Category Archives: Books

Driver

By | | It's Never Enough
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I wasn’t always Spider.

But I’ve always been a driver.

That doesn’t make me the best, or anything like it. There’s many out there who are better drivers than me. That’s not what I mean, and I don’t know if I can really say what I mean, except maybe by example.

It goes as far back in my memory as I can reach. At age five, directing cabbies to the hospital so my grandmother’s wrist could be set in plaster after she slipped in a supermarket and broke it. My parents were out of town, she was addled even then, so I had to tell the drivers where we were going, when to turn. Okay, so I might be a little pushy, still.

One of the first books I ever read, once we got past “Dick and Jane” (who were responsible for many of my character flaws, I’m afraid), was called “The Red Car.” It was about an MG TC that had to prove itself against big-motored Fords in the heyday of the American hot rod.

The type was large and there were pictures, but that was in grade school. Even with the pictures, I kept trying to imagine what a “drop dead” grill looked like. I could see the grill, but had no idea what “drop dead” could mean.

When they talked about the little car being faster in the corners and able to beat the big car, I was fascinated and read that part over and over. I have a soft spot for those MGs today.

I remember sitting beside my father, handling the steering wheel when we drove to my grandmother’s house after she was moved to Oregon when she was unable to care for herself. That may be the best memory I have of my father.

There were also terrifying rides from the Oregon Coast back to Portland, he’d be drunk and it would be raining hard and the windshield wipers barely able to move the smear. He’d take stupid chances around curves and over hills. From the back seat, I couldn’t bear to watch and I couldn’t look away. But maybe that’s as good a reason as any why driving fast is second nature to me.

In my early teens, and long before getting my driver’s license, I stole my father’s car whenever they left town, sometimes when they were just out on the town, sometimes while they were just asleep, often to drive to a girl’s house (the ladder to her room was far more risky).

I learned many things on those trips, including that it’s possible, with enough speed, to coast a car up a hill and into a carport with the motor off and not make any noise.

But you only get one chance.

Once an ex girlfriend and I, we’d both “moved on” but I was giving her a ride to someplace because she asked and sometimes, even after you’ve both moved on, there are dangerous echos of what brought you together in the first place, she and I were blasting down a dark and rainy road in my 1970 Mustang with a big motor, and I said “Let me know if you want me to slow down.”

“I’ve always felt safe driving with you. No one else since, but always with you,” she said, and that was just one more lesson about seeming to go slow while going real fast that she taught me.

In college, late at night and with someone I should not have been with, I chased a BMW 2002 while driving that same Mustang over the twisty La Honda Road between Palo Alto and the coast. I caught up with it on the straights but lost badly in the curves, and never saw that car once the road really rolled back on itself.

“Why can’t you catch him?” asked the girl in the right seat, and I learned another difference between driving and arriving.

I used to drive from Portland to L.A. in 13 hours, usually to see another girl. Yeah. Sometimes I took the desert route and came in through the Mojave. Sometimes I would drive back a few days later, but it usually took longer, maybe because I was leaving the girl, maybe because it always seemed to be uphill.

Those trips back always ended at sunrise. But in the middle of the night, at a certain level of fatigue, dark shapes seem to leap across the highway right in front of the car. I never hit one, but I’m not saying they weren’t real.

They scared me nearly to death. Maybe that’s why they were there.

I sold the Mustang before I went to Asia and bought a BMW when I got back.

When I was a waiter in Portland, and it snowed while I was at work, I used to take that old BMW (which became my first real race car 20 years later) to a Safeway parking lot at 2 a.m. and throw the car sideways, first one way and then the next, always trying to catch it before it went all the way around.

There’s a “point of no return” in every spin. But if you have the clutch in and the brakes on, once past that point you may be able to power out to a recovery, of sorts. Maybe, but not until it’s had at least one go around. Could be that was another life lesson, too.

When my uncle was on his deathbed, I left Bend, Oregon in a fast car at the same time my cousin left the east coast on a plane. We both landed in San Francisco seven hours later, five hours before my uncle, her dad, passed away. The main difference was that I drove everyone to where ever they had to be over the next few days. I was the driver. Just like always.

Driving was my escape, driving was my hobby, driving was what I did. I wanted to write a book about “Driver,” but not a race book and this isn’t it. That one is about someone who is always taking others through major life transitions.

I will drive the ashes of my uncle’s son to a lake in Montana near the Canadian border this summer. I was told it can be a bad road. I told them not to worry about that.

Every one of the other guys has their story, and they are at least as interesting, or more interesting, than mine. I think Cowboy had his racing license before he had a driver’s license. He’s on a first name basis with everyone who’s raced over the last several decades. Ceegar has stories that weave into the lives of famous people, and I’ve seen the first car Ceegar’s brother ever owned, brought back from Japan new about the time of the Viet Nam War, it was sold but now sits in Ceegar’s shop.

It can be hard to get the time of day, let alone a story, out of Beater, but he’s from New York. As tough as he is, you know there’s more than one story there. Canuck may not have a story yet, but he’s writing one.

Long before Merlin, as we were building the big black and yellow car, I had several goals in mind. I wanted it to handle as much like my full-race BMW as it could, and that car was a scalpel. I wanted it to be easy to look at. I wanted it to be reliable. I always wanted it to have enough, of whatever was needed.

That’s before I learned there’s never enough. But Merlin will find what’s there and make that usable. I think deep down, beneath his magic and his talent and his hard-nosed attitude about only doing it the right way, generally recognized as “his” way, the stay right-of-the-centerline way, I think Merlin’s world is animated, and he approaches his flowers and lawn and tomatoes with the same passion he brings to machines.

Maybe we will have “enough,” maybe at least a chance when Cowboy and Canuck show up in a month and a half at the big race in Seattle, with whatever monster’s they’ve cooked up over the winter. Ceegar and Beater have been busy in the last couple of weeks, I imagine, given that neither would be happy in fourth or fifth place. I saw the tires Beater had stashed in his trailer. Tires far too big to go on the car that he was driving last weekend.

That July race ought to be something.

A week after that, this circus might head off to Road America. It would be a lot of fun to see how we rubes from the Pacific Northwest stack up against the best in … America. I can’t really afford to go, but Cowboy is on me hard, saying it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, going there with these guys, these guys driving these cars. I would probably remember that race forever, long after I was unable to remember how much money I saved by not going.

But in the mean time, Spokane is coming up in a couple of weeks and the car isn’t quite ready and there’s other things to do.

Today I drove three hours from the desert in the middle of Oregon to a place just south of Portland where they have a world class kart track. A friend and I went around and around, 12 turns in a little over 2/3rds of a minute, around and around, finding the line, carrying momentum, balancing the Gs.

Because, as I told Merlin a couple of weeks ago, if his job is to refine the hardware, my job is to work on the wetware. No driver does it alone, but every driver is out there alone. I don’t want to be good, I want to be better. That’s what a driver does.

Not Racing in the Rain

By | | It's Never Enough, Uncategorized
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Jakester and I got to Merlin’s about noon, right on time. I thought we’d be there a few hours, go have dinner, be ready to run the next day then race over the weekend.

That wasn’t at all how it turned out, not at all.

To begin with, we didn’t leave Merlin’s shop until after nine. Every minute of the nine hours we were there, every one of them, was a working minute. Jakester helped out a lot, right from the beginning, all the way till the end. I’d picked him up 150 miles south at 9 a.m., and we didn’t crash out to sleep until close to midnight.

Jakester is my crew chief. He’s thirteen. Years ago at Portland International Raceway, he and his dad walked by, and I saw Jakester staring at my car. I asked if he wanted to sit in it, if his dad wanted to take pictures. They were pretty stoked about that.

They came back the next year and gave me an exact model of my car, three inches long. They’d built it over the winter. I was stunned by how little things can have such a big impact. There’s no way to understand all of it, but I started to pay more attention to little things after that. There’s more, but I can’t explain what the family’s friendship means to me.

What makes anything important?

We were at Merlin’s because I wanted “more.” Even if “more is never enough.” If anyone can find “more,” it’s Merlin.

But first he had to find what was broken. The timing would not stay where it was set. My mechanic at home, Shade Tree, couldn’t figure it out, even though he had meticulously built the engine.

Watching Merlin think is an adventure. He cuts a problem into chunks. Big chunks at first, he eliminates the things easiest to look at, and fix. Unfortunately, that’s not where the problem was. By the time we started taking parts off the motor, he knew what was wrong. Shade Tree had replaced a $10 part about half deep in the engine with one just the slightest bit too small. The new part allowed things to move that should not move.

On the phone, Shade Tree was mortified. He is justifiably proud of his meticulous work, more often than not backed up by careful research. He slipped up, he said. It should not have happened, he said. I heard the embarrassment in his voice. I told him it’s not about blame.

Throughout all this, Jakester was getting stuff from the trailer, going under the car for bolts or washers dropped, scraping old gaskets off aluminum parts, putting gunk on new gaskets so they would hold.

The problem was fixed long after the sun hit the horizon. Merlin finally started on finding the “more” I was after. What we found was additional bad news: upgrades Shade Tree and I had been making over the last couple of years had taken the car in the wrong direction.

Sometimes we do the wrong things for all the right reasons. Especially if we haven’t decided on how we are going to test each step along the way.

They were costly “upgrades,” too, that over the next month will be taken off and replaced by what I had ten or twelve years ago. Good thing most of the parts were still in the trailer.

Long after Merlin told his wife to go ahead and have dinner, Merlin walked over to the wall and brought Jakester a carburetor.

“You get the Magic Carburetor Award,” Merlin told him.

As much as anything, it was a statement that Jakester was a member of a pretty small tribe, smart guys who get what they want in life because they know what that is, have the ability to reach for it and will work until they do.

Merlin recently learned a lot about horses, ones owned by one of his neighbors, he worked with the horses because he liked it. Merlin says horses know in a few seconds who you are. He likes things to be right. He combs the gravel of his drive with a harrow, plants flowers, trains his amazing dog to sit until he says otherwise.

At the track the next day, Merlin told others about Jakester, who I’d been introducing as my crew chief. The next thing I knew, Ceegar was driving Jakester around in his golf cart, telling everyone Jakester was HIS crew chief. He didn’t even offer me O.C., the guy that runs his operation and does everything before everything knows it needs to be done.

During the second round of testing on the track, another ridiculously cheap part failed, this time a piece of hard plastic the size of a cheerio. My throttle cable came off the pedal and I was coasting, trying to get off the track.

Ceegar almost hit me when he and Beater came through Turn One at 150 mph while trying to get through a pack of BMWs. I couldn’t be seen around the curve until they were right on me. They got past but so close my car rocked with the wind. I’m glad I didn’t see them coming.

Ceegar came over after the session. I’d found the problem, and Merlin pocketed the piece of failed plastic which he took back to his shop to machine one just like it but better.

“We shouldn’t have been running that hard,” Ceegar said, “going fast in traffic, during in a test session.” I said finding out what you had was part of testing, he and Beater always wanted to find out what they had, what other one had.

“That wasn’t the time and place,” Ceegar said.

Those two have been fighting it out and making each other better, and the cars better, for years. It’s probably the best rivalry out there, right now. I thanked him, but said it wasn’t necessary.

Leaning on my roll cage, Ceegar looked over and asked Jakester if he liked cars. Um, yeah. Ceegar invited Jakester, and by default, Jakester’s dad and me, over to see his collection of cars. I won’t say much about it, but there were some cars there I never even knew existed, and Ceegar was rattling off dates and build numbers and details as only a man passionately in love with his hobby can share.

Ceegar has some others cars in the South. He  keeps them there in a museum that supports an orphanage. Yeah, that’s right. There’s a lot more to most of these guys than you would ever know by seeing them hauling ass around Turn Nine, inches from the concrete wall, trying to get an advantage over the driver just a few more inches away.

As Jakester, his dad and I left the garage on the hill above the valley not far from the race track, Ceegar shouted out to Jakester he would pay him $20 more than I was paying him, whatever that was.

Of course, I couldn’t match Ceegar dollar for dollar, but what he really had to offer was priceless, anyway, and some of that I could put on the table.

The rain held off during practice and qualifying. Beater had a pretty good time, but Ceegar had a personal best, the first time he’d ever broken through the one minute, thirty-two second level. I was a third of a second faster, but wow, has he ever closed the gap.

A third of a second! In a lap of over two miles, at times close to 160 mph, 12 turns, that takes two minutes to cover, and the difference is one-third of a second! At times that just seems impossible to believe.

It’s hard to describe the feeling when tires are hooked up, the engine eager. The car talks to me. Coming hot into a turn, a feather’s touch on the brakes to keep her settled, front tires carve around the apex. Then, most of that over with, I unwind the wheel while putting  power down until the pedal is on the floor, the engine snarling then howling as she urgently leaps forward, clawing her way through space and time.

When in a series of corners, right-left-right-left, the weight of the car rolls smoothly from one side to the other, I hold her eagerness in check and it’s a dance, a Tango, just her and me, it feels like that when we’re alone.

If we’re in traffic, and we want around Ceegar or Cowboy or anyone else, we become predators, and I’m almost secondary to the task. We hunt for an opening, probe for weakness, attempt to dominate. The dance has devolved into ruthlessness.

The races on Saturday and Sunday got washed out. “Stang” was the only one in our group who went out and went fast. He ran well in the rain, even if I thought he was crazy. But he showed something of what he had. St. Vitus went out, too, but he was more cautious, maybe one or two others.

At least we had a choice. Those working the race did not. In the pits where racers waited to go out on the track, Roxanne and Karen and Scot and Becky and Fran worked the line, told us where and when to go. People worked the turn stations, with flags to communicate with drivers and fire extinguishers ready in case they were needed; others drive trucks to pick up stalled cars, or wrecks, and there was a crew with the ambulance.

I don’t know why course workers wear white, but at times I think their love of racing may be more pure than that of us lucky few in the cars. They are out there, working in the rain, at other times in ripples of heat radiating off asphalt measured at 140 degrees.

At least drivers get the adrenaline rush. Course workers do it for love of cars and the sport and if they didn’t do what they did, we couldn’t do what we do. Three times Scot had to tell me to get emergency information put on my helmet, just in case I was in no position to talk. Three times his request was erased by the rush of speed, but maybe I’ll remember next time so they can help me when I need it.

There were some bad wrecks in other groups. The passenger front of the first race car I built, a BMW 2002, was taken off in Turn Nine. I hated to see it, that car taught me how to drive. I admired the woman worker who stood at the edge of the track, signaling to drivers going too fast to slow down while safety vehicles were on the course.

At dinner, a emergency crew member told me that he always, always wears a helmet after being launched 30 feet into the air when a car hit one where he was working to help a driver.

“I’ve got daughters to take care of,” he said.

A Porsche was brought back to the pits, pretty much mangled. I heard it went into the wall in Turn 2. They may save parts but I think the car is probably gone, though I’m no mechanic.

Both drivers were okay, if not a little heart broken. It’s just sheet metal, they say, but these aren’t just machines.

Instead of racing in the rain, I sat in Beater’s trailer and we talked about moving dirt and building houses. Beater, like many of these guys, is a contractor, a builder. He knows a lot about money, he said, but that wasn’t his only goal. He loves excavation, construction, building, the planning and design. He thinks of it as his art.

He also loves the fact that 10 days after his next grand-baby is born, that infant will be upstairs in the office where Beater and his family run their business.

“One little squawk and I’m upstairs to see what’s wrong,” Beater said. Talking about it, an air of fulfillment draped across him like a shawl over his shoulders.

Ceegar looked like that too, when he was describing his family, his kids, his quiet work of helping the kids of other people. When Falcon was showing his daughter around, he introduced her as his third daughter, but she said with a smile, “but I’m really Number One.”

These guys have pretty interesting soft spots, even if some people think of them as knuckle-dragging, road racing, ground-pounding Neanderthals and the cars an unnecessary waste of precious resources.

You can bet that Beater is looking for at least one full second as I sit and write this, and for the next month Ceegar will be looking for that third of a second I had over him last weekend in qualifying. Being who they are, it’s pretty likely they’ll find it, too.

But it’s not like I’m sitting on my hands.

The weekend, the first race, wasn’t a complete bust. We solved some problems, are working on others, and we know a little bit more than we did last week about what other guys are bringing to the party. And that’s good, except for one thing. Two things, actually.

Cowboy wasn’t there. Canuck wasn’t there. Each of them has been building something very special over the winter, and nobody knows yet what that will turn out to be.

Drive it like you stole it.

By | | It's Never Enough
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Cowboy got me into this nearly 20 years ago and he keeps upping the ante every damn year. The last motor he built had compression like odds in Vegas. What, 30 to one?

When he started it up it sounded like somebody lit a string of very nasty, crackly rifle rounds. The gas wasn’t burning in the cylinders, it was popping and snapping and sounded like distilled anxiety.

One of these days something we build is just going to go too damn fast, or blow up at exactly the wrong moment, or we’ll nudge each other some place where the mistake has consequences. But until then, this is what we do. Every year it’s the same: It’s never enough.

Of course, it could be Ceegar. Seattle has a long line of great gentlemen racers going back a lot of generations. The Armstrongs, with the GT 40 and Corvette Gran Sport and the ZO6; Flannigan, who drove a BMW 2002 like he was in a whole different class than anyone else on the track. He was.

Waster, with the most amazing stable of exotics I’d ever seen. Some damn fine cars, too. Once he sent his jet back from Laguna Seca to Seattle to get a spare engine to replace one he blew up right in front of me in the Corkscrew. First time I’d spun in that car. When his replacement engine got there first thing the next morning, Waster had to buy a $15 head gasket from Cowboy. I thought Cowboy should have charged at least $100, then bought us all coffee.

But Ceegar just drives the wheels off that Mustang. And helps the rest of us, to boot. On more than one occasion he let me go down and pick through his pile of not-quite used-up tires. What kind of competitor does that? He does, which is another reason why I don’t mind being wheel to wheel with him at close to 160 mph with a left-right-left hairpin turn coming up fast.

I’ve followed him around enough turns to watch Ceegar handle the steering wheel. He doesn’t drive that car as much as point it and pull the trigger. His hands are constantly working, trying to keep that live axle pointing that impossibly eager motor in the intended direction. He could blow something up one of these days, but O.C., his crew chief is always, always on.

Could be Beater. One time, Beater lost his driveshaft. Tell you what about that: When the front of a drive shaft lets go, you don’t just stop. It drops, still attached to the rear end. If it doesn’t pole vault you, it is still spinning when it hits the pavement. Then it is whipping. Then it’s tearing into your car like God’s own power cutter, and most of that is happening about three inches from your lap and everything your lap currently contains.

Beater installed a shaft retainer after that. On the car. So did I. But Beater is by far the most improved driver out there. He and Ceegar go at it month after month, small block against small block, Corvette versus Mustang, driving each other to be faster, to be better, to beat the other.

Speaking of helping each other out, Beater gave me a transmission last year when I blew mine up. Then I blew his up, too. There was, as we say, a mechanical problem. An expensive one. I rebuilt both, gave his back to him. Who knows who will use it next.

Beater talked to me once about trading cars, plus a little bit of money. Not nearly enough money. I told him I’d need another 20 grand just to fix the things he’d cut out and thrown away, paint, etc. etc.

“But I like the way my car looks!” he said. Yeah, and leaving it like that hurts him less if he swaps paint with you. I know this frm personal experience. We’ve raced cheek to cheek, as it were. Boy he’s gotten good. I’m glad we didn’t trade. If I was driving his car and not winning, everyone would say my car was good, not me. If he didn’t win in my car, everyone would say he wasn’t that good. That’s a lot of downside.

There’s Falcon, too. Nobody nicer, and in my opinion, nobody with bigger — ballistics. Coming out of Turn Nine in Seattle, that damn red car has tasted the gravel more than once.

“Just got to ride it out,” Falcon says. Yeah, because even thinking about touching the brakes in that situation would put him nose-first into the wall at well over 100 mph. I don’t even like being behind him when he does that, cuz watching it scares me too bad.

The Swede, who works on Falcon’s car, said, “nobody can imagine what it takes to drive that red Ford that well.” Actually, I think we can. Respect is earned.

Captain America has a car a lot like mine. A ’69 big block Corvette. Red White and Blue. Sunuvagun looks like Howard Hughs. In the good years. He’s gotten so good as a driver, we all had to up our game. Sometimes I walk over to his crew trailer to congratulate him, sometimes just to steal grapes from what looks like a chef-prepared spread. Just the grapes. The sweet ones.

Then there’s Canuck. He whipped my butt last year. I’d beat him more often than not in year’s past, if not in Seattle then at least at my home track in Portland. Not last year. His Camaro sounds like it’s running a NASCAR motor.

He has to be revving it more than nine grand, so I think it is. It defines the term “Screamer,” at least in terms of cars. Canuck has always had an “in” with Joe Gibbs Racing. Maybe he’s downstream on some engine enhancements, too.

To top that off, Canuck is building a ’69 Vette, like mine. He might not be catchable for the rest of my racing days. He’s building the car out of the wreck of one of our favorites. Originally it was known as “The Dick Bech Car.” Black and menacing. Dick retired when he was 70 something, a promise made to his wife, I think. After a couple of owners it was raced by Big Mac, another Seattle racer. Fastest on the course, by seconds!

Until one weekend. I hated the decision the racing committee made to make the very first outing on the track a qualifying round. I said so at the time, too. We’d been working on the cars, it was the biggest race of the year. We’re always tweaking. We leave things off. Everything isn’t always tightened. And even if it is, we are not at our sharpest for at least the first couple of sessions.

There were lots of theories about what happened to Big Mac when he went through Turn One at over 160 miles an hour. There’s a hump there, cars get light. As Cowboy said once, “There’s a bit of a pucker until your tires touch the ground again.” We don’t actually get air, but it feels like it. You absolutely do not want to touch the brakes in that spot, or have anything break.

I’ve forgotten how many times they said Big Mac flipped. When I came through the turn, his car was on the berm just off the pit entry road. Was it on its top? I don’t remember. I do remember looking at the car before they covered it up after they brought it back to the pits. It was a mangled tangle of steel and fiberglass.

Big Mac suffered a lot of headaches for a long, long time, and he never raced again. Probably doctor’s orders.

Canuck is rebuilding that car, and that car means a lot to us, for a lot of different reasons. The trouble for me is, Canuck has been racing karts all over the West Coast for the last few years, and he has sharpened his skills to nearly a professional level. He is now the best driver. Plus, he can afford to put anything he wants into any of his cars. He may be unbeatable in anything he drives. I guess we’ll see.

Some of it depends on what Cowboy has come up with over the winter. The most devious, the wiliest, and smartest racer out there, he’s been racing a lot longer than the rest of us, too, and knows every trick on the track. He can give a faster car behind him exactly six-too-few inches to pass, on either side. I’ve seen him leap curbs for position.

A few years back, as soon as the green flag fell, (“You wanna watch their elbow,” he told me) he went by about 12 cars before we got to the first turn, passing on the inside next to the wall. I was going to do the same thing, but he beat me to it and was exactly where I wanted to be. I got pinned behind the slugs. I guess there was room when he went by, but a few drivers didn’t think so. There was definitely no place to go if anyone else decided to move over there.

Cowboy got a talking to for that one. They say a race isn’t won on the first lap, but but it sure can be lost there. We laughed for days.

Last year, his car was crazy fast, and this year, rumor has it that his new tires are so wide they could lie flat on their side and hold up a usable coffee table. Which means they can’t be legal because they’re the same size as mine, but never mind that.

Some people think this is a parade. Or, as officials tell us before every race, “The cars are the stars.” True enough, there’s no prize money. That doesn’t mean we don’t race.

Oh. Then there’s me. I drive a big block corvette, black and yellow. Sexiest car out there at times, in my opinion, but maybe that’s just because I designed it. It even has its own fan club. That’s right, my car has a fan club.

Well, I help out with that. I’ve won a few races over the years. To the point where everybody thought I was cheating. How would winning races prove I was cheating, unless they were all cheating too?

I even had an ex-girlfriend say once when she was mad at me that the only reason I won races was that I built a bigger motor than everyone else and just drove away. But she didn’t know racing much better than she knew me. The guys I race with know how I drive. Sometimes I wonder what she’s been up to.

I don’t have the biggest motor, certainly not the most expensive, not in that bunch, and I don’t think my 427 is even close to the most powerful. But I’m not going to say more, because those guys are really competitive, when we’re not helping each other out, and each of us has beat the other and would like to do so again.

You can call me Spider.

Make my day

By | | Chalice
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Hi, Erik,

I have just completed Chalice and I loved it.

As a lover of English Literature (and taught Latin as well), I appreciated your email style of communication in our modern world, and the intense capture of two people developing in love.

Would love to discuss Chalice with you sometime.

I was at Dudley’s when you approached our book club, and handed out a copy. One of our book club members received it first, but I did not want to wait after (the) succinct introduction you gave us, so I ordered in for my Kindle…  you kept me up until 2.30 am!

…I can’t wait for the next.

Martha Hendrick, Bend OR

Nice week for “Chalice”

By | | Chalice
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In order: An old friend and racer called to tell me he finished Chalice. I thought I’d get criticism or compliments on the racing angle. Instead, he thanked me for the story, saying he didn’t know if he’d ever read anything that described love in that way, and he thanked me again.

Then I got an email from a woman who had read about half the book: “Just wanted to let you know that I am really enjoying this read! It is creative and really sucks you in.  As we all live in such a cyber world of texting and email, it almost makes me feel as if I am the recipient of the communications between them. Thank you so much!”

Two book clubs in Bend may take up the book, they seem enthusiastic, and in a few days I will present to another that has already selected and read the book.

Finally, “Vintage Drift” did a nice article on the book in the issue that came out this week. Sales seem to be picking up a tick. Fingers crossed that more readers will enjoy and tell their friends.

Fear of Goodbye

By | | Chalice, It’s Nobody’s Fault, Out My Writer's Window
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Fear so often keeps us pinned inside lives we wish were different. So often, that fear is irrational, only an echo that sets wiring of brains vibrating, certain we will be set upon by wolves if we leave the ring of firelight.

How do we not fear pain? How do we not fear loss? How do we not fear being unloved, or not-now loved, by someone we love? How do we not fear that, back in the ring of firelight, they laugh and sing and did not notice we were gone?

Fear is hard-wired into the code of who we needed to become when we descended naked and defenseless from the trees. Fear is fed to us with mother’s milk, perhaps tainted by her abandonment, maybe spoiled by angry harsh words from her own father, or corrupted by neglect from the man she married. What’s to do with it now?

Sitting, watching a rising sun paint mountains pink then gold, I see goodbye for what it wants to be, an ogre too large when wrapped in a cloak of fear, instead of what really is, just a good bye. I miss you. That’s a good thing, not to be feared.

You need to cry

By | | Chalice, It’s Nobody’s Fault, Out My Writer's Window, Outer Limits
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When was the last time you cried? From loss, joy, relief, fear, gratitude? When was the last time you let yourself be that vulnerable?

Well, I’ll recommend it, especially on Thanksgiving. Because, I think, there is no way to really, truly give thanks without shedding a tear. Otherwise, you’re holding back. Not nearly thankful enough.

Yesterday a friend gave me a book, and I’m recommending it to you. There’s a couple of them, in fact. But first, know that these books will make you cry tears from being embraced by someone who knows, who cares, who has seen every thing you’ve been  through, and can see through you, as well. They will bring tears back to your eyes from things you’ve been hiding from yourself. That’s good.

Each was written by someone twice as smart as I ever thought I was, and twice as wise as I will ever be. Each was written by someone who may, just may, have a bit of the antidote for the toxic, inauthentic, self-absorbed yet indifferent world some of us can’t seem to find our way through. Each was written by a woman with strength that would intimidate a roomful of warriors.

Warning: these books are at times explicit, but always honest, human, literate; they will make you cry because of what the writers are not afraid to look at, not afraid to see, not afraid to feel. These books are emotional fire storms.

They will give you reason to say thanks.

“tiny beautiful things,” by Cheryl Strayed.

“Bluets,” by Maggie Nelson.

Weaver

By | | All But Forgotten, Chalice, It’s Nobody’s Fault, Out My Writer's Window, Outer Limits
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In writing Chalice, and now again researching It’s Nobody’s Fault, I stumbled across the idea of “who” we think we are. This “sense of self” actually has a home in the left hemisphere of our brain, and it basically integrates all sorts of inputs.

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga has called it the “Interpreter.” I call it “Weaver.” Three quick thoughts, then I’ll leave it alone, for now.

First, it is important to know that one of Weaver’s primary jobs is to give reasons for what is happening in our world. Weaver is constantly weaving yarns of various colors into cause and effect, weaving them to make up our “reality.” That’s what Weaver does. Weaver explains. Always. Constantly.

Secondly, the fabric Weaver creates out of all these inputs is only as good as what Weaver gets by way of information. Some of that information is bogus. Not only external information, but internal, as well. My amygdala may fire a flash of fear through the circuits, and Weaver won’t know it’s a false alarm. Weaver will know only that there has been a signal of fear. Weaver will find an explanation for that signal, usually external, because Weaver explains. Always. Constantly.

This has been called “Tigers in the grass.” We evolved to run from tigers, so we run when the grass moves, even when it is only the wind.

Finally, it is possible to catch Weaver in the act. It’s a two-step process for me. First, I recognize that my unnatural calm may be the result of the chamomile tea, nervousness might be the coffee, the twinge is from seeing a car like one driven by someone I used to know, getting up to do something may not be because it needed to be done five minutes ago, but the result of a memory that just drifted through I did not want to face.

In other words, what I think is happening, even with my own emotions, is not necessarily what is happening. It feels real, Weaver says it is real, but it might not be.

Then I sit and watch Weaver work. That gives me space. It takes a few minutes now, it used to take longer, to put Weaver in his place. He doesn’t stop weaving or explaining, because Weaver explains. Always. Constantly. But, after a few minutes, “I” am no longer being yanked around at the end of his leash.

Dudley’s, at 1 p.m. tomorrow

By | | Chalice, Out My Writer's Window
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A few people are going to join me at Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe in downtown Bend tomorrow, at 1 p.m., to discuss some of the philosophy tucked into various passages of “Chalice.” Whether you’ve read the book or not (Dudley’s has a few for sale), or have questions about the book, writing or publishing, come on down for a bowl of soup, cup of coffee or tea, and some conversation. We’ll be upstairs.

On hearing “no.”

By | | It’s Nobody’s Fault, Outer Limits
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In hearing “no,” I think we also succumb to “what if.”
What if he/she/they had said “yes?”
Then I would be rich/validated/happy.
And would not have to feel the pain of “no” anymore.

You’re right. Those very things often go through my head. Finding happiness ourselves is easier said than done…

Easier said than done, because we’ve been taught to look in the wrong places.

“This moment” is woven, on a loom of evolved wiring, from strands of bird song, thanking me for the seed, tragic news of a typhoon and a shooting, from the zing of this morning’s coffee and lull of last night’s chamomile, the slight pain of a sprain from yesterday’s run, echos of childhood loss, all etc.

Our brain does this weaving, always, but often with yarn that is too thin, of the wrong dye, sometimes of the wrong wool. But weave it does, constantly, because it is Weaver, and the cloth is “me.”

To protect us, Weaver learned to double the knots of fear and pain, to twice the count of hoped-for gain, even when loss is of something only imagined. So “NOs,” when they come, pack twice the wallop as the “Maybe?” pushed across the table by Weaver, with a shy smile.

The trick?  You’ve said it so many times: Be real, let go of the knots, be kind, breathe, do what you love and for the right reasons, be honest, have faith. Repeat. It’s not easy getting past Weaver to the barrels of yarn. In fact, it’s damn hard, because Weaver weaves even that effort into patterns it already knows. But, it can be done.