Christmas Party, Bernalillo County Medical Center

 ‘Tis the season of the obligatory Christmas party in the workplace.  Everyone dreads it.  It’s not about gemutlichkeit.  I’m not sure what it’s about.  

My most memorable holiday workplace gathering was in 1973 at the Bernalillo County Medical Center in Albuquerque, where I worked for six months in the steno pool of the radiology department.

 With headphones, a tape recorder, and Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, I sat in a cubicle transcribing radiology reports dictated by radiologists sitting in their cubicles, feet propped on their desks.  Having recently achieved a Master’s degree in English literature from UNM, I was in demand for transcribing because I could distinguish “spondylosis” from “spondylolisthesis,” and words like that.

 Recently, I went through a box of papers from those New Mexico days and found a vignette about the radiology department Christmas party.  Being “P.C.” hadn’t reached Albuquerque in December 1973.

Here’s what I wrote:

Christmas Party, Bernalillo County Medical Center

December 1973

Someone announces over the loudspeaker, “Christmas party in the conference room,”

 We chipped in for cold cuts, brought goodies from home:  deviled eggs, Swiss cheese and crackers, cranberry relish, pink jello salad, fruitcake, and Mexican wedding cookies. Mary Dullea brought posole, which we eat in paper cups. The spiked punch is gone in fifteen minutes.

Mrs. Petty stage whispers, "We shoulda made chicken soup for Dr. Kopperman."

Sandra brought bunuelos, learned to make them in her Mexican cooking class. Consuela spits hers into the wastebasket, hisses to Teresa, "I've never tasted anything like that."

Sandra hears her, gets huffy, says, "They're Mexico City style. Not New Mexico."

Kyle, the security guard, plays Santa.  Evie drew my name, gives me three pair of bikini panties, each with a drink recipe on it.  On the q.t., Mary Dullea tells me she is selling hot Navajo jewelry for her brother-in-law in Arizona.

The custodians are having their own party upstairs. Lucille doesn’t like their food and complains,  "They're playing Spanish music and I can't understand a word of it." She writes her recipe for sweet potato pie on a pink, "While You Were Out" pad, tells me it's her new husband's favorite. He's from the Bahamas, hates Albuquerque.

They pass around a card to slip into Poopsie’s in-box.   She’s secretary to Dr. B, the chief of radiology. The card is a photo of a penis with glasses and a little Santa hat. Underneath it says, "Seasons Greetings. Guess Who?"

Poopsie won’t come to our party. The way she refers to herself as, "executive secretary," emphasizing the "zec," I know she won't show. Evie thinks she's having a mad affair with her boss.   I think Poopsie simply hates us all, especially this time of year.

Evie is pregnant, thrilled about it.  We laugh when she pops a button on her blouse because her boobs are getting big.  The conference room is near the nursery and the maternity ward.  When someone opens the door, you can hear an infant cry.

“Baby Hay-Soos,” Mrs. Petty says every time.

My Dad and I Ride in the Rain

My Dad and I Ride in the Rain

 
       Maybe it is the golden autumn light or my November birthday.  Whatever the reason, November takes me to memories of childhood, especially the years spent on ranches in northeastern Nevada.  A few weeks ago, the first hard rain here in the redwoods of northern California triggered the memory of a summer thunderstorm sixty years ago.
   
      My father and I were horseback, about five miles from the Seventy-One ranch where we lived. It began to rain, and then it began to rain hard, and then it really came down. This was summer before sixth grade, my last summer as a ranch kid. That September we would move to Elko and live in town.
   
      I heard my dad call my name, tell me to rein in, get off my horse, and pull off the saddle blanket.  We would use our saddle blankets for cover he said as he checked my cinch and gave me a boost back on my horse.
   
     Why do certain memories stay with us?  Was it the strength of the sensory memory:  the strong scent of horse sweat, the heat and weight and prickle of the saddle blanket?  Perhaps it was the surprise and joy of galloping side-by-side in the rain, down the graveled  road and across the last hay meadow before the home ranch.
   
     Maybe this was the best experience I shared with my father, before adolescence and town life took over; maybe it was my last best day as a kid.

Skipping

 Skipping 

     I was visiting her in her room at the assisted living facility, and she was reminiscing about her college days at Utah State, repeating some anecdote I had heard many times.  Now that she is in her nineties, I don’t correct her, confuse her, make her wrong by saying, “I’ve heard that one, “ although I’m tempted.  Any daughter who takes care of an old mother knows the forbearance needed to listen to a story one more time, audience to a monologue of memories. 

     She surprised me when she said, “We were walking downtown to the movie theater and he asked me—we hadn’t been dating that long—he asked me if I knew how they skipped down the yellow brick road in the movie, The Wizard of Oz.  I told him, ‘Of course I do!’  He took my hand and we skipped all the way to the movie theater.”

   I was delighted by the vision of young Helen and Fred skipping down the streets of Logan, Utah in 1935, the year they met.   She continued, “There was something about his taking my hand....” She paused and repeated herself, which she often does, “There was something about his taking my hand.”   As she said the words, it was as if she could feel her hand in his.

     “Mom, I have never heard that story before,” I said.

     “I just remembered it,” she said.

      The next day I discovered that the Wizard of Oz was released in 1939 and realized that my mother’s story could not have been true.  By that time, my parents were married and living in Reno, Nevada.

      So What?  I thought.  So what if the story can’t be true, at least the way she told it.  It reminded me of literary definitions that imply the lies of fiction lead to greater truths.   That little story, true or not, was a gift, restoring memories of my parents’ marriage, reminding me that theirs was a happy one.

     I remembered long car rides from the sheep ranch near Hayden, Colorado to Colby, Kansas where the livestock  wintered.  As my dad thumped the rhythm on the dashboard, they sang, “I was born in Kansas, I was bred in Kansas, and when I get married, I’ll be wed in Kansas…”

      Later, living on a cattle ranch in northeastern Nevada, I remembered their duets on an old upright piano, my mother playing the bass, Dad, the melody, and both singing, “I like mountain music, good old mountain music…”

      I remembered my father ‘s last days of a terminal illness in a morphine-induced state, his expressive hands fluttering above the bed covers, her steady hand feeding him teaspoons of water.

     It is a blessing to remember that,  after all the anger, blame, regret, curiosity, doubt I have been through, trying to figure out who I am, what shaped my life, I know with certainty  my parents had a good marriage, a happy marriage.  “Be my life’s companion and we’ll never grow old…,” another song I remember them singing.

I, Too, Have a Hemingway Story

I, Too, Have a Hemingway Story

     In 1956, my friend Karen Toothman and I met Ernest Hemingway at the bar of the Stockmen’s Hotel in Elko, Nevada. My friend's father managed the casino-hotel.   Hemingway was on his way to his home in Ketchem, Idaho.

     High school freshmen, Karen and I were doing homework in her basement when the phone rang.  Her mother called down the stairs, “Karen, your father says Ernest Hemingway is at the bar.  If you girls want to meet him, come down right away.”

     Out of breath from running, we paused at the hotel entrance, reminding each other about the great  article we would write for the Sagebrush Saga, our high school newspaper.

     I don’t remember what Karen asked him, but I still wince at my question.  I looked  at him and said, “Mr. Hemingway, which do you write first, the story or the title?”

     Hemingway  paused and said, “Well, sometimes write the story first, and sometimes I write the title first.”

     We walked back to Karen’s house and were talking with her mother when Mr. Toothman came home, which was unusual.  It was also unusual when Karen’s reserved, Germanic father put his arm around his beautiful, petite Spanish wife, Esther, and said, ”He said she reminds him of Ava.”

     Forty years later at our class reunion, I saw Karen again.

     Obviously, we  had aged.  I heard that at one point she had a drinking problem, but  was in recovery.  I  had not written the Great American anything.

     As we reminisced, I said, ”Karen, do you remember that your father was told by America’s greatest living author that you looked like one of the ten most beautiful women in the world—Ava Gardner?

     “No” she said.  “I just remember that you asked Ernest  Hemingway some really intelligent question about writing.”

Go Back

Go Back

If I don’t know where I was,

How can I get back there?

There’s a place I remember as if I was holding a photo.

 I see the rise of sage-covered hills, a willow bank,

 and wild rose blowing sweetness in the morning breeze.

I know what you’ll say.  We don’t learn who we are in a day.

Yet after all these years, it is a day and place that stays,

when I knew I could hold the herd in an easy way.

When I consider the places I’ve been and how far I’ve strayed

 I’d give anything to go back  and see if I know that young me                               

 riding  tall and free beneath a blue Nevada sky.

                                        Nancy Harris McLelland

     A couple of years ago I had a conversation with a cowboy in Elko during a Cowboy Poetry Gathering who described a particular place he remembered.  “I was a young   buckaroo for the Marble Ranches,” he said. “There was a special place…sure wish I could remember where it was. “ I was struck by the intensity of his yearning. “Go Back” is the poem I made from that encounter.

      Last summer, I had my own “go back” experience, revisiting the ranch in northeastern Nevada where I lived from ages two to five.  I went on this one hundred and fifty-mile  round trip from my summer home in Tuscarora to an abandoned ranch site  a few  miles from Lee, Nevada with my childhood friend, Linda.

     My friend was born and raised on a family ranch near Lee, went to one-room schools in the area, knows and loves this ranching community scattered along the western flank of the Ruby Mountains.  Our parents were friends during the early days.  Linda and I ran with the same group of girls in high school and pledged the same sorority in college.  After college, we went our separate ways until we were both retirement age. I was free to spend summers in Tuscarora, a silver-mining metropolis in the 1850’s, now a collection of fewer than two dozen retirees and artists, and the only service a post office.  Linda and her husband were raising quarter horses and bucking bull stock on their spread  in the valley below.

     After our fiftieth high school reunion, Linda said, “When you come next summer we’ll go back to the Pitchforth Ranch   above the Kane’s place.  That was your dad’s first ranching job, wasn’t it?  You remember Bill and Josephine Kane?”

     “ I have lots of memories of that time,” I said, which turned out to be a lie.  I remembered my mother’s stories. She loved telling anecdotes about the bad winter of ’48 , the hay lift and  pogonip frost;  the evenings when Dad  roped fence posts  until he was  good enough to throw a loop with the Kane men; Mom’s  first time fixing lunch for a branding crew; Dad taking me winter mornings on the hay wagon  to feed cattle.  That time was important in their young married lives because it was Dad’s first ranching job and their first child, a healthy little girl.

      During the fifty-two mile  drive from Tuscarora to Elko on the day of our road trip, Linda and I talked about our  class reunion, deaths, divorces and  laughed about who we made out with in high school .  We talked about the town girls who married ranchers and the ranch girls who moved away and never came back. I also told her a little bit about how I “came by” the place in Tuscarora.  She understood the appeal of the remote ranching community, below and beyond Tuscarora, which had stayed  relatively unchanged, the way much more of  Elko County used to be.

     It was harder to explain  Tuscarora as my source of creative inspiration, something I have written about in a piece called “Thinking of Names.” http://adobehouseartists.com/nm/html/names.html   In Tuscarora,  I found time, space, and a place that inspired me to take my writing seriously, especially my poetry.

      We were still chatting as we turned onto Highway 228 to Lee.   About five miles off the pavement and onto gravel, Linda slammed on the brakes.  “Look at that derrick!  It still has the cables and everything.”  We had stopped in the middle of the road, and I thought maybe only a Nevadan could appreciate the scene:  a sage-covered hillside, true blue sky, the profile of an old-style derrick, the kind used to build haystacks fifty years ago—when we were young.  I also thought how good it was to reconnect with someone who knew me when I was a kid, who knows where I come from.

     Our next stop was what used to be the busy hamlet of Lee. The defunct grocery store had been converted into a residence, the Lee schoolhouse remodeled into a charming country home.  I got out of the car to look around.

     Linda pointed to the field across the road.  “That’s where they used to have the turkey shoots,” she said. I stared hard at the barren field, wishing it into familiarity.  I could imagine a target on a bale of hay, remembering another of my mother’s stories.  Mother was a good shot; and one November she won a turkey.  However, it was years before I realized that it was a contest of marksmanship.

 “I thought they shot the turkeys at a turkey shoot,” I said to Linda.

   “In the early days they probably did shoot the turkeys,” she said.

     “Bullshit.  You’re just trying to make me feel more like a ranch girl and less like a town girl.”

      “You never were much of a ranch girl, “ she said, slamming the door.

     “I beg your pardon.” I was defensive about how little I remembered about this particular place, in spite of my ranching history.  I reminded her that my dad managed one of the largest outfits in Elko County, sixty-five thousand deeded acres, sixty-five hundred mother cows, seven ranches in all.    “Do you remember that I had to move to the ranch headquarters in Deeth and go to school in Wells?  We lived in that hellhole for a year and I had to take the school bus from the ranch into Wells and there were only eighty-four kids in the damn school.  I might add, that was the year I was second runner-up to the Wells Rodeo queen.”    

     She smirked into the rearview mirror, “You never were much of a ranch girl.”

  “You already said that.  Besides, you were always an ornery little shit.” We laughed.

     We took a dirt road up the hill, stopping at what used to be the Kane ranch, now called the U-2, owned by a mink farmer  from northern Utah and  run by  Jess Peters, son of one of our high school friends.  To get to the old Pitchforth place, we had to drive through the U-2 ranch.

      We stopped the car in front of the fenced yard.   Jess’s wife came out to greet us.  Linda explained our excursion and then turned to me and asked if I recognized anything, pointing to the original ranch house, set back in the trees, and to the barn.  Nothing seemed familiar.

     We agreed to go inside just to say hello. I could see Jess’s wife was trying to fix lunch for her family hay crew.  Linda likes to visit, and, while I edged toward the door, she talked with the men about haying, the old days, and her old family ranch.     As they reminisced, I felt a rush of memories about haying time—not at this place—but on other ranches where we lived, other seasons of my youth.  Good memories.

     We said goodbye, drove across a cattle guard and up the road two rutted miles.  “This is the old Pitchforth place,” she said as she turned off the key.  I was quiet. Nothing registered.    I had no memory of what the ranch looked like sixty years ago.

 What I saw was a small wood-framed house, vacant so long there were no signs of human detritus—no broken windowpanes, no doors, no rusted tin cans, or the weathered torso of an abandoned doll.  Our house was now a cowshed with two feet of dry manure covering every inch of the interior.  Close by was a small building made of railroad ties, probably the milk house; beyond, a primitive brush corral.  That was it.

     “I think that tree looks familiar,” I said to Linda, remembering a black and white snapshot in a family  album, me and a cow dog sitting in the shade of a cottonwood tree.  I studied the dead branches of the stunted tree.

 “Do you want me to take your picture?” Linda asked.

“No.”

      I headed to  her car, signaling that the nostalgia trip was over.   As she started the engine, I said, “Well, Linda, if I ever get famous and then die and they ask you about me, you sure as hell can say, ‘She came from humble origins.’”  I smiled, so she wouldn’t think I was pissed-off about our trip down memory lane.

     At the end of that day, back in my place in Tuscarora watching the evening light move across the valley floor, I felt tired and disappointed.  The purpose of the trip was to reconnect with my childhood friend and to revisit a significant place in my life.  The friendship had been renewed, but the truth is that it was a long ride for nothing other than my friend’s stories and my mother’s memories.

      In an unexpected way, the experience reinforced my love for Tuscarora, where I feel most at home.  The dry air, the sound of the wind, and the scent of sage after rain take me back to my youth and restore me to my authentic self.

     This is my “go back” place, and, at seventy,I am  surprised by the strength of my need to be here:    the solitude; the time to write, the way  memories are triggered by  wind and sky; the need to be from somewhere; the need to go back.





   

Conversation with a Gold Miner

 

June 21, 2012
Tuscarora, Nevada

     I went to the post office to see if Julie, the postmistress, needed  anything from town.  She said no, but there was a young miner who had gotten  a flat tire on the Midas road, about five miles west of the turn-off.  He walked into Tuscarora looking for a ride.

     I said the guy was in luck.  Stan, our neighbor, was taking his truck to Elko, and I was going along to pick up  an order at Sears.  We were leaving in half an hour. There would be room.  We would take him to his truck to get his tire, get him to Elko and back.

     A nice-looking young man in a clean white t-shirt and levis, Daniel, the young miner, talked all the way to Elko and most of the way back.  He seemed like someone suffering from  PTSD, not from serving in Iraq, but from working  at a Barrick gold mine near Golconda.

     These are the notes I took when I got home that evening:

     The kid seems exhausted.  He’s trying to get to Mountain Home, Idaho where he’s from.  There’s a big rodeo this weekend, the Snake River Stampede.  He told his buddies and a girl he knows that he’ll be there.  I have the impression he hasn’t had a day off in quite a while.  Someone  told him the Midas road is a short-cut.  It is, but notorious for causing flats.

     He works fifteen to seventeen-hour days.  Right now, he has a night shift, working for a drilling contractor at the mine.  He hasn’t slept for twenty-six hours, just wants to get to Mountain Home.
He tells us that mining is the fifth most dangerous occupation in the country, and that he sees accidents all the time.  “These guys are tough.  I mean tough.  Just last week a guy was unloading a piece of machinery  and dropped it on his foot.  He tried to walk it off.  Finally, I got him to take off his boot.  His toes were all smashed, the bones sticking out. “  Daniel leans forward from the back seat to emphasize his point, “He was trying to walk it off.”  He continues, “Another guy got his thumb split lengthwise…”

     I interrupt, asking about emergency medical treatment.

     “They  put them in a truck and head for the ER in Winnemucca.”

     I ask about their living situations. He says  most of the guys live in motels in Winnemucca, and  they get ninety-five dollars a day for food and lodging.  They have an hour and a half commute from Winnemucca to the mine.   Daniel says he lives in a fifth wheel in Golconda, which cuts  half an hour off his commute, and he saves on groceries.  Once a week he gets gas and groceries at the Super Wall-Mart  in Winnemucca.

     We talk about food.  He says that on some of the crews you don’t get a lunch break.  “You eat what you pull out of your pocket.”

     “That doesn’t sound too healthy,” I say.

     He says  just last week at a safety meeting one guy passed out, fell face forward, flat on the ground.  “Come to find out, he had pretty much been living on Red Bull and Twinkies.”

     Daniel, who is twenty-three, has been working at the mine for eight months.  He says he planned to work three years; now he’s hoping to make it two years.  He wants to buy pasture land adjacent to the  family farm in Mountain Home, put a nice trailer on it.  “There’s no work in Mountain Home; heck, no place in Idaho could I make the kind of money I’m making.”

     He clears about five thousand dollars a month and says there are bonuses all the time, as well as rapid advancement.  One of the crew chiefs he knows is only twenty-one.  Daniel anticipates my question.  He says, “Yeah.  Big turnover. Guys are coming and going all the time.”  He explains that it’s rough but you make a lot of money, and great benefits—80% medical and dental; 100% eye care.   Death benefits—survivors get three times the salary of the deceased for three years.

     “What about drug testing, “ I ask.

     “Strict drug testing.  Mostly all you can do is drink.”

     Daniel doesn’t drink.  He has religion.  He says, “The Lord is looking out for me.”

     He thanks us for the last time after unloading his tire and fetching his six-pack of Red Bull from the back seat.  “I’ll be home by midnight, “ he says with his Idaho-friendly grin.

     “Drive safe,” I say.

Don't Be a Stranger

  

Don’t Be a Stranger

I have been thinking about Nevada women in the Forties and Fifties who lived in godforsaken places:  remote ranches, mining claims, highway maintenance stations at least fifty miles from bread and milk.  They had telephones and electricity, but that was it.  Many don’t think they have stories, but they do.

Last summer I went with my friend to visit a woman who lived most of her married life in out-of-the-way places.  Now in her eighties, she and her husband    retired on a little spread along the south fork of the Humboldt River, about an hour and a half drive from Elko.  My friend had been raised in this house and on this ranch and invited me to come along for the ride.  Before we got out of the car, my friend said, “She has cancer.” 

The thin woman moved and talked with effort.  No action seemed easy, not even leaning forward letting herself receive a hug from my friend.    “I need to get something in my stomach,” she said as her husky, fortyish daughter handed her a small dish of bread pudding.  As we chatted she took one or two teaspoons of food from the blue and white china bowl.

Somehow, we got on stories about trusting strangers; how, in the old days, people were more helpful.  “Last spring we were on our way to Oregon,” she said, “and had car trouble about sixty miles this side of Denio.  No one would stop.  People always used to stop.”  My friend and I nodded, sitting across from her on a brown naugahyde couch that matched her armchair.

“Well, Mom, somebody musta stopped or you’d still be there, right?”

“Don’t get smart with me, missy,” the woman said, making the effort to smile at her daughter.  “Of course someone stopped.  A rancher pulling an empty horse trailer.  He took us to Denio, at least forty miles out of his way.  That’s how it used to be.”  She handed the nearly filled bowl to her daughter, pleading, “ Don’t scold me.”

She leaned her head back into the worn chair and told us this anecdote.  “I was alone in the house.  My granddaughter was in the bathtub.  These two deer hunters came to the door, saying  their truck was stuck in a creek some miles back.  They’d spend the night in the truck, had been walking all morning.”  

“I asked them, ‘Do you want me to fix you some breakfast?’ Well, I fixed them some breakfast and told them the men were gone for the day.  There was nobody around. “ 

My friend and I glanced at each other.  We knew the Nevada-Idaho border country she referred to.  We understood how alone she and the child were. 

“After I fed them breakfast I said, ‘I guess you could take that truck over there and try to get yourselves out.  The keys are in it.’” 

“One of the men said to me, ‘Don’t you want our driver’s licenses or something?’”  

“No.” I said.  She looked at her daughter, as if she were the one who would understand the   intuition and experience that had taught her how to live in the middle of nowhere, how to recognize dangerous men.  “I couldn’t see any point,” she said.

“Well, they took the truck and went and got their truck out of the creek, came back, and went on their way.  It turned out that one of them was with the sheriffs department in Reno.  He showed me his badge.  He said,’ You know, ma’am, you really shouldn’t have done that.’”

We laughed.  She smiled and we thanked her for the nice visit.   At the door, I glanced back and noticed she was lighting a cigarette. I heard her say to her daughter, “Don’t scold me.”

On First Reading "Tintern Abbey"

On First Reading “Tintern Abbey”

I first read William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” at Tintern Abbey on April 21, 2012, while sitting in the back seat of David’s VW Passat with a cd playing American country music.  David is my sister’s sixty-four year old British boyfriend, an awfully nice man she met on the Internet.  While they strolled around the site in the light, cold rain, I stayed in the car and read the poem, half listening to  “Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette” by Tex Williams and then  “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” by the Hill Billies.

I was embarrassed to be reading for the first time a literary classic I should have read years ago.  I have an MA in English literature and taught college-level English  for more than twenty years.  However, it’s a moot point.  I’m finished with a career of talking about books set in places I’ve never been.  Chalk it up to the powers of the imagination.  As Emily Dickinson says, “I never saw a moor/I never saw the sea/Yet know I how the heather looks/And what a wave must be.“

Reading the poem while I looked at the ruins through a rain-spotted window was more about being able to say that I was reading “Tintern Abbey” while looking at Tintern Abbey, just as I would be able to tell them back home that a week later I bought cheddar at Cheddar.  It’s clever, but even I want to say, “So what?”

So what about the juxtaposition of a literary classic while listening to classic western swing tunes?  Could I make the case that American cowboys and the English Romantics are saddle pals at heart?  Maybe.  For both, it’s all about nature and nostalgia—and swagger.

I know that since meeting my sister two years ago, David, a retired banker, has had a crush on all things western.  He wants to learn how to ride a horse, loves driving ninety miles an hour on the wide open spaces between Reno and Elko, Nevada, our home town, and listens to a collection of vintage western music as he drives on the wrong side of the road between Winscombe and Bristol, where he and my sister attend vikram yoga three days a week.

Later, at my desk in Tuscarora, Nevada, I thought again about that quirky experience.  I remembered  lines from “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the  poem by Wordsworth  I  love:   “for oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood…”.

There’s no more to this anecdote.  Sometimes odd juxtapositions in life are just that.  Maybe there are just so many universal themes.  Maybe there’s a little bit of cowboy in every man.

What Valentine's Day Means To Me Now That It's Over

What Valentine’s Day Means To Me Now That It’s Over

At 5:00 p.m. on February 14th, I was fourth in line at the CVS Pharmacy in Elko, Nevada waiting to buy a large box of Imodium A-D for my ninety-six year old mother sitting in the car.  I was behind three working guys, each holding a last-minute token of affection.  The man directly in front of me in a hooded sweatshirt with grease spots held in his work-thickened hand a heart-shaped box of Stover’s chocolates and a greeting card.  I could see part of the card, which was from the Humorous Valentine section.

 I have lost my sense of humor regarding Valentine’s Day.  That morning, my friend Sally had sent an e-mail saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day.  I hope this isn’t the only valentine you get.”  It was.  Thanks for rubbing it in, Sal.   I’m done with Valentine’s Day. Finis.  Kaput. I’m too old and, like Greta Garbo, “I vant to be alone.”  I need to be alone to write.

 The next day, I was reading Facebook postings from widowed or divorced Facebook friends saying,  “I fixed myself a terrible dinner, ate the whole thing, and polished it off with three fourths of a bottle of Malbec.” or “I didn’t have anyone to share it with, so I ate a chocolate cake for dinner.”  That was posted by a man.  We know food is the first response for self-pity and often a substitute for sex.   That’s what Valentine’s Day is about, eros, pure and simple. I know my Greek mythology.   If my husband had sent me flowers, which he didn’t, it would have been in memoriam for our young bodies and lustful youth.

Menopause didn’t trigger this change.  Turning seventy did. More than anything at this time in my life, I want to find myself as a writer.  “We strive to be good, to be nice, to be helpful, to be unselfish.  We want to be generous, of serving the world.  But what we really want is to be left alone,” says Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way.

Writing requires solitude.  Solitude takes practice, self-discipline.  I am a good place to practice, when I am in my small house in Tuscarora, fifty-two miles from Elko, where my mother resides in an assisted living facility and I can care for her; and six hundred miles from my home in northern California where my husband of forty-five years goes about his daily business  without me.

“Who do I think I am?”  That’s the question I ask myself when I’m alone and writing, both when I’m feeling strong and when I’m feeling weak.  When I’m feeling strong, it seems an appropriate question for my age and my nature, reflective and analytical.  Learning to be alone is different from being lonely or alienated.  The poet David Whyte says the following:

All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone—and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.


Being quiet in the midst of a frenetic life is like picking up a new instrument. If you've never played the violin and you try to play it for the first time, every muscle in your body hurts. Your neck hurts, you don't know how to hold that awkward wavy thing called a bow, you can't get your knuckles round to touch the strings, you can't even find where the notes are, you are just trying to get your stance right. Then you come back to it again, and again, and suddenly you can make a single buzzy note. The time after that, you can make a clearer note. No one, not even you, wants to listen to you at first. But one day, there is a beautiful succession of notes and, yes, you have played a brief, gifted, much appreciated passage of music.


This is also true for the silence inside you; you may not want to confront it at first. But a long way down the road, when you inhabit a space fully, you no longer feel awkward and lonely. Silence turns, in effect, into its opposite, so it becomes not only a place to be alone but also a place that's an invitation to others to join you, to want to know who's there, in the quiet.
from Lesson 4: The Truth Will Set You Free
  David Whyte
                                                           OWN TV/June 15, 2011


When I’m feeling weak, my inner critic rephrases the question, “Who in the hell do I think I am?”  I feel self-indulgent, to have to set myself apart like this, like Narcissus, in love with her own reflection, and for what?

Once, in a fit of anger, my husband said, “Go ahead.  Stay up there and write War and Peace!”

I squeaked, “It’s been written.”

I never falter in my belief in my need for creative expression or my love of the craft of writing or my knowledge that serious writers must take themselves seriously and they must devote time to their work.  Maybe, as I gain confidence in my abilities and the habit of a writer’s routine, I can reintegrate into domestic life.  Of course, there is the risk that my husband won’t be there when I come out of a room of my own.

Why I Have a Cowboy Hat Like Fiona Wanstall’s

Here’s a description of the class in the 2012 Cowboy Poetry program. However, it doesn’t mention that Roy’s business partner, Bernice Coombs, also a master hatter, would be coming up from Queensland, Australia to help out. She told us, “Everyone back home calls me ‘Ben.’”

Hat Making with Roy Jackson: Traditional vs. Contemporary
Monday, January 30 – Wednesday, February 1 9:00 am – 5:00 pm $425

Back by popular demand! Learn the art and craft of hat making using methods that have changed little since the mid to late 1800s. This three-day workshop will introduce you to hat making without machines. You will build your own hat using just a few simple tools and techniques. The differences between traditional and contemporary hat making will be discussed during each phase of the class. Participants will learn dry blocking and wet blocking, choosing the correct block, pouncing and finishing the 100% beaver felt. Hats will then be sized, trimmed and ready to wear. Master Hatter Roy Jackson has been building quality hats for 15 years. His business, Jaxonbilt Hat Co., is in Salmon, Idaho.

Here’s a picture of the hat I made:

Why did I end up with this hat?

Three reasons: I was interested in learning to make a hat, not to wear one, but I had no idea how intimidating the hat-making process would be. I was coming down with a cold. I thought that Ben, a master hat maker, would be better at choosing a style for me than I would for myself.

I do not remember my grandmother, who was, according to my mother, a clever woman who could fashion a hat. When I looked through the workshops at the 2012 Cowboy Poetry Gathering—Rawhide Hobble Braiding, Leather Carving, and even Blogging—it was Roy Jackson’s hat-making class that caught my fancy. Perhaps I was thinking of my hat-making grandmother. Who knows. I do know that when I mentioned to women friends I was taking a class to learn how to make a cowboy hat, several responded enthusiastically, especially Nicole, a glamorous acquaintance, who said, “I would love to learn to make a hat!” and then forwarded me a link to her favorite British milliner, Philip Treacy http://www.philiptreacy.co.uk/

All the years my dad was in the ranching business, he wore a light gray, grease-stained Stetson. “He was very particular about his hats,” mother said, alluding to the fact that he went bald in his twenties and to the shape of his head. “He had a double-wide oval head,” she said. I think she meant that was his hat size. After taking the class, I recognized the style Dad wore, listed in Jaxonbilt Hat Company as an Open Road—a 2 ¾ brim with a punch-front crease called a “cattleman’s crown.” http://www.jaxonbilthats.com/hatshop.html


That first day I was overwhelmed by the hat-making lingo, the tools, and the process—the right steps in the right order. My notes went something like this:

You have the basic hat shell of 100% beaver felt. That has a name. You are handed your block. You put your rough hat on your block. You go to the front. Roy or Ben steams your hat and you pound your hat down over the block. You use a puller down and then a runner down, or is it the other way around? That pounding has a name. Once you get your hat down over your block and even with the bottom of your block, you loop a piece of string twice around and twist it in the front. This has a name. It’s to make a crease for the hatband. Then you start “pouncing,” which is sanding your hat with 400 sandpaper, then 600 sandpaper. Or is it the other way around.? Sanding rough felt creates piles of fluff and I’m sneezing my head off. My cold is worse. I feel like hell. ‘Smooth as a baby’s butt’ or ‘like velvet,’ people around me say as they caress the sanded crowns of their hats.

“Is this smooth enough?” I ask Ben.

She gives it a quick touch. “Keep going,” she says.

You have to sand counter-clockwise. Dan, the patient man at my table who has ignored my nose-blowing, teases Ben, “Do you do it in the other direction in Australia?”

“That’s right,” she grins. With her accent, it sounds like “Tha’s roit.”

Next is Flanging the Brim. which sounds like a Scottish jig, but is ironing the brim —very carefully. Then you spray your hat with rubbing alcohol and set it on fire with a small blowtorch. That process also has a name. It’s to get all the fine hairs. You take your hat up front to Roy and he conditions it with a sprits of baby oil on the light hats, mink oil on the black hats. I forgot to mention that we have moved on to day two. After day one, I went back to the hotel, fixed two stiff drinks, took two Advil, and went to bed. So much for whooping it up in downtown Elko. Anyway, in the middle of day two we were at the crucial point where we must commit to a style of hat. Everyone has a plan but me. They all know what kind of crown and crease, whether their brim will have a pencil roll or not; whether they will sew trim, which will be tedious but look cool.

Cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell making a hat much like the one he is wearing.

 In the Jaxonbilt catalog it is called an “Elko,” with a Boone crown, Nevada snap brim and a full bound edge.

Do not try to make a hat using my notes. I left out important steps. You don’t have the tools. For example, I doubt you own a conformateur, a wicked contraption invented by the French that Roy or Ben clamps on your head to measure your skull form. Of course, the result is that your hat is your hat.

I took this class because I wanted to know how to make a cowboy hat, not because I think I look good in hats. I don’t. During free moments, I would borrow cowboy hats, go into the ladies room, and try them on. I realize now that it was a breach in hat etiquette; nevertheless, I tried five or six styles. I didn’t look good in any of them.

With stuffed nose and plaintive voice, I said, “Ben, I don’t know what to do.”

She replied in her robust Aussie way, “Myself, I like a wide brim.” I should have paid more attention to the way she stretched her arms when she said, “Wide.” In hat lingo, she told me how she would shape the crown and what she would do with the brim. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I nodded in approval. “Sound great!” I said.

It was reasonable for me to think that a master hat maker would be a better judge of what kind of hat I should make than I would Besides, I really like Ben. She is unpretentious, opinionated, and has a rowdy sense of humor. At one point we exchanged tasteless jokes about old people and admitted to the necessity of swearing under certain circumstances. She was patient with everyone and committed to seeing that each person came away with a quality product.

Ben helps western artist Willie Mathews fix his hat.

She told me anecdotes about her life in Queensland. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the nearest town, which was about fifty miles from where she lives. She and her husband have cattle and train horses. On her iphone, Ben showed me a photo of their ten-year-old daughter, an adorable girl in a beautiful cowboy hat. obviously made by her mom.

She has a close-knit family. Ben’s brother musters cattle six days a week from his helicopter. Her sisters live in the nearby town. But when she talked about her mother, that’s what impressed me the most. “I’ve got the greatest mom,” she said. She told this to several of us around a table where she was helping someone with a hat. “If I told my mother that I’d like to fly to the moon, she would say, ‘You just do it!’” and Ben slapped her hand on her thigh, imitating her mother’s unconditional support and belief in her children.

In retrospect, I think Ben sized me up, took pity on me, and decided she was going to help me make a fine hat. At first, I didn’t see that. At first, I was worried that she thought of me as someone like Fiona Wanstall, a haughty Aussie matron in a big hat who lorded her social position over others.

Earlier, I had asked Ben if, back home, she had made a hat like this before. “Of course. Lots.” she said. She was sitting at my table making ribbon flowers for the extravagant hat that had taken shape.

“Name one person, “ I said.

“Fiona Wanstall,” she replied, folding sage-green gingham ribbon into a flower bow.

“Who’s she?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s a lady who’s very wealthy…thinks quite a lot of herself.”

“What does she do for a living?” I asked. I was re-sewing the sweat band on the inside of my hat. Ben made me take it out yesterday, because it was too loose.

“They own a cattle station. A big one.” Ben had her head down and I could tell she was biting her tongue.

Well, my hat was different from everyone else’s in the class. The “cowboy” was manifested in the beautiful silver beaver felt and the “Aussie” in the outback tilt of the brim. Otherwise, it is a ladies’ hat, more English than American, something to wear to a meeting of a garden club in Shropshire or on race day at Ascot. Waddie Mitchell did say it reminded him of the cowboy hats women wore at the turn of the century

I think Ben sizes people up, and she likes you or she doesn’t. Now, I am pleased that she could see me in such a grand hat. After all, I am seventy. While not quite “matronly” or “full-figured,” I’m headed in that direction. I like to think Ben is giving me a message—you can wear a fine hat and be yourself. Put on the hat. Chin up!

That’s what I did.

Ben said, “Okay, let me take your picture. Smile.”

“Fuck Fiona Wanstall,” I said to the camera.

Ben burst into laughter that filled the room.

That made everything worthwhile.

Thoughts on This Year's Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Arlene Croce, dance critic for the New Yorker magazine, raised a ruckus the year she wrote a review of  a performance by the Bill T. Jones Dance Company she  didn’t attend.  I experienced few of the week’s events of the 2012 Cowboy Poetry Gathering, but I still have an opinion:  ho-hum.

The setting, Elko, Nevada at the end of January, was appropriately bleak, a cold landscape of old snow and mud, more mining town than ranching center; fewer pickups with stock racks than half-ton rigs bearing the logos of mining companies or their suppliers.  Most were covered with the grime of two-lane highways and dirt roads that lead to the mine, not the ranch.  Actually, I liked the rough, dirty look of the place, more Butte than Missoula. 

 As I browsed through the Cowboy Poetry Gathering program, looking to see who were this year’s presenters, I recognized the same old faces.  No, same faces, now old.  I do have my credentials.  I started coming to the Gathering, which is held in my home town, that first year, 1985.  I remember Waddie Mitchell when he was just a kid, twenty-five years ago, and I can lament with the best of them the passing of great cowboy poets like Buck Ramsey.

  I can imagine the conversations among strangers standing in line in front of the closed doors of the Gold Room or the Turquoise Room at the Elko Convention Center, where most of the daytime events are held.  “Yep, we’ve been comin’ since ’92 or ’89 or ’85.”  However, among some of my rancher friends and locals, it’s about when they quit coming because the Gathering had gotten too commercial, too liberal, and most of all, “too goddam yuppie.” 

For me, the keynote address indicated how far the Gathering has strayed from its  intention to preserve and reflect authentic rural life in the West.  Before the keynote speaker gave his address, Waddie Mitchell, a true buckaroo and one of the first and finest of the cowboy poets, received a Distinguished Nevadan award from the Nevada Arts Council.  After a brief thank you, Waddie recited a long anti-war poem and then left the stage. 

 The keynote speaker was a veteran Hollywood character actor.  He rambled on about his career in western movies, and two tv series, Lonesome Dove and Northern Exposure.  In the latter he played a retired astronaut.   He could tell a good anecdote and the audience seemed to enjoy him.  A bad sign.  I thought he was another full-of-himself bullshitter.  I guess that’s a cowboy of a certain type.

Here in Tuscarora, where I live part of the year, the ranching community is in dire straights:  government bureaucracies and antagonistic  attitudes make many of the ranchers feel like their lifestyle is both misunderstood and endangered by urban people.   Like Elko in January, real ranch life is too gritty for   phony nostalgia.