Ask yourself what you want to do before you die and start doing it.

Here are some things I want to do in my lifetime:

Go to Yosemite and go hiking
Climb the Eiffel Tower again.
Live in France for a month and see if I can recover French
Go to Italy
All right—go to Jerusalem, I admit it
Peru, Venezuela, Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn, climbing the
Matterhorn has been ruled off, also Everest which was an early dream, but Killamanjaro remains, also swimming the Hellespont which I wanted to do this year, but I don’t know if I will make it.

I could go on, but we should all be working our way through lifetime dreams small and large. I can’t believe I’ve been living in California 25 years and haven’t made it to Yosemite. It’s ridiculous. We will go there in the next few months. We’ve done a lot of going to the Sequoias and I love it there.

The question is finding out what gives you joy in your life and then being with that. For some people it’s gardening, or spending time with family—having picnics, watching the kids grow up, watching them learn to play the music of their life.

Nobody ever said, My life is great—I have all these adventures and I have a good job and no money troubles, but I never see my kids because we don’t get along. I think the first step toward happiness is having integrity with the people you love and then finding the adventures and creature comforts that give you joy.

When I go home, I want to do some stuff to make our house seem more like a nest. Some people’s houses are very warm, my friends Darlene, Lisa and Karen all have houses that feel like they were thought out. Darlene’s is all adobe and curved walls and ceilings and little seats, Karen’s house is all about being in the back yard with the fountains and the trees and the little pool that my kids thought was a huge pool when they were little, and Lisa’s house has this library and the library has a secret door and there are flowers outside always blooming. I like the feeling of a life blooming. In Ireland, everything is blooming because they have some very hardy trees and plants. We go to Cork on Saturday and by Sunday we’ll be as far south as you can get in Ireland. But even that far south, I expect it will be cold. We’ll be on a tiny island, this is not a large place. You can walk from one end to the other in twenty minutes. As Steve would say, “They recently had the whole place carpeted.”

Getting to know the Irish

me swimming

There are yellow irises in bloom everywhere and buttercups covering the fields with the dandelions and there are many pink foxgloves.

Last night at the bar we had a long talk with an activist, a fireman and his wife, a baker and his wife, and the other guy and his wife we don’t know what they did. They were talking about bad things that have happened to Ireland, like there are some people here who have gotten divorced recently and that’s just terrible. It shouldn’t happen, and then I said that I had gotten divorced (always shy to speak up but managing anyhow) and the one man was shocked and said how did that happen and did he beat you and was he very violent and that’s why you had to get away for your safety and the safety of your children, and of course, then you feel very trivial saying that it just wasn’t working out, you feel like a jerk who doesn’t qualify to be part of an Irish Catholic society and perhaps you don’t. And the baker kept at it trying to figure out what would induce a person to just get a divorce.

And then there was the subject of the vicious drug trade for which they completely blamed the Canadians who they said have a tendency for packaging drugs that come in from Afghanistan and exporting them to the rest of the world. I had always thought drugs came from Northern California in the Emerald Triangle and hard drugs from Columbia and of course meth is everywhere, but now I know the truth. I’ve been warning my blog readers about the Canadian thieves who stole some of the strategic maple syrup reserves, but it turns out our northern neighbors misdeeds are on a slippery slope—from syrup to syringes. Who knew what danger lurked north of Niagara Falls? The fireman stressed that the worst thing that could happen to Ireland is if weed should be sold here and that weed leads very quickly to heroin.

The activist said the worst thing that can happen to Ireland is if abortion should become legal because then the Catholic children would be killed and that abortion always leads to violence in the streets. I had trouble make the connection between unprotected sex and shootings in urban areas, but as I said things in Ireland things are often a slippery slope.

She also told us about what’s wrong with the international banking system and how God is watching us, and we should obey the ten commandments, when you get a cell phone, the government is listening to you and that’s why you experience dropped calls which she said are a form of mind control. Which is good to know because I thought dropped calls were holes in the Los Angeles cell tower network, but now I know that shadowy area on the 210 right around Tujunga is just an area where the government is listening in to my calling my husband and asking if he can take me to sushi.

All of the people we talked with, especially the activist were very interesting and smart. I do not believe the government is controlling my mind. Not yet, but she may be right that it is a very good thing to watch out for.

If the government is really listening to all of our cell phone calls or even the let’s say ten percent of Americans who are actively thinking –that’s what 30 million of us? Listening to our calls, that explains a lot about why education is going down the tubes. All our tax dollars are going toward this conversation, “Hey Osborne Cox, you should be worried about the security of your shit. I’m talking to you, Osborne Cox.”

Kurt Brown the poet has died

Kurt Brown, the amazing poet, who lived on both coasts has just died. His book No Other Paradise is a book every poet should have on their bedside table.

No Other Paradise

Swimming in the north Irish Sea

Today I went for a swim in the north Irish sea out at Glassilaun Beach. I swam out and came back in and then decided to go out for a long swim and out I went. I really swam out pretty far. The beach is nice and sandy and you can see islands and far out into the Atlantic. The air today is fairly cold, maybe 55 degrees and the ocean was probably 40 degrees. I was in for a quite a while and swam way out beyond the waves to where the swells were pouring in and tossing me about and there were whitecaps.

Mark did not go for a swim. He stayed on shore. In fact, there were only about three or four people on the beach, and they all stayed on shore. Not a single one of them came into the water or even splashed around.

On the way back, we had to slow a bit because there were sheep in the road. By the road, there are people bringing up the peat and packaging it and stacking it and so on, and then later you can burn peat and your house smells like earth.

The Irish people like to talk about politics. And family and they want to know the story of your life, and they have time to hear it. It’s so weird how you can have a long conversation with people about life, the universe and everything.

Mark Haddon’s book The Curious Incident

Just finished a book called The Curious Incident by Mark Haddon and I really loved it. I would recommend it to everyone. It has a bit of a Beautiful Mind meets Forrest Gump kind of feeling to it and if it were a movie, it would be filmed in England or some place that looked like England being both grand and quaint simultaneously, the setting in this book isn’t really a character, you get it in shreds, but I like the shredding of setting into manageable bits. Sometimes in a Marquez novel, the setting is so much a character in the book that you lose all track of plot and character because you get lost in the jungle and the parrots are always talking on the terrace and the church bells are ringing just as your main character falls off the ladder, or was he pushed? Or are we going to go through many pages now of who might have wanted to push him? But let’s go back to the church bells and where they were forged in the valley where light pulses on the valley floor. I mean, I know Marquez is a genius, but I’m just saying, I get lost sometimes in the setting.

So here we are with Haddon and the strongest thing is the voice which comes out very well and is very recognizable and you are quite sure you would know this boy Christopher if you met him on the street and in fact, we tried to figure out which members of our family are a little bit like Christopher who doesn’t like his food to touch his other foods, like carrots touching the rhubarb or the turkey. And we have someone in our family who is like that. Plus he doesn’t like to be touched and he doesn’t like to talk to strangers. And he likes to know exactly how everything is going to happen because then he can plan around that in his head. There was a lot of math in the book and I skipped that, I don’t need to see that or experience those kinds of things when I am trying to read a book. I’m trying to have a happy time and enjoy myself not hit myself over the head or anything.

The mother character is also very recognizable as an unfortunately fairly depressed person who gets attention by being slutty and sadly some of you, my dear blog readers may know someone like this or have been married to someone like this at one time. But the main character is so engaging that I am willing to follow him anywhere. He doesn’t like being laughed at which is typical of someone with Asperger’s Syndrome. A good book. We’re reading and writing up a storm here in Ireland. And storm it does. Ireland has all four seasons and in every season, it rains.

Father’s Day

Hopefully, you’ve already made your Father’s day plans as you read this and you have had an amazing day. Father’s Day is not as much celebrated as Mother’s Day. Motherhood is rather glorified in our culture. Lots of fathers don’t know their kids or see much of them, and people just shrug that off. Even more fathers have strained relationships with their offspring.

My kids’ dad Jerry was raised by his grandfather who he called Pappy, and who was a great dad to him, but gone by the time I came along. Mark’s father, oddly, was born within a decade of Jerry’s Pappy, and like him, was an older father, fifty when Mark was born. He was, by all the stories I hear from his kids, not a particularly pleasant fellow. His older two children have never told a single story about the man that makes him sound like any fun. But, to Mark, his youngest, (the accident?) he seems to have had some fond feelings because Mark was well behaved as a child. Mark’s oldest brother, was not perfectly behaved and must have been a strain on his father.

Dads often have an easier time with kids who are well behaved. Which is why it’s probably best that my father never got to know me. It’s too bad though that he never met my kids or got to know them. The story of my father is very simple. In the early Sixties he was married and had two small children. He met a woman named Basya who convinced him to leave the wife and kids and go to Vegas with her to get a divorce. He never saw those kids again and his wife, my mother didn’t want us either so we ended up living at High View Church Farm School where we could be beaten and sleep on the floor. My father completed Cornell at my maternal grandfather’s expense (I’ve never understood that part of the story.) And went on to live a perfect and happy life.

Thirty years later, my father had a second chance. He met me and my two children who were about the age my sister and I had been when he took off. My two children were adorable and I was going through a divorce. Basya Gale was concerned that I might be needy, (Me? Needy. I’ve never been needy.) and convinced him to never see the kids again, and he never has. So he missed out on that part of fatherhood twice.

He’s focused on being a dad to the two children he had with Basya.

So picking good fathers for my children was of paramount importance to me, and I picked two. Both Jerry and Mark have been amazing dads and they even get along, so my kids ended up very lucky. I hope they realize how lucky they are. We don’t all get good fathers or mothers either.

Unfortunately for mothers in our culture, much more is expected of us. If we leave our kids, they are righteously angry. Mothers aren’t supposed to leave unless it’s for a one week vacation. Being abandoned by a father feels like, “Well, that’s gotta suck.” Being abandoned by a mother feels like years of therapy.

Went out walking today in the light rain. Ireland’s weather is changeable no doubt. Raining several hours, sunny two minutes, then raining again. We’re here for another few days, then down to Cork for the writing workshop.

What We Talk about when we Talk about Love

Ray Carver has a great story of that name, and I like to think about that. What do we talk about when talk about love? Murakami who has done a lot of translation of Carver into Japanese has a book, What We Talk about When we Talk about Running which I really love. He is a serious runner and I am not. But I like to think about running and the way it creates grooves in your skull that are always there. And when you’ve been away from it, your body teeters on the edge of not being able to do it any more and wanting to do it. And then, in my case, you start up again and the first day you hate it and the first week it’s tedious and then you tip over and you like it again.

What I talk about when I talk about love.

You’re renting a cabin for three weeks out in the nothing. There is literally nothing to do there but write and hike on the green. Every few days you drive to the store and you get mushrooms and chicken and eggs and greens hills and mountains. For breakfast you make eggs. For lunch you have a little cheese and for dinner you have salad and chicken or turkey. That’s all, you are alone with this one person for three weeks. Tonight driving to the hotel where we pick up Wifi for a few minutes, we were approached by another car on the narrow road which has only one lane. We went far off to give her room and then we teetered over the edge of a gully. We studied the situation, and then I pushed the car out. If it had been too much for me, we would have changed it up, but he’s the better driver. (You have no idea how it pains me to admit this.)

And you wake and are happy to still be alone together. And you take turns hiking, and you take turns cooking, and you read each other what you’ve written and you decide when to pour the wine. Not too early. And you read a lot and you make a lot of jokes not all of them as funny as you think but you laugh anyway. And one night, you cheat on your strict schedule of no bread, pasta, cake, cookies –no gluten—and you have bread and it is wonderful like magic.

You know where the other is wounded and you avoid the wounds. That’s love. You walk carefully in the world, like they were a fern or a small forest animal, and you were sunlight, you touch and hum with light but you are aware of the small breaks in the forest.

If you live in a house that is big enough for all your kids to visit, that’s nice. If you’re a parent and you move to a house without rooms for your kids or space for them to visit, does that make you a jerk? Not necessarily. Maybe you can only afford a very little house. We live in the house we raised our kids in so they can all still come back, but if we moved to a smaller house, I would make sure there was room for them to visit. You have room for people if you love them.

If you have a large fountain in front of your house and/or statues, does that make you a jerk? Now that is a whole other question. There are some show off houses in this part of Ireland, so I’m thinking. Maybe I need to meet all the people in fountain houses. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m sure some of them are charming, but the fountains in front? Really now?

Ireland turns icy, hail falling amid cold rain

It’s storming here in Ireland. Ice cold hail just beating down on the hillside. We went for a walk in it, just to try out our sea legs against the storm. In less than hour, we were drenched even in our rain gear. I think we won’t be trying any more walks in this today. It’s too wretched. The hail beating down on the rhododendrons, ferns and buttercups. The sheep don’t seem to mind a bit. The cottage where we’re staying is at the very end of the road; it sits out here on the edge of the wild. This is an Irish summer; hail throwing itself on the roof and hillside. Hail turning to driving rain and back. It feels like the whole house is rocking on its foundations. There’s nothing to do but be indoors. The cyclists who are all around this part of Western Ireland are all safe in their hotel rooms. The river and waterfall by the cottage is thundering, huge galloping swashes of water thick and foaming over the rocks and dashing down below, bushes bending into the river and wash of it. Clouds envelop the mountains. We’re inside now, listening to Sexy Beast soundtrack and wondering why we didn’t bring more music. “I’m a good listener, Gal, talk to me,” Ben Kingsley says and then doesn’t listen at all.

There are people who really listen like my friend Lisa, and there are people who don’t really hear a thing you say.

It’s weird how much differently you think when there are no electronics. We have no working phones or Wifi and of course no movies. We can use our computers as a typewriter and we can listen to music, that’s it. You feel your brain moving and going places it hasn’t gone before. It’s like your brain on Star Trek without Star Trek if you know what I mean.

All day long the wind and storming keeps going. When we first got here, we wondered why the Irish didn’t grow more vegetables as everything except mushrooms and potatoes seemed to be coming from South America, Spain and the Netherlands. Now we know. No self respecting tomato or lettuce would grow in torrents of cold rain and ice. It’s amazing the flowers can keep themselves upright. A melon wouldn’t be caught dead in this weather, it would stick out its melon thumbs and hitchhike to Spain or Portugal in a frozen minute. There is no Irish wine. They’ve got Guinness. The wine comes from Italy, France, Spain and even some Malbecs from Australia. None of the wine we’ve tried has been very good, I’ve tried a lot of it since we arrived but have yet to find a decent bottle. I’m almost reduced to Jameson.

What you need to get around here is boots. Big rain boots. Rain slickers and plenty of peat for the fire. The Irish don’t seem to have much wood to burn, the hillsides and mountains are mostly just grass all the way to the top, so they dig peat out of the ground and that’s what gets burned. It smells thick and earthy like a hedgehog home or a badger home. It doesn’t burn very hot; it’s a sort of slow dirty burn, but you get used to it. There are peat farmers who spend their time digging the peat out of the earth and selling it as little peat logs. Life moves very slowly in Ireland. There’s sheep and there’s peat farming, and there are the pubs. And the hail. It’s a good place to get writing done because you aren’t distracted by anything silly like say, sunshine.

Climbing mountains

I climbed the mountain today. I’ve been planning my ascent since our arrival, and I’ve done a few practice climbs, but today, I finally managed, amid rain and a great deal of fog, to reach the very top. I climbed along a stream bed for a while until that became too precarious and then I began climbing directly up the face of the hill which was wet and slick with rain. I was wearing boots and a coat but the water poured down over my red slick rain coat. I passed sheep huddled in little copses, watching me and calling to each other. Note: When we first arrived, we kept thinking there was something wrong when we’d hear the sheep crying. Oddly, they say the same thing to each other constantly. They say, “Why are those humans always talking to each other? Do you think there’s something wrong? Do you think they need our help?”

Actually, sheep are extremely dumb. One lamb got divided from its mother and we tried to get them together but both of them were too stupid to go through the gate when we herded them toward it. It’s an interesting note that in the Bible, goats are always bad and sheep are good especially lambs, note that Jesus himself is referred to as the “lamb of God,” meaning what? That he’s helpless, small, needs to stay near his mother? Or is he too incompetent to make his own way through a gate? Who knows? At any rate, goats are alert, inquisitive and very likely to find ways to get into trouble on their own. Sheep are dumb and like to be told what to do. Hence the whole idea that we should be more like sheep or soldiers. The idea of being a “soldier in the king’s army,” was impressed on me as a child. It makes me tired to think of all the marching we did. Left right, company halt. Why did we do it? Were we preparing to be Marines? Conquer the New Hampshire hills?

Speaking of hills though, I did climb the big mountain by the cottage today and climbing to the top and back took me just over three hours. When I finally got to the top of the ridge, I started making my way along it. The wind was blowing hard in my face and in my hair, whipping me back and forth so that I had trouble keeping my balance. At times like this, I like to think, what if something bad happens to me. They don’t have a rescue service in this country that includes helicopters, do they? My phone doesn’t work up here. It took me two hours to get here, it will be nightfall before Mark even says to himself, “Well she’s not here to help me with this bottle of wine, I guess I’ll have to just finish it myself.” Then after night has really fallen, he’ll say, “Where is she? She said she’d be home for supper.”

I couldn’t see far front of me by the time I was at the very top, the whole mountain was in the clouds and they were thick around me like being inside vapor, or steam, or God’s breath. There’s a pile of high rocks at the top so you know you’re really there. The way down was treacherous, steep, thick muddy patches and stinging nettle everywhere, and in case the word “path” has crossed your mind, there aren’t any in this wild Irish country. Mark had coffee and stuffed mushrooms and a fire going when I got back to the cottage. Being alone in the mist, I was cooled and tired. I was like a damp butterfly, all in, wings folded.

What it Takes to be a Writer

Vacations are for discussing big things and having the time to notice little things.

A lamb got into the adjoining pen and was separated from its mother. We spent hours on this project, getting the baby lamb back with its mother, finally giving up and going in for lunch and then Mark went out to try it again with a shepherd’s staff. A sheep dog would have been a big help. We notice the flowers, we notice the rain, but we have time to talk about big stories, getting stuck, where we got off the rails.

It finally started raining here, so I hiked today in boots and a raincoat which was a good thing. You can see why the main vegetables are rhubarb, potatoes, carrots, turnips and cabbage. The tomatoes we are eating came from Holland. The cucumbers and melons from Spain. The avocados come from Spain and they’re not good. Also, we can’t find salsa anywhere. Salsa is good if all you are eating for breakfast is eggs and mushrooms with green onions, but we’re making do with Tabasco. Mushrooms are big here and they are grown locally. If you really wanted to be one of those people who only eats locally grown fruits and vegetables, it wouldn’t be easy here. You would have a very limited diet and one of the main ingredients would be potatoes, followed by pints of ale. Every village has several pubs. If it’s a small village with only a couple hundred people, it will have only two pubs. You even see women drinking pints of ale. I can’t imagine how these towns and villages keep a pub or two afloat. But the pub is the communal spot where people gather to socialize.

Most of the activity in this part of Ireland is tourism. There are B and Bs every minute when you’re driving around as if every single Irish house that isn’t a vacation home is now a B and B. And there are little hotels and in the towns, hostels as well. So, they are really counting on people coming to Ireland to get rained on and look around at all the green and say to each other, Wow, it’s really green, I bet that’s because it rains a lot here. It is beautiful, and it is peaceful. It’s kind of like Montana or Wyoming except without any dangerous animals to hunt. In fact, there really isn’t much danger here at all. There are no predators for the sheep, and there is plenty of ale, so what’s not to like?

We are starting to do some thinking and writing, now that we’ve had time to unwind. I’m working on a libretto, but I’ve also started a new novel. A grim fantastic fairy tale of sorts. We’re thinking the big thoughts though. About things like…

What it takes to be a writer:

1. You write every week and you get the pages done.
2. You mail out your work at least once a month.
3. You are ruthless with editing.
4. You connect with people who dig your work.
5. You get your work in print.