipe (recollected in memory) called for, by a factor of three, maybe four.

I pulled the crust from the oven and began assembly.

I washed the French copper bowl down with salt and white vinegar until it glowed like a new penny (and thought of Neil Cook with his small army of salvaged copper pots), I scrubbed the equally country French huge balloon whisk (it looked more like bailing wire than a cooking utensil—no stinkin' stainless steel here!) with a large wooden handle—which hadn't been used for years, maybe longer (both gifts from my Aunt Jane when she was at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris).

I set up the double boiler (also unused for years—there was a time when I baked early and often), and I got down to it.

But when I read The Silver Palate recipe, it was all wrong. Two cups of milk in that much lemon juice? A real curdler. Not what I remembered. My grandmother and Aunt Jane had been adapting their variation of the Kingsford recipe since the middle of the last century.

So I went online, and found Alice Waters' Chez Panisse recipe from 1987, courtesy of the New York Times. I tossed in two eggs, three yolks, sugar and juice, and stirred the mixture in the double boiler, running back and forth from the computer screen to kitchen, oops! Not two whole eggs....then I saw how much butter... A cup? I wasn't making lemon butter FFS. WWJC say? (Julia Childs).

So, I flipped back to the Williams-Sonoma recipe. Closer to what I was looking for. But by that time I was so far off the recipe reservation, I was winging it. More sugar, more eggs. OK. Hey, what about that Limoncello in the back of the cupboard? Vanilla bean sugar? Why not?

Not that much butter. Are you kidding me? A cardiac arrest feature built right in, for Valentine's Day, so I tossed in another yolk to compensate. So much for watching the cholesterol. So I tossed back a capful of Limoncello for good measure.

I whisked the whites, added cream of tartar, noting that it too was from the middle of the last century—as was I, for that matter), that balloon whisked whipped the whites until they resembled glistening clouds in the bright copper bowl the color of a sunrisen sky.

I whisked the lemon curd which had thickened to the texture of fresh cement (maybe that was a bit too much cornstarch and egg yolks? So that's why all the butter—a loob job). I needed 2, maybe 3 more arms—make it a shiva's dozen arms. I was wearing lemon curd in my hair and on my newly washed red cashmere sweater (which I can probably never wash again, as it's desperately trying to shrink its way back to doll-sized despite my best efforts of washing it in creme rinse to relax it and stretching it with s steam iron—but it's red. Crimson red, I tell you.)

By this point, I had gobs of lemon goo in my hair, and no free arms to speak of. Where's that bottle of Limoncello? And by this point, the lemon curd was so stiff, it couldn't boil if it wanted to.

Lightbulb. I'll chiffon it with some meringue. Or was it bouffont? So I tossed in another yolk into the curd mix, added more whites for more meringue madness. Or was it merengue madness? I whipped them some more until my arms ached. Luckily the meringue held its air, from this rather unorthodox treatment—and didn't collapse on me. A real ollie.

Limoncello? Wherefore art thou? Forget Romeo. Give me the freakin' Limoncello, or give me death. By this point, I really wanted to die, I was so tired, And when the meringue resembled the texture of angel wings, I carefully folded in half the whisked whites into the concrete curd until it resembled pie filling. Or a yellow cello sponge.

Then I dressed the pie crust in raspberry jam knickers to keep it from getting a soggy bottom, added the filling, with a meringue chapeau (next time make sure the meringue can clear the height of the broiler shelf). And hoped for the best. Luckily the oven did the trick. Me, I went back to bed to recover from the ordeal. Best pie ever. He has no idea, of course.

               

Bay Area Generations, Edition #42, The Bellevue Club, Oakland, Maureen Hurley & John Oliver Simon

We are very grateful to invite you to be a part of Bay Area Generations at The Bellevue Club, Oakland on Monday, February 27, 2017.
We would like you to read the following pieces:

STILL LIFE WITH DEAD BIRD (Maureen Hurley)
LETTER TO COLM TÓIBÍN (Maureen Hurley)
I WAS TEN (Maureen Hurley)

Pablo (John Oliver Simon)
Mama Skunk (John Oliver Simon)
After Rilke (John Oliver Simon)

Day of The Show
Your Reader arrival time - 6:45pm
Writer's mixer (at the bar) - 6:30pm
Doors open for seating - 7 p.m.
Reading starts - 7:30 p.m.

We invite you to arrive early so that you may meet your fellow readers and then we can review our reading procedures for the show.

We provide you a complimentary "souvenir" chapbook of the entire show, and there will also be a small number of copies available for purchase at a nominal cost.

Sales Table You are welcome to bring your own products to sell at the book table: books, chapbooks, cds, broadsides.

Guests We hope that you invite friends and colleagues to hear you read! We are unable to offer comps. We do ask that all attendees, other than readers, donate $7.00 admission (or $10.00 with a souvenir chapbook), which helps to offset our costs.

Directions The Bellevue Club, Oakland is located in Oakland at 525 Bellevue Ave., Oakland, CA, right on beautiful Lake Merritt. It's walkable from BART (19 St.). The Bellevue Club has a full bar and offers a sumptuous view of the Lake. Map:https://goo.gl/maps/pjv7KpvvWv62

We are happy that you will be participating in this event and look forward to a memorable evening with your work.

Sincerely,

Sarah Kobrinsky, Guest Curator
Sherry Wilson + Amos White, Board Curators

Bay Area Generations
A Reading Series for the Ages
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Sandra Wassilie, Co-Founder & Chair
Amos White, President
Gina Goldblatt, Secretary
Sherry Wilson, Treasurer
Charles Kruger, Emeritus & Co-Founder

Bay Area Generations is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Tax ID #47-2973129

Bay Area Generations reading 42 at the Bellevue Hotel 

Bay Area Generations Reading, Hotel Rex
Fred Dodsworth + John Oliver Simon introduce Bay Area Generations #15 at Hotel Rex in San Francisco on November 24, 2014

Transliterating the names of drugs

My friend Jorge Luján, a poet from Mexico, developed a poetry lesson for kids called Imaginary Translations. My favorite: Dragons—stoves on the run.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my old UC Berkeley professor former Jeopardy champ (he got married on set!), Dan Melia's been having a good run with his own version of Imaginary Transliterations using drug names:

Drug names: Repatha: prize-winning Bollywood film.
Taltz sounds like something you can get a bad case of.
Trintellix: a low-cost cell phone service or Trinidad and Tobago's equivalent of the CIA. Trulicity: online university or Christian matchmaking app. Namzaric: master of the pan flute, or latest Sasha Baron Cohen character. (Or both.)
Viberzi: Italian cheese or one of those annoying horns they blow at soccer matches? (Someone quipped: All drug names are Dungeons and Dragons character. This one was a gnomish illusionist.) Victoza: right wing Spanish political party or Miami Dolphins running back.—Dan Milia

So, I decided to have a go at it.

OK, I'll bite.  Omeprazole: it's all about me, oh, me, oh my—self praise, I'm a fiesta screaming ¡Ole! while sticking in your craw. 

Omeprazole (alternate definition): an orange acid-reflux twittering Cheeto with smol hands, that causes, not cures, widespread indigestion upon contact. Approach with caution. And carry a big stick.

AKA Prilosec: Someone who stoops pretty low to hurl an insult, but doesn't take the time to properly masticate it and so it comes back up to haunt him.

AKA Losec: A harried SNL phone operator trying to swallow lunch and talk at the same time.

PeptoBismol: A pretty-in-pink pepOmint-flavored gullet unguent that tastes abysmal butt also has a dark side.

An Apostrophe too far

The Case of the Missing Apostrophe, or an Apostrophe too far.

I read an eoook where a clueless author got her apostrophes wrong EVERY SINGLE TIME! You'd think there'd be a 50% chance of her getting it right, but, no. Simple plurals were well beyond her intellectual grasp. She even wedged apostrophes into words that naturally ended with -s—which made for some very surreal reading pleasure. Not. I was swearing a bluestreak by the time I finished that book. She did not get a very good book review.

You see, I take this stuff seriously. I have dyslexia, and an apostrophe can make or break the meaning in a sentence. So, why are teachers wildly successful with teaching the rampant and errant use of apostrophes every time an S appears on the tail of a word? Clearly no one has a clue as to why they're using them. Other than they must use an apostrophe if there's an S. Hiss. His's? Hiss's?Cats and snakes have better grammar skills than said author.

OK, I looked it up. An apostrophe is a bridge that replaces missing letters or words! Blame it on Chaucer. Like German, olde English nouns in the genitive case picked up an -es to show possession. Mine! Take the genitive forms of Boyes, Mannes, Knyghtes, Kynges and Goddes. Drop the -e, enter the possessive apostrophe. The Kynges speech becomes the King's speech. Quit swearing! Hisses (oh, look, it retained the plural -es stem).

OK, so why did vegetable, and apple get to keep that final -e? Shouldn't it be vegetabl, and appl? Children? Come back! Ms. deVos, please do sit down. Quit polishing that apple. It won't do you any good.

Towhee in the Kitchen

Yesterday we had an orange-ass'd towhee sneak past the kitchen door which was open a crack, looking for crumbs, but then she couldn't get back out. She had a lot to say with her plaintive one-note call, as she tried every window looking for the way out.

My grandmother said that when birds enter the house it meant someone would die soon. She said this, as the towhees gathered morning crumbs at her feet like small chickens. The cats ignored them. Death wasn't on the menu.

Today she was back in the kitchen again, eating crumbs off the floor. (The towhee, not my granny.) In this case, it's all about the free lunch. Or a place to nest. Not death. This time she also knew where the door was. She only swore at me once on the way out. We're making progress, that towhee and I. 

See, last year, I tried to save her baby who fell out of the nest too soon, before it could fly. I perched it in the lemon tree—and I think she remembers something of it. Who knows the reasoning capacity of towhees? She has no fear of me. That's for sure.

She's baaack! This time she ventured down the hall to collect some fluff-n-stuff. I really should vacuum more often.

KITCHEN CHICKEN
Towhee visitor
Rescuing a Towhee Chick
DEATH OF A SONGBIRD, BASTILLE DAY

New swearword of the day: fascist, loofa-faced s***-gibbon

New swearword of the day: fascist, loofa-faced s***-gibbon.

Thank you Senator Leach for a gut-wrenching belly-laugh.

Score a 10 for sheer creativity. Shakespeare would be proud. Not the first time oor wee manny's been called a s***-gibbon, for aa' that. A right guid Scots epithet that made headlines when he mistakenly claimed Scotland voted to leave the European Union last June, (not to mention those ill-fated golf courses) which kicked their ire up a notch. The Scots loaded both barrels because wee nyaff just wouldn't do.

My friend Mark Adler quipped: I can't unsee it. I'll never look at a loofa-sponge the same way again. Yeah. Shades of the Bill O'Reilly loofah escapade. Scrub-a-dub-ya-dub. There's a new Dubya in town. So hysterical I'll even forgive the loofah typo. But it's so not fair to slander and malign the poor gibbons with the Orange One.

Think I'll file this one under linguistics. Ya can't make this shit up.

Happy Birthday Dougie Jarret,

Dougie Jarret, last night I dreamed we were still young, you were driving your hotrod. Revving a turquoise two-tone Chevy in front of your house in Forest Knolls. I was banging on the passenger window of a car from this century, just as we were slowing down to turn up Arroyo Road, toward home. I was trying to get your attention, screaming Happy Birthday Dougie! But you couldn't hear me from across the ages. So, I rolled down the window, entered your world, and you smiled that James Dean smile that left the girls giddy and breathless. And still you couldn't hear me. I awoke to find that today is your birthday. Like, Dude! Happy Birthday and now, get out of my dreams already!

Facebook memory: photo shoot with Richard Salzman, take one and a half

Seeking chronological order, I posted a version of this story but this was written in 2017.

I was doing a photo shoot, a double-truck fashion spread, certainly one of my weirdest assignments ever for The Paper, (fashion was not my thing at all), and I needed one more image—my models were flighty young creatures from my poetry class at El Molino High School, were gone for the evening, and I was the last one standing in the field at deadline. Make that dreadline.

So I went to see my neighbor Richard Salzman and he said Just use yourself. I set up the lighting on a music stand, and the camera on a tripod, set the focal plane, shutter and aperture, and hoped for the best. (No light meter, just my jaundiced eye.) It's sort of an assisted selfie. Of course, you can't go wrong with a Hasselblad. Incredible glass. Large format negatives were more forgiving, you could practically use then as contact prints, as is.

The Paper (North Bay Bohemian) editor Nick Valentine would loan his camera to me from time to time. The camera was worth the price of a small country. I quaked whenever I used it. I never expected Nick to use the photo for The Paper, but he did. That's Richard Salzman tickling the ivories, in Forestville. Late 80s?

Now, our cabins were the size of a minute. You had to go outside in order to change your mind. Richard moving his piano into that cabin was a major feat of ingenuity. So we were also fighting physics too, to get the distance, and most of my body into the frame. I had to shoot it from the corner of the bed.

You know, it's funny, but I had no real sense of self, or how I looked to others—my inner dialogue was always nattering on, telling me that I was homely as a mud fence. My tall, leggy aunts and mother were the gorgeous creatures. My Aunt Jane was the Gallo Girl on the back of the Sunday Funnies, and Time Magazine. I was indoctrinated at an early age not to be vain, or focus on my looks, etc. And the girls in school were seriously cruel, as a rule of thumb, always making fun of me, because I was from the San Geronimo Valley, and wore hand-me-downs, etc. So glad when the hippie movement rolled in, because it no longer mattered what we wore. Liberating.

I was not a fan of the mirror either. I once made the mistake of looking at myself at Judy Soga's house—after someone had slipped me some acid Koolaid earlier that afternoon at the Kent Lake spillway, and let’s just say it was a long, rough ride. Took me years to get over that trip. The Pinnochio nose slidehsow didn't help. I drank a whole lot of it, as it was a hot day at the spillway.. I was stratospheric for a solid week. My ride was a darker turn of the soul as well. Why I am glad the heaviest stuff I ever tried was peyote. Hitching out the The Valley after peyote tea, I swear I saw the ghosts of Miwoks by the golf course.

Speaking of print ads, Bill Deutra, the Marlboro Man, lived right across from me, lovely man, full of stories, the KS ravaging his handsome face. He'd take me out tea dancing in Guerneville. Told me about JEdgar's propensity for cross-dressing. I know the feeling. I felt like I was (reverse) cross-dressing in this photo. Out of character, out of soul depth, charging right ahead into the abyss. I was madly in love with poetry itself, the rest was ephemera.

Photo shoot with Richard Salzman, 1981, long and winding musical version, Take two

I was doing a photo shoot, a double truck spread on fashion, which was one of my weirdest assignments ever for The Paper, (so not my thing), and I needed one more image...my models were flighty young creatures from my poetry class at El Molino High School, were gone for the evening, and I was the last one standing in the field at deadline. Dreadline. I set up the lighting on a music stand, and the camera on a tripod, set the focal plane, shutter and aperture, and hoped for the best. (No light meter, just my jaundiced eye.) It's sort of an assisted selfie.

I had these huge 200-watt bulbs that I stuck into aluminum reflector lamp shades with clippies. Seriously low tech. I used Tri-X, with a slow shutter speed, wide open aperture, and pushed the film in the developing process. Almost no post process. Grey scale was all there. Of course, the Hasselblad negative film was so big, it was practically like making a contact print.

Of course, you can't go wrong with a Hasselblad. Incredible glass. Large format negatives were more forgiving, you could practically use then as a contact print, as is. The Paper (North Bay Bohemian) editor Nick Valentine would loan it to me from time to time. The camera was worth the price of a small country. I quaked whenever I used it. I never expected Nick to use the photo for The Paper, but he did.  I remember I was mortified at the time. I really didn't think Nick would go for it... I still have some of the half-tones from some of my photos. In some cases, the half-tone is the only copy I have.

I did clean up nicely from time to time. But I preferred old clothes to new duds. I wound up keeping the outfit, and used it to land a couple of jobs. I still had a waistline and my boobs weren't frequent flyers. I love thrift stores. My grannie and mother were both seamstresses, so I learned to sew at an early age. I was relieved when the hippie look became popular. So much less stress. I will NEVER wear panty hose again. Just sayin'. My friend Lee Perron said I used to dress to challenge—whatever that meant, other than wearing lingerie long before Madonna was a household word.

That's Richard Salzman tickling the ivories, in Forestville. Late 80s? They don’t shoot piano players, do they? Ken Bullock said that I looked like a torch singer. At the time, my favorite torchiere song in those days were My Funny Valentine, Stormy Weather and Stormy Monday.And Ewan McCall's First time ever I saw your face, a tribute to Peggy Seeger knocked me stone cold with its beauty. But there's that little thing called words. And the notes, they all have to line up exactly. I was never good at that. I get too nervous and it all flies out the window. My Torchiere amore, you're the one that I adore...

Even Don Coffin chimed in on my thread. We'd all go nuts whenever he drove up the Celli driveway in that big green caddy with all that chrome grille, ‘cuz it meant the craic was on. Don would step out with his fancy cowboy boots and mandolin. An Irish saying, means to part-ay on like there's no tomorrow!  Don always traveled with some musical instrument or other. And Paul was a switch-hitter, he could go either classical or bluegrass.

Sone incredible music sessions at the cabins with Paul, Alistair Ingram, and Richard Salzman on the flute, because he couldn’t drag the piano out into the driveway, which was our communal living room, because there wasn’t a cabin big enough to hold us all. I asked Don if he was with Kate Wolf when she was living in Forest Knolls. I just remember her white ford falcon stationwagon parked in front of the Forest knolls USPO, not much else.

A high school friend, Toni Tierney commented on my photo saying it’s a Stevie Nicks look. Funny she should say that, I used to clean house for one of the band members—tall guy with an English accent. was it Fleetwood Mac himself? Dunno. They lived behind The Drake Club in Fairfax. Still trying to piece together that memory. Wish I could sing like her. I can still see the inside of the house in my mind's eye. They had an adorable toddler. The man was lovely, offered me tea, but she was a cold fish.

I didn't last long as a housecleaner for Fleetwood Mac. The blonde just didn’t like me. But they turned me onto some good music. Probably the first time I ever listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac. Rhiannon became my favorite song. Weirdly, they turned me on to Michael Franks. He had me at those popsickle toes. I hear they're planning to buy the old recording studio in Sausalio. LOL. Toni confirmed that it was Fleetwood himself—and they probably paid me with checks too...Talk about autographs. But I was never into the fame thing.

You know, it's funny, but I had no real sense of self, or how I looked to others—my inner dialogue was always beating me up and nattering on that I was homely as a mud fence. I was a tortured angst-ridden soul. (Still am). At Lagunitas school, Jimmy Bohman taunted me, called me Skinny, and Flaca. Cruel kids. And trying to fit in at Drake high school, just wasn't within my skill-set. Those were miserable years. Thank god for art. It literally saved me. And my horses. Always the horses. Riding alone along the ridges of Mt. Barnabe brought me solace and refuge from the savage world.

I’m still not a fan of the mirror either...made the mistake of looking at myself at Judy Soga's house—someone had slipped me some acid Koolaid that afternoon at the spillway, and it was a long, rough ride. Took me years to get over that trip. The Pinnochio nose slidehsow didn't help. Yeah, my ride was a darker turn of the soul. Hitching out the The Valley after drinking some peyote tea, I swear I saw the ghosts of Miwoks at the Nicasio turn-off, by the golf course. Must’ve been Geoff Davis’s doing. He said he used to see their ghosts there by the pond. Said there was a village there. I never could shake that image. Window to the past.

I was certainly indoctrinated at an early age not to be vain, or to focus on my looks, etc. And the girls in school were seriously cruel, as a rule of thumb, always making fun of me, because I was from The San Geronimo Valley, I wore hand-me-downs, etc. So glad when the hippie movement rolled in, because it no longer mattered what we wore. Liberating to finally be ourselves in a massive hippie crowd.

My aunts and mother were the gorgeous creatures. My Aunt Jane was the Gallo Girl on the back of the Sunday Funnies, and Time Magazine. Speaking of print ads, Bill Deutra, the Marlboro Man, lived right across from me, lovely man, full of stories, the KS ravaging his handsome face. He'd take me out tea dancing in Guerneville. Told me about JEdgar's propensity for cross-dressing. I know the feeling. I felt like I was (reverse) cross-dressing in this photo. Out of character, out of soul depth, charging right ahead into the abyss. I was madly in love with poetry itself, the rest was ephemera.

2/2017
Added 2/20

RAIN HAIKU

Tempestuous night
rain hammers a thirsty land
mountains become prone.


She didn't expect
runaway nightmares, sleeping
on the horse-sleigh bed.


Staccato of rain
cats racing to the front door
to outwit the storm.


His words are windows
streaked with the grime and decay
of alternate facts.


Sing America
while the enemy within strikes
down justice and truth.

Preserving the past: Centrum in the early 1980s (photo)

In the process of using old Facebook Memories to flush out the gaps in my blog, I discovered that I had met Meridel LeSueur, not in 1981, but according to the Centrum site, it was 1980. I will need to readjust many (undated) poem dates...

Not only that, as I attempted to fill in the gaps on this timeline, I discovered that I've been misspelling Meridel's last name for decades. It's LeSueur, not LeSeuer!!! Got that. Awg, egg on face. Blame it on dyslexia. (True—I had a hard time unraveling it—even now, when I knew it was wrong and I had to resort to a snapshot of her name to keep it right in my head.)

As to fluffing out this blog, the trouble is, my Facebook Memories only date back to 2009. So it doesn't help flush out those impoverished writing years. I'm still sorting old papers, so more work is coming, but the bulk of the poetry has been scanned and posted (a huge task). Now it's come down to transcribing old journal entries. (Not the highest on my priorities list, of sorting all my old papers, filing them, and eventually dispatching them.)

The year 1980 is particularly dicey in that I didn't seem to keep a proper journal. Napkins, paper place-mats and menus were pressed into service, along with carbon paper separator tissue, as well as the backs of old posters and poem revisions—an odd sleuthy way to date my many undated old poems.
 
So, I must've gone to Centrum three times. I know we were personae non gratae for crashing the gates of the kingdom when Meridel was there. Carol Jane Bangs in particular had it out for me. She actually chased me out of a poetry reading, screaming bloody murder, the only thing missing in that lunatic chase, was a cleaver in her hand. No matter that it was free and open to the public. Luckily she never knew my name. The nerve. Crashing a poetry reading/reception like that. I was an alley cat, hungry for poetry. Perhaps the free wine and hors d'oeuvres were involved as well. 

Jim Heynen, one of the other Centrum coordinators, apologized to me later. He didn't mind at all that I was there as a freeloader. We spiced up the conference. Jim read a hysterical poem about someone using false teeth to make the scallops on a pie crust, and hog farmer David Lee read from The Porcine Legacy. Worth the gate crashing entrance fee.

Writing at Centrum

1980 (I remember meeting Lisel Mueller, and Bill Knott as well as Donald Hall; I think this is the year I met Bill Root and Pan Uschek, and Rusty North.) 

FACULTY: Galway Kinnell, Meridel LeSueur, Richard Shelton, Ann Standork, James Bertolino, Madeline DeFrees, Donald Hall, Sam Hamill, Bill Ransom, Lisel Mueller, Bill Knot.

1981 (I'm pretty certain I went to this one too as I have a journal entry on Jack Cady; and I spent time with Tree Swenson and Kathleene over at Copper Canyon Press. Kathleene West (what was her last name back then. I adored her. I found out that Linnerson was her maiden name, she said she was always reinventing herself. Anyway, she got me to apply to teach poetry to kids in Montana.) 

FACULTY: Margaret Atwood, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Stafford, Jack Cady, Jane Yolen. 

 

1982  (I know that I went to this one too, I remember singing and drinking with Tess and Ray at the Town Tavern (note to self: don't try to keep up with them drinking); I fell head over heels in love with Thomas McGrath. I remember him reading from his imaginary letters, wow, and his talking about coal mines.)

FACULTY: Olga Broumas, Henry Carlile, Sandra McPherson, Carolyn Forché, Tess Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Paul Hansen, Jim Heynen, Thomas McGrath, Richard Shelton, James Laughlin, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish.

This photo engendered an interesting conversation on June, 2013, which was worth preserving in situ.
Facebook conversation (photo) Lyle Daggett & me on Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, Doubiago

And another much shorter version of this post was filed July 10, 1980, for continuity's sake.
Port Townsend Poetry Conference 1980 (photo)

Preserving the Past: scanning old family photos (at what cost)

I've been preoccupied with the process of creating order out of orphaned papers since November, 2014, when we had to clean out my grandmother's house (which not only contained her memorabilia, her husband's memorabilia, but also that of her three daughters, as well).

And when I suddenly had to move all my stuff from my old cabin, which in danger of falling down, during the summer of 2015, I was left with mountains of my own paper, photos, etc., that had accumulated during a 35-year-career of being an artist and writer. The penny dropped. Get it together now. Don't leave all that crap behind for those who will survive you. Because it will all wind up in the county dump.

In 2015, I rescued and scanned thousands of family photos—after catching my uncle pitching my aunt Jane's France photos in the trash—Jane had lived with my grannie until her death in 1987, then moved down to Santa Cruz with my aunt Toddy ca. 2002, when she had breast cancer.

My aunt Canice, who lived in my grandmother's house too, until her death from colon cancer in 2012, also left mountains of memorabilia behind. And my mother's stuff from 1994, not to mention her ashes, was still in the house as well. None of the three sisters particularly got along, and each one of them was a hostile hoarder.

In the summer of 2015, I created an online photo archive. By 2016, I finished scanning most of the family photos. Except for the ones in Santa Cruz. Then my aunt Jane, who was living in Santa Cruz, with her sister, my aunt Toddy (Kathleen), died a month after her birthday.

I had made order out of most of Jane's old photos, scanned them, and had returned them all to her in Santa Cruz in June, on her birthday—when we found out that Jane's cancer had metastacised as melanoma and uterine cancer.

My cousin Katie saw me looking though a box of Jane's photos, accused me of stealing Jane's photos as I was returning the last batch.The irony is that most of them were photos that I salvaged from the basement trash cans. I was merely taking the final batch of photos north to be scanned, and Jane had given me permission.

But Katie, misread the situation, not knowing that Jane had given me permission to take more photos, thought I was stealing them. It just doesn't make sense, but Katie was under a lot of stress at the time. My explanations fell on deaf ears. And the "problem" escalated.

For some reason, all three of my Santa Cruz cousins completely lost their minds because I continued to scan family photos. Maybe they thought I'd stop if they got angry enough? I don't know. It's useless to speculate on irrational behavior. The next time I went down to see Toddy, in October,  all kinds of accusations of theft and epithets were hurled at me—for preserving family history.

I was devastated, in that I loved my cousins, and had devoted thousands of hours to the process of preserving our family history. As my cousin Barney verbally abused me, with his brother Myles joining in, I realized that I'd never set foot in that house again, that I'd never see their mother, my aunt Toddy, alive again. I hugged my aunt, made my final goodbyes, walked out their front door into the night, and waited for the death announcement to come.

Meanwhile during the summer of 2016, I began scanning my own photos—I had lots of travel photos. I still need to process them and put them online, which I do, from time to time, in random fits and starts. I still need to tackle the black and white photos of the 1980s and 1990s when I worked for The Paper, etc. Mostly photos of famous poets, etc. But for that I need a negative scanner. On the TO DO list. A massive task.

When my aunt Toddy died last month, we were able to go into the family archives and share the wealth of our family history. Toddy's daughter Katie and I made up at the memorial last weekend, but Barney and Myles are still heavily barricaded behind their irrational anger and misdirected hostility towards me for scanning (not stealing) family photos, so they kept their distance.

They needed a scapegoat. I was a convenient target. I doubt they'll ever get over it. Dickheads who were raised better than that. But I remind myself, searching for a small grain of compassion in my heart, by not fueling my own anger towards them, I reminded myself that they're survivors of a dysfunctional family.

Their older brother (mine too, as Toddy adopted Sean) was a drug addict, and a convicted felon for possession, who killed himself on October 16, 2007, rather than go back to prison (for assault), on the Third Strike program. And their father was a functional alcoholic for most of his life. In recollection, Toddy always had a can of beer in her hand, as did her husband.

Toddy, who was a two-times cancer survivor, later admitted that she had a problem with drinking too during the early years, but when she became a mother, all that changed. She held the family together as John spiraled out of control, losing jobs.

Toddy held the family together, against all odds, also raising Sean's children as her own, and once her faculties began to fail, her granddaughter/niece Tiffany took care of her, every single day for seven long years, as an unpaid laborer. No time off. No vacations. Once I was part of that family matrix, spending every Thanksgiving, Easter, and summers in Santa Cruz, going to the Feather River with Toddy and the gang. Halcyon days.

It all changed when I began to scan the family photos. To cope, everyone opted to live in a continuous fucked-up time present, where the relics of the past stayed firmly entrenched in the past, and the future was undefined. And here I was, disturbing carefully reconstructed timelines, uncovering the angry ghosts of the past.

With Toddy's death, my ties to that family are severed, except that Sean's children are also my blood nieces—not that anyone's ever acknowledged it. What I didn't know is that the family hatred and rage wasn't limited to just me, some of it was directed toward Tiffany, and it continues to stain the unblemished days of the future present.  I'm not big on prayer, if I were the praying kinds, I'd pray for them. All I can do is offer compassionate thoughts, and keep my distance. And hope that they begin to heal themselves.

Meanwhile, I've got some more scanning to tackle. That's what we do best. Carry on. Even in the face of adversity.

Declining coho run on Lagunitas Creek: It's the damned dams, Stoopid!

An Open Letter to Alastair Bland:

Who, in an article, Big Rains Bring Both Good and Bad News for Salmon, for of newsdeeply.com, wrote that: "Lagunitas Creek and its lower tributaries, have been lined with bank fortifications and berms that confine the streams to their main channels..." are the real problem for failing coho salmon runs ... Not.

Hmm, Mr. Bland, and there are few berms on Lagunitas Creek. Unless you're referring to the dams on upper Lagunitas Creek, they are called, you know, flat-out dams, not berms. I  ridden every inch of that creekbed from the Inkwell to Tócaloma. There are berms at Jewel, but that’s about it.

As to your reference to all the damage to the lower tributaries, you're way off mark (have you ever heard of primary investigation vs using Wiki as a reference, bolstered by a Marin Municipal Water District quotes. Nice touch, BTW. Lends a real air of authenticity.

Has it also ever occurred to you that MMWD just MIGHT be part of the main problem? Not exactly an unbiased source. Think about that for a moment. I'll wait. Five dams. Has the penny dropped? Oh, right. Dams! MMWD's bread and butter. Ka-ching!

One main tributary to Lagunitas Creek (other than Olema Creek), the San Geronimo/Creamery Creek does not have extensive berms either, and certainly not any new channeling, and the fish runs were huge when I was a kid. There was a fish ladder at the golf course (see below), but it didn’t impede the fish run. The golf course (and pesticides) did.

I know damned near every bend of these creeks. (And most of the tributaries). And I have swum in, or ridden most of the streambeds. On Lagunitas Creek, south of Kent Lake Dam, Devil's Gulch Creek, another main tributary, has NO berms whatsoever... never had them, so this is bogus info. Total bullshit. Olema Creek, ditto. Cowshit might contribute to the problem in Point Reyes. But I have seen silver salmon runs where the water was roiling with fish in cowshitted water.

There was a fish ladder (at Roy's Dam) on the San Geronimo Creek in San Geronimo. Unless the fish ladder was later removed, SPAWN's claim to fame is somewhat hyperbolic. The fact, that in 1997, the fish were still navigating San Geronimo Creek, suggests it wasn't a problem. I distinctly remember going to the ladders to watch the coho navigate the steps in the 1970s.

It is possible that the SGV Golf Course radically changed the structure of the ladder ca. the late 1980s, early 1990s, and I wouldn't have witnessed it. (From what I can gather, upon further sleuthing, the fish ladder was in disrepair, and fixed in 1999 and Roy's Dam—if you can call it a dam— was removed). But I’ll also mention again that the golf course used pesticides to keep the weeds off the course. 

Maybe Andy Giddings has more specific info on the SGV creek fishladder as his father was Fish & Game Warden for the San Geronimo Valley during the 1950s-1980s?

BTW, Fish also made it all the way up to our tertiary creeks, Barranca and Arroyo during the 1960s. 

On San Geronimo Creek, where it meet Lagunitas Creek, Shafter's Pool was dammed during the summer, but that practice stopped in the late 50s, early 60s. It was a seasonal dam, a summer swimming hole for kids. It had zero impact on coho runs. And the salmon were still plentiful. No other dams on the creek. So what exactly are you talking about?

The silver salmon and the coho runs declined in the 80s-90s, there's something else at work: like over-fishing and lack of spawning grounds. Oh, and the biggest "berm" of all, Kent Lake Dam—is probably the biggest reason of all why critical fish habitat was destroyed. Add Nicasio Dam to that list. Most of the Mt. Tam dams date back to the 'teens" so they didn't have a huge recent impact on failing coho runs of the 1990s.

Lake Lagunitas dam was built 1872, Alpine Dam 1917, Bon Tempe 1948, Kent Lake (Peter's) Dam, the largest reservoir, in 1954—it was still filling up in the late 50s. The dam was raised 45 feet in 1982, after the drought of the 70s. Nicasio Dam was added in 1962.) And then there was the drought. Did I mention drought. As in several back-to-back long-term drought cycles?

So, to be clear, Lagunitas Creek (and its three forks) is dammed at Lake Lagunitas, becomes Lagunitas Creek the First, which drains into Bon Tempe Lake, then to Alpine Dam, (with a name change to Big Carson), then to Kent Lake Dam, then to Lagunitas Creek the Second, at the confluence of San Geronimo Creek. Note: they are full blown DAMS not berms.

And then there's Nicasio Creek, which flows from the Nicasio Reservoir (1962), to Platform Bridge, where it joins Lagunitas Creek— another damned dam, to the mix. That's the source of the problem. All the damned dams.

FYI: From Kent Lake to the sea, Lagunitas Creek is a wild creek through Samuel P.Taylor Park, through Jewel, around the bend, past Devil's Gulch, past McIsaac's Ranch, my cousin's Gallagher Ranch at Elephant/Black Mountain, to Point Reyes Station, to the Point Reyes bridge....still NO channels or berms, on to White House Pool, that I can recall—then it empties into Tomales Bay... Even Olema Creek is not bermed. So, what are you talking about?

Seriously, this sounds like a spin from the self-serving organization, SPAWN (litigious Todd Steiner's Salmon Protection and Watershed Network) which began its alternative truth campaign in 1997, and has been wildly successful at obfuscation and litigation...probably leading to some of the factoids in your article, a case in point. It's the damned dams that are the problem. And droughts. Did I mention the droughts???

Otherwise, a good article...

Google Maps screenshot of San Geronimo Creek headwaters. Roy's Dam was at the golf course, where SGV Rd turns up to Nicasio road.

Fluffing out the blog timeline (home stretch)

Lately I've been adding a few Facebook Memories to my blog. The past few months, I've been scanning adding variations, revisions of old poems and generally fluffing out the blog timeline (home stretch). My goal is 52 posts per year (poetry, prose, journal, or art).

The weak-kneed anemic years:, but 40 posts per year is doable; hell, I'll even settle for 35 posts per year, which means I have 10 9 8 abysmal years to fluff out... In which case, I need to focus on 1986; 91, 92, 96, 98, 99;  2004, 05, 06. The rest is pure gravy. 

The 1990s I was traveling a lot and never got around to transcribing my travel journals. Truth be known, I'm resistant to typing up stuff, so searching for typed work is a higher priority than cracking open old journals. There is some resistance. This is my carrot, this is my stick. Flagellate! Flagellate! Avanti!)

Dirtbags

My aunts and uncles, Myles, Jane, Feilim, Toddy, Bill Reilly (all gone, now—including Jane, Canice, and my mom. I only have one uncle left), in Forest Knolls, ca. 1932-33. My aunt "Toddy" Kathleen (Reilly) Ritter, RIP, Oct 1, 1930 - Jan. 28, 2017

Dirtbags, all...nothing like Marin County dirt.  Franciscan strata. Baths were Saturday night, whether or not you needed it, and since water was scarce, the eldest went in first, followed by the next, and the next, until the water could walk out of the tub on its own.

None of this single person per tubful bathing nonsense, and certainly not showers.

They are even dirtier in other photos! They weren't afraid to play in the dirt or eat mudpies.

Is anyone else being blocked by Facebook censors?

Facebook note: Apologies in advance for any typos. I'm a terrible typist, and I have dyslexia, so I make many mistakes. I do not think in parallel structure, I'm a messy writer, i hone and refine my posts. (It doesn't come easy.) And yes, it's important to ply one's craft to the best of one's ability—even on Facebook. Because, in my world, typos are often the only bits of writing that survive...some sort of weird Murphy's law at work.

It takes me, upon average, three tries for each comment or post, to get everything right. So far, today, I've been blocked by Facebook from correcting my posts ten times. Belay that, we're now up to 2 dozen times.

The problem is, that I have to make a decision each time to either save my revised post or complain to Facebook.

Despite the fact that Facebook is once again blocking my every amended post I have found a copy and paste workaround. Cumbersome.

Wondering if anyone else is being blocked by Facebook censor.

My note to them:

"HEY! I have the right to correct, edit, amend my posts withougt you arbitrarily deciding thst I'm a spammer, As you can see, I'm a terrible typist, and I have dyslexia, so I make a lot of mistakes. It takes me upon average, about three tries for each comment to get everything corrected. QUIT BLOCKING ME!!!"  (Note the typos...)

What is significant, is not that I make typos, etc., but that you, Facebook are being a censor nanny, and your algorithms are broken, if they continue to construe my correcting of my typos on my comments as a form of spam.

"It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it."

I can't help it if I'm a fast thinker.

• Dear Facebook, stop blocking me

• Facebook censorship in a time of crisis, Tubbs Fire
• Is anyone else being blocked by Facebook censors?

• Facebook FAIL Rant