Saturday September 24. Sitting on the floor in LAX international terminal next to the only electric outlet on a mile of concourse. Many wall receptacles have been removed and the holes spackled over. There’s no wireless internet connection here, so I will try to simulate the Blogger interface in Microsoft Word.

Here’s Jan in a chair across the carpet as this area fills with passengers waiting for a JAL jumbojet. I took her picture, downloaded it to the laptop, put it in here. With a camera phone I could have snapped and sent it directly to the blogger server. Once again I’m technically behind. A good consumer of technology, I find the new tools inspire creative play. How does this mesh with a primitivist preference of the simple and natural”in gardening, eating, economic exchange, and child rearing? How can I teach Ecoliterature as a web based class in which we exchange journal entries and photos about wilderness experience online?

Last night was insomniac again”I got up at 1:20 and at 4:00 and wrote emails. There was plenty of time to load up and lock down the house this morning before we left, but once we got to the airport I realized I’d forgotten the computer power supply chord. Between flights, we took a short cab ride to Fry’s, a huge L.A. electronics supply house near the airport where we found a replacement that would work with my Mac. Without it I’d have been unable to keep this journal.

Fossils in rock
Footprints in sand
Paths in a chamber of cloud.

To mark the beginning of early retirement, I’ve spent the summer clearing out shelves and file cabinets at home and in my office at the university. On a table in the hallway I left dozens of books bequeathed to me by my retiring predecessor in 1989–hardcover volumes of Shakespeare criticism he longed to have someone take off his hands, only one of which I ever read. This morning I said goodbye to a multivolume German gothic print history of European art packed into their lift van by my parents when they fled Berlin in 1937 and a 75 pound 1955 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica that I asked for as a Bar Mitzvah present. Our second hand bookstore proprietor had no use for them and told me that unlike junkmail, you cant recycle books, they have to go to the landfill.

I’ve written three books. When the first one–Youth against Age–went out of print, the publisher sold me the last 40 copies for five dollars each. Thirty five are still in the closet. Yesterday I went to the local Borders to try to get them to carry the two books that are still in print. The young store manager looked at me mockingly and told me to get in touch with his assistant, who would need to see hard copies before making the decision whether or not to order one of each.

A friend died of lung cancer a few years ago. He was my digital mentor. I was delegated to clean out his office to make room for a replacement. I filled a dumpster with stuff, and saved what I could on a website called Legacies When another friend was stricken with mesothelioma and given about a year to live, I said in his situation I would spend part of the time assembling an electronic archive of my life. Six months after he died, the college secretary gave me a CD which contained his memoir, easily uploaded. I expect to maintain this site until I become part of it.

Though disposing of the past has become a preoccupation since I turned 60, passing into a new stage of the life cycle excites me about the future and prods me to produce more. I take alot of pictures, especially of my grandsons. Not having a captive audience of students for six months of the year makes me look for other listeners. Prosperity and health send me on new adventures. And the end is always nearer.

In four days my wife and I will embark on a trip we have planned for a year–our Italienreise to Florence, Venice and Siena. At first I thought I’d leave my laptop home, save photos in a portable hard drive, and write in a journal. But instead I’m trying something different.

Louise Marx: September 6 1910”January 19 2005

I wake up at 3:30 am  praying for Lise’s smooth passage, knowing the end is near.  When the alarm goes off at 5:30 I feel weak and vulnerable from a lingering cold that  I suspect results from teaching anxiety,  stage fright about two presentations last week,  and unconscious stress from the impending end.  Instead of my regular swim,  I  take a hot bath to relax tense muscles and  reduce sinus pressure.  I decide to wear a white shirt, tie and sport jacket and carry a cell phone to work in case the call should come today.  My morning meditation brings a burst of tears when I think of Jan and the transiency of life.

I give my all to the morning composition class and a lecture on Shakespearean  tragedy. When it’s over at noon, I’m drained but exhilirated.  As students leave the room, the phone rings in my pocket.  A person at the nursing home reports that Lise has just died.  I say I’ll be there soon.  I phone Jan while walking to my office; she’s just pulling up to Cabrillo to check on Oma on her way to the gym.  I tell her the news and she comes to get me.  I reluctantly decide not to try to get back in time for my 1:30 class and ask the secretary to run a videotape of Othello for the students to watch.

We enter Cabrillo for what may be the last time, the odor more pungent than usual.  Josephine, the reserved  nurse’s assistant who tended my father Henry in 1995 and who has been with my mother for the last four years,  is tearful and gives me a hug.  Curtains are closed around Lise’s bed.  She lies flat, skin silken smooth, facial bone structure,  nose and closed eyes in fine relief: a perfected mask.  There is still color in her cheeks and warmth  on her brow.   She feels receptive to my stroking and comfortable with my presence for the first time in many years, the ever- thickening wall between us now departed along with her spirit.  I feel free to start replacing the resistant body and resentful soul that it irked me to call Mom with  memories of the delight I enjoyed in her presence as a young boy”the one she called “Schlumbie.” Those memories have been recalled lately when  I am with  Ian,  our three year old grandson.

We sort through the closet and nightstand, selecting the few items to keep, the rest to leave in the communal  pool of nursing home laundry, hearing aids and spectacles.  Long ago we’d liquidated Lise’s condo and then her unit in the Assisted Living facility at Garden Creek. While Jan takes a load to the car, I go to the storeroom to find the scissors I used to cut the stem bottoms off the flowers I brought every week.  I clip a lock of her white  hair, which is still thick and wavy.  The empty hearing aid box I place it in slips into my pocket.  By 1:15 we  leave  through the main lobby making no eye contact with  those remaining.

At home,  I collapse on the bed, sleep for an hour and then walk to Cal Poly for my 2:50 office hour.  Thankfully nobody shows up, and I meet Jan at the Benefits Office at 4:00 for a long planned conference with the retirement  counselor.  We spend an hour figuring out how to maximize the monthly sum we will receive until our deaths.  Neither of us mentions that we have just come into an inheritance.  Right now,  loss means gain.  May it be so too for Lise.

We walk home and I nap again,  then call our son Joe.  He knew this was coming,  and finds words to amplify the positive that  we  no longer need to think of her as the presence in the nursing home, the wraith awaiting transport across the river, but as someone we can remember fondly.  There will be no funeral or memorial,  though he’d be willing to come  for one.  He suggests a scattering of ashes on a mountain  in the Rockies, which she and Henry made their own, when we visit in March.

I phone our daughter Claire, who has asked about Oma at one of our infrequent encounters.  I leave a message suggesting this might be an occasion for her and Jan and me to get together for the first time in a year.

As evening comes on I feel briefly energized for the task of remaking Mother,  of undoing some of her last ten years.  It was at the memorial for Henry in November 1995 that she said her life was over.  A year before that she concluded her autobiography, “My Story.”  I will go back to it, add some scanned photos and print a second edition.

Jan and I go to Tsurugi’s for Sushi dinner and walk in the dark along the creek downtown.   We share our sense of the solemnity of the day, of our own mortality,  of the awareness that gain also means loss. Recent long-needed rainstorms have caused the creek to crest and wipe out a large chunk of the bank.  The fence protecting the natural riparian vegetation will have to be moved  back.

When we  get home there is a voice message: Ethan, our two year old grandson in Idaho, warbles  “Hello Boppa, Hello Boppa, I love you.” It’s the first time he’s spoken to me on the phone.  This is followed by expressions of sympathy from Amy his mom.  A few minutes later,  Claire calls and agrees that we three should meet.  We are,  as always during these conversations,  halting, guarded, over polite.

I open the packet that had arrived in the morning from British Columbia.  It’s Steve and Juliet’s Christmas letter and photo calendar loaded with pictures of  Lund folk– including three generations of Marxes–and news of deaths and grandparenthood among our contemporaries.

I dig in the closet and find the pictures that Jan had put together for Lise and Henry’s sixtieth anniversary showing them in their twenties and eighties,  radiant in both pairs.  I set them on the bureau and get into bed with “My Story,” which I havent  looked at since editing and typing it with her.  For an hour, I read and marvel  and pity and laugh.

[To view full book, scroll to bottom of this graphic and click on successive pages]

Back on the train to Santa Barbara, coffee in front of me, Ocean on the right, rocket launch towers on the left, smooth rocking.  It recalls the train’s passing during the concert last night in San Miguel mission where we celebrated Jan’s 57th birthday and sat with Eric G. who told me about this early morning ride. I’m carrying some sample page files for prefroofing according to Mary’s instructions.  The concert was memorable”an a capella performance of Mexican Baroque music sung by Chaunticleer, highlighted by Corey McKnight, a countertenor doubling as soprano whose soaring melismata took me on a flight with the dove painted above the altar.

I see flocks of snowy plovers on the beach as we stop at Surf.  No people for miles.  Offshore a towering oil platform.

Joe and Amy want us to buy a condo in Ketchum for 350K. Stock market is crashing.  I call broker and tell him to sell 100K. The market goes up 500 points.

Working all week at the computer lab on the Field Guide page layouts.  Mary sits next to Brian and points with her finger at the screen telling him precisely what changes to make in Photoshop and Quark.  Bob H., who wrote the book on Photoshop gives me advice on how to improve some difficult slide scans.  The confusion and misinformation  circulating among us is partially cleared up.  Brian working in the lab till 11:00 p.m. I pick it up there after the concert.

Claire is working as a “bookkeeper” for a friend’s garage.  I’m looking after Ian, whom I take to Laguna lake to visit ducks and playground and then to computer lab.

Train has just rounded Point Conception, heading east now, sun’s out, fog on mountain top, ocean white caps ignited.

Lunch under the Redwoods in the Arboretum, the tiny creek flowing in a shady wetland created and maintained artificially. Birdsong and sprinkler sounds.  I hope for another glimpse of the two western tanagers that darted by as I was thinking about the paragraph describing them by Johanna after three prompts and her claim that she’d never seen any on Cal Poly land.

I spend today and tomorrow with a printout of the second proof of the book, making corrections, writing notes and photo credits and the acknowledgements and table of contents.  Today Anna assembles the colored printout into a new comp and then Brian and Mary move forward with the page by page image processing and detailed layout. My meditations are consumed with the details and fears of more unforeseen pitfalls. I take little joy in the baby steps of progress, now that the thrill of scanning has worn off. I had no idea how many of them still lay ahead to realize Mary’s uncompromising plan.  All the organization and talent she’s devoted to this I regard with impatience.

I’m also coming down from the 60th birthday festivities that Jan orchestrated on the weekend. Friday night was the dinner party with Vicky T., Melody, Paula, Mike, Lindsey H.  The fresh baked Ahi and salade Nicoise were delicious.  Jan announced the occasion at 10:00 p.m.  After private festivities in the morning, we went to see Oma, who perked up after I found her hearing aid and a missing lens of her glasses. Back home I loaded mulch from the pile in front by bucket to the back yard.  At noon I heard a noise on the patio and spun around to find the silver-haired figures of Caesar and Penny. I hadn’t seen them in over a year”since Claire’s wedding. A fine surprise. Later came Ruth, then Claire, Dennis and the baby and a trip to Pete’s café for dinner.

Santa Barbara two days scanning slides into digital files for the book

Scanning my own photos taken with a professional camera in a professional lab with professional equipment.  All slides and negatives in a binder in perfect order with the complete comp version of the book to check against.  After many false starts and rescans, the procedure is now smooth.  Sky has been a wonderful guide and hostess, stopping in four times yesterday to give Mary and me moral support, taking us to lunch in her new Audi at Tutti’s in Montecito, where Mary wanted to go to see movie stars, then to dinner after a 13 hour day at another Italian restaurant in Montecito where we met Richard his his daughter and son.

The feeling now a little like at the end of writing a chapter or the introduction of a book¦things cruising, falling into place, producing better than expected yield.  Just the opposite of slogging through and getting delayed and needing to redo.

Richard insists on paying and then we drive to his and Sky’s new house”a palace, which reminds me of J’s house on Edna Ranch where Jan’s bookgroup Christmas party took place last year. Two-story roof and beams, stonework, light arch windows, stained redwood siding, three car garage.

Being in this place and having the help of these folks feels right at this stage of the project¦after years of begging and scraping and doing things alone and wrong, and redoing, and going backwards rather than forwards and not knowing what’s next and being humiliated by errors and delays.  How much unhappiness and discouragement and anxiety went into this project.  Not, as they say, a job for the faint hearted.

How will the book turn out? How will it be received?  Shakespeare and the Bible was best I could do, got some fine reviews, also panned.

Taking my own pictures for the book, as commanded by Sky and Mary, has gone from an ordeal to a challenge that I now hate to relinquish.

On the train back to SLO

Sun golden on the ridge of Point Sal.  We creep by the haunted junkyards of Casmalia on  a siding as the dominant freight passes on the right.  The seat is comfortable, the train almost empty.  The cost of taking me home with my CDS and Giggy, my portable hard drive filled with digital images is ten or a hundred times the twenty two dollar fare. I’m in no hurry for this trip to end, though I relish the thought of seeing Jan tonight. Reading “Headlong” by Michael Frayn, the novel she recommended, is a rich indulgence, the narrator like me an academic in constant dialogue with himself.  The gentle rocking movement and the insulated quiet unlike any other form of travel I know.

One slight breach in this contentment: when I met Sky at Armstrong she was pissed that I left scans for her to finish tomorrow morning, since she had so much else to get done and was jetlagged after her return from Thailand.  I had an excuse–I thought she and Mary had agreed to finish them together–but I could hardly bear the shame.

The pink sun was just grabbed by the gray fog.  The sound of the horn as we cross the Santa Maria Valley: muted, melodious, melancholy. Pink-orange glow behind the chocolate brown of fields of blue-green broccoli.  Diner, Eucalyptus, Forests, the Dune Lakes, the crop fields of Arroyo Grande at the base of Nipomo Mesa.

Shot the second roll of film today.  I’m curious to see how they turn out.  While out on errands I stopped at the RR station to ask when the Coast Starlight would be on the grade.  Southbound now said the stationman, Northbound will leave here around 4:00, it’s just arriving.  It was 3:45.  I dashed home, changed into my boots and drove up Stenner road.  As I neared the trestle, I saw the back end of a passenger train round the curve in front of me and thought I’d missed my chance.  But how could the northbound be here at 4:05? No it was probably the Southbound heading west before the hairpin curve by CMC.  I drove to Serrano Ranch and ran up the trail and heard a train whistle behind Kestrel Crest, and I knew it must be the Northbound exiting town and leaving me just enough time to get above the tracks, load the camera and set up the shot.  Breathless, I climbed the embankment by the cut near the hanging telephone pole and waited, rehearsing the shots.  The locomotive came round the corner faster than I expected and then round the Stenner canyon hairpin curve. I got three or four shots, but don’t know if the camera had time to focus.

Then in the afternoon light, took a number of vegetation shots, and headed back to campus for field 25 and to try to replicate Dale’s schematic landscape shots in higher resolution.

I try to learn again to sit and read and write, to slow down”not to be lazy but thoughtful, observant, awake to the shadows of leaves on the leaves of this page.  Yesterday I got up at 6:00 and took the new camera to photograph the fog bank and Poly Canyon, but none as dramatic as I’d hoped for, the camera either under or overexposing, losing the contrast between cloud and sky.  Regardless of the outcome, the looking and composing was thrilling.  Afterwards I came home and went to Avila for a picnic with baby Ian.

Things turning brown with no watering.  Not the holly-leaf cherry and the bamboo, which remains after the removal of the hot tub.  Too much noise, maintenance, energy.  But we’ll miss it too. The side yard with redwoods remains damp, the front yard still showy with native blooms.  Next door gardeners have been digging and planting for the last two days, talking cheerfully, playing the radio.  The grounds are being transformed from a wasteland of ivy to varied panoply of large shrubs and trees. Brian arranged for all of this before last Tuesday.  They become his memorial.  His widow doesn’t come out but her light is on at night.  They came here from San Jose, after he sold his lucrative business and she retired as police officer.  Planned to have children.  Another young widow joins Amena and Barbara B.

Kenton’s camera back arrived yesterday, the lens I ordered today.  Together they weigh five pounds.  The shutter action, the zoom lens, the image stabilizer.  I’ve been told by Mary I must shoot slides.

Summer quiet back here.  Wind in the pines on top of the hill sound like ocean, finches like canaries.  There’s time to work on Polyland book