Maxine Hong Kingston is a mythic personage for me. I read The Woman Warrior soon after it first came out in the 1970’s while living in Canada. It was so difficult I decided to teach it in my introduction to literature class at Malaspina College. That was the only way I’d devote the effort needed to understand it. Each chapter was a world of its own, with a different style that required many rereadings to decode the mercurial connections between sentences and incidents.

I was gripped by the horror of No Name Woman, having to piece together in my own imagination the chaotic details of its isolated heroine’s torment. I was thrilled by the pent-up fury of the young girl in revolt against the grip of her Chinese heritage and the hateful prejudices of her native Stockton. I laughed at the cross-cultural comedy of Auntie in Los Angeles.

But what got to me most as I sat reading on the old chesterfield in the log cabin was Maxine’s pre-Disney retelling of the story of Fa Mu Lan, “White Tigers.” Its mixture of psychedelic voyaging, epic battle, erotic romance, frontier child-rearing, pacifist militancy, gender-bending feminism and poetic lyricism distilled the whole range of my aspirations over the preceding ten years. It also reminded me of my wife, another woman warrior who, shortly after we met, had entered personal battle with the President of Stanford University and won, gaining the right for undergraduate girls to live off campus and who had ripped a phone booth out of the wall to stop a mob of angry cops from coming up the stairs during the 1968 sit-ins at Columbia. (more…)

My pre-dawn run leaves me bathed in peace, pleasure and inspiration. I started up with exercise again last Saturday with an hour’s run-walk on the Miossi Ranch and then yesterday morning with four laps around the track. The sense of self-neglect has been growing for months, along with intensifying bouts of anxiety and depression: body protesting to mind. Yesterday and today I woke up before the 5:30 alarm relieved to escape dreams of embarrassment, frustration and failure. There was no longer a choice, something led me to the tennis shoes in the closet, to the door, and down the steps under Venus and a crescent moon.

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Yesterday I went to the Mission Plaza at noon to attend an anti-war demonstration organized by Code Pink, the national organization, largely of women, who have been mounting protests since the war started in 2003. I was reminded of Women Stike for Peace, to which my mother belonged in the 1950’s.

It was one of those beautiful west coast January days.Low light and long shadows. The creek was flowing, the bells were tolling, music wafted through the plaza from one of the restaurant patios. Pairs of shoes of all sizes labelled with the names of Iraqi casualties were laid out on the pavement, an effort to put passersby “in their shoes.”

Prayer flags fluttered from the bandstand, each inscribed with the names and ages of U.S. soldiers killed in the last year and the dates they died. An art teacher unveiled a group canvas produced by her students showing the lofty ideal of the dove of peace and its ragged reality, trapped in barbed wire.

Starting with a woman in her nineties, people read the names of the 110 US troops who died in December written on flags that had not yet been mounted and placed them slowly in a box. After each name, one of the organizers beat a gong. Some wept as they read.

The day before, I had cashed in my United Miles and got a ticket to go to Washington for the January 27 national mobilization. Last night I listened to the CD just sent to me by college friend Jeff Parson: The Baby and the Bathwater–seventeen songs about the horrors of this war he felt called to write and perform with one of his daughters and friends.

Passions are rising. What comes next after elections?

A Walk to the Confluence of Warm Springs Creek and Big Wood River

What do you call a guy who does the Luge? Click mvi_7408.AVI for the answer. Then run the Quicktime movie backward.

Monday November 13, 2006 12:30 P.M.

Abel sleeps, second nap this morning. I fed, changed, carried, played with him since 9:00 when Amy and Joe left with Ethan for school. He got tired in my arms, turning to jelly, eyes closing. While I worked at the computer he sat in his rocker and talked, and when he complained, I just tapped the moon and star rattles.

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Friday November 10, 2006

Isabel is in the third hour of her weekly cleaning Joe and Amy’s house as I sit on the couch in the slant sun illuminating the back sides of the bare aspens in the front yard and creating complicated patterns on the walls through the many windows in sight. North November light.

Inga swearingen croons through the sound system. Four year old Ethan is in nursery school and ten week old Abel is deep asleep. I held, rocked, played with, sang to, fed and changed him for two and a half hours until he drifted off in my arms. As he relaxed, his body got heavier while his consciousness thinned and floated away–along with my own. Now he’s awake again. Only a forty minute nap.

12:10 Abel sits in his bouncy seat listening to the Bruch violin concerto. He’s waving his hands and feet, fascinated with the soft moon, star and blue dog on his toy bar. He stares at them, his own movements rocking him, occasionally furrowing his brow, swatting and talking, and I talk back.  Now the sounds intensify. They could lead to crying or just be self-expression, cheering at the ball game.

I have nothing to do but attend him. Behind the music, the sounds of the Spanish soap opera from the tv in the kitchen as Isabella cleans. We conversed a bit in Spanglish: she has five children, aged 22 to 7. She looks youthful and moves fast.

It’s three days after the election, after the national headlong plunge into darkness has been arrested, after the citizens of San Luis County voted overwhelmingly to approve a huge shopping center on prime ag land with no environmental review. I flew here for a week to provide some support for Joe and Amy as she returns to work.

LA Community Colleges go solar. Los Angeles community college officials have announced a plan to take campuses “off the grid” by having each school generate its own electricity.

Monday night, on a whim I decided to make a campfire in the backyard to burn pieces of a broken lawn chair and barbecue chicken and vegetables. We’d picked up our grandson at preschool as usual and kept him till his dad came by to take him home after a long day at work installing fire sprinklers. I invited him to stay for dinner.

We chattered while cooking the meal on hand grills in the warm light of one of the last evenings of daylight-saving time. After hearing about how he almost came to blows with a fellow worker who had punctured his 64 oz bottle of Mountain Dew, Jan asked how his aunt was doing now that she’d moved down south.

“Not too well,” he said. “She’s not getting along with her relatives.”
“She wasn’t happy here either,” said Jan.
“Life’s what you make of it,” replied my ex-son-in law.

Spoken by him, that tired old proverb took on depth. Our fractured and happily reconstituted family was testimony. It struck me that this was a more direct way of saying what seemed terminally hip during my adolescent days in Greenwich Village: “existence precedes essence.”

How Close to Catastrophe?  An upcoming piece in the New York Review by Bill McKibben. Cutting edge on Global Warming.