(H-Minus is the motto of the 505th regiment of the 82nd Airborne. In the American airborne landings in Normandy, the 505th actually jumped before its scheduled “h-hour,” which is how they earned the motto.)

Dear Dad,

Thank you for signing up with your cousin at the Army recruitment center the day after Pearl Harbor. (And thanks to Grandpa Haener for giving his permission for his 17-year-old son to join)

Thank you for surviving more than three years of parachuting into the multiple hells of North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Holland, Belgium and Berlin (though you were so sure you wouldn’t make it out alive that you stopped writing home, and only resumed your letters after ordered to do so by your commanding officer.)

Thank you for getting sober shortly before I found you. And when I did find you, after years of uncertainty about the man I’d find, you were a loving and generous man. That you for that gift, and for the ten years we had together.

Thank you for sitting me down and setting me straight on the War. My stepdad served, too, but never wanted to talk about it. Growing up, I got my knowledge about WWII from John Wayne movies and Warner Brothers cartoons. I came of age during Vietnam, which seemed an exercise in futility. I came to look on war as an alien concept, invented by men for territory and glory. Thank you for showing me your experiences as an ordinary citizen soldier.

Thank you for our weekly phone calls. I loved your warm, kind voice and your passionate liberal beliefs. Thank you for the steady stream of books, newspaper clippings and little notes, all redolent with the stink of your Marlboros.

I miss you. I think about you every day. Especially today.

That’s what I heard everytime Leo DiCaprio said “old sport” in “The Great Gatsby.” DiCaprio struggled with his accent, which does seem to fit his character of a man struggling to reinvent himself.

Accent aside, he did an amazing job playing Jay Gatz. I keep thinking back to the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version of Gatsy. Redford played the role as a lofty romantic, somehow detached from the dirty business of making money. DiCaprio shows both sides of Gatsby: the thug and the dreamer. In his distorted value system, he could only win Daisy Buchanan’s love by being obscenely rich. Born poor, he believed he had to make a lot of money fast, by hooking up with shady characters and greedy investors.

He might have won Daisy over if he’d followed her wish to run off together, to get away from her society, and from the demands of his moneymaking empire. But her suggestion horrified him. Gatsby couldn’t, wouldn’t run away – he had to prove to her “people” that he was solid and reputable.

I discovered Fitzgerald when I was a swoony teenager. I wanted to be like his beautiful flappers. Their whirl of a social life was everything mine wasn’t. I loved their short fringed dresses and their short, bobbed hair. I loved how they shocked their elders; loved their wit and their heartless treatment of earnest young men. Unfortunatelty, as I got older, I was forced to see that Fitzgerald’s flappers didn’t age well. They had nervous breakdowns, for one thing. Or worse, like Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, they died in fires. So while his Jazz Age women were seductive, I couldn’t be the party girl I so loved to read about.

Watching Baz Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” was like being at the center of a wonderful, whirling, drug and alcohol-fueled party. It was an exhilarating, exhausting experience. But after the party comes the hangover. You know you’re getting older when instead of thinking about Daisy and Jay’s tragic love, you wonder who got Gatsby’s mansion when he died? The bank? Meyer Wolfshiem?

My reluctant cynicism may be a function of age, or the recent recession, which certainly affected me. Or maybe Luhrmann was successful in exposing the rot beneath the shining excess of our dreams.

I wished Luhrmann had scrapped the conceit of Nick Carroway writing “Gatsby.” The Nick in Fitzgerald’s book floats above the story, and it does make emotional sense to have him deeply affected by his friend’s death. But to have a kindly shrink advise him to write about it? And then to have those words swirling around the screen, like cartoon characters from “The Sorceror’s Apprentice?” It was as if Luhrmann didn’t quite trust his artistic vision, which is a powerful one that can stand on its own, without cute little homages to his source material.

Tamolitch Pool, also known as Blue Pool, is the spot where the McKenzie river pops back up after flowing underground through lava beds.

Spent several days camping in Central Oregon. Kirk mountain biked the McKenzie River trail and I hiked around Clear Lake, on one of the most serene summery days ever.

New tent, new camp stove, gorgeous weather and friendly, laid-back people. But more restorative than time off is time spent under towering old growth firs and alongsite pristine lakes.

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” Henry David Thoreau, “Walden, Or Life in the Woods.”

Thanks to Jannat Bay, a fellow writer and like me, a recent grad of the Artist Trust EDGE program for writers. Jannat’s put together a reading series, SouthSound Writes,for emerging and published authors to share their works. The free series is held on the second Sunday of each month.

When: June 9, 2013 @ 2:00 – 4:00 pm 

Where: Des Moines Library 21620 11th Avenue South, Des Moines, Washington 98198 

Other writers at the June 9th reading are Kristen Millares Young, Anca Szilagyi, Patty Kinney, Claire Thornburgh and Judith Gilles. Other EDGE grads will be reading during the series, too, which I’ll post later.

 

Summer days in my home town of Las Cruces, New Mexico were frequently over 100 degrees. The swamp cooler in our old bungalow wheezed, spat and rattled, but never really cooled. The best place to spend a hot afternoon was a few blocks away at the town library, the Branigan. Built in the Thirties as one of the New Deal’s WPA projects, the library had thick adobe walls that kept the heat at bay. Its peaceful interior was stuccoed white, with gleaming terra-cotta tiles and dark brown vigas (exposed beams). Natural light poured in through deep-set leaded windows.

The Branigan was an oasis in the desert, a down-home temple to the power of the written word. A WPA artist, Tom Lea, painted a stately mural on the upper wall across the entrance, depicting a Catholic priest showing New World natives a large open book, religious in nature, no doubt. Everyone in the mural was strikingly calm, noble and civilized. Even as a kid uninterested in New Mexican history, I suspected the conquest of the New World didn’t go down with the aplomb Tom Lea had envisioned.

Miss Caffey was the queen of the library. A tiny woman in old-fashioned dresses and shoes, she wrapped her gray braids around her head like a tiara of hair. She held court behind a high wood desk. She was always kindly, more so if I stayed in the children section of the library. But I’d learned to read before first grade and was a voracious and indiscriminate sampler of text. I was soon bored with kiddy books and drifted through the adult and reference sections of the Branigan.

During one of my hunts, I found an adult novel that I hoped might be torrid and maybe even sexy. In the name of research, to further my education on sex and romance, I took the book to the front desk to check out. Miss Caffey glanced at the title on the cover, frowned, opened a page at random and read. Then she handed it to me and asked me to read a passage aloud. After I did, she asked if I knew what it meant. I nodded, but felt intimidated by her skeptical gaze. I can’t recall if she let me check out the book. I probably abandoned my quest and slunk back to the children’s section.

I’d check out as many books as allowed. I’d troop home, hurl myself on my bed, and read, read, read. Time slowed down and stretched out. I forgot my troubled family, forgot even who I was as the lives of others, fictional others, laid claim on my imagination.

(PS: The Branigan is now a cultural center and on the National and State Registry of Public Buildings.)

 

The great playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner once wrote:

“But hope isn’t a choice, it’s a moral obligation, it’s a human obligation, it’s an obligation to the cells in your body, hope is a function of those cells, it’s a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping; hope is not naive, hope grapples endlessly with despair, real vivid powerful thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul.”

 

(Hey – I’m no literary critic! Just want to share some of the things I see as a writer in a fellow writer’s work)

I just finished this short, powerful novel set in Nigeria in the late 1800s. The main character is a village leader, Okonko, a proud angry man with little self-knowledge. Okonko’s friends and tribal elders have to warn him to behave with compassion, but he continually ignores this wisdom because he’s afraid of appearing weak. His tragic fall is in counterpoint to the arrival of British missionaries, the resulting clash and eventual absorption of his tribe into a colonial system.

 

Unlike traditional Western literature, there is no real subjective viewpoint. Rather, the story is told from a sympathetic distance. The traditions and ceremonies of the tribe, as well as the day-to-day operations, have more value than the individual ego. For instance, only halfway through do we learn the romantic and dramatic story of Okonko and his second wife, Ekwefi. I could imagine this love story being more developed in a traditional Western narrative, because the individual is ascendant in our culture.

At first, I couldn’t find the thread through all the folk fables, but they culminate in the story of the Tortoise, whose greed and arrogance lead to a hard fall from heaven, mirroring Okonko’s fall.

The most suspenseful section is when Okonko and Ekwefi follow the village priestess on a frightening journey in the pitch dark night. She’s spirited away their only daughter and Ekwefi, who’s already lost nine children, is terrified she’ll lose Ezinma. Shades of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The strongest part was when Okonko returns from his seven-year exile and finds Christianity has invaded his tribe. The point of view widens to include the entire tribe’s take on these foolish but persistent do-gooders.

From the Baz Luhrman trailer for his “Great Gatsby.” I did a quick search to see if that was an actual passage in Fitzgerald’s classic. Here’s the closest: “no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.:”

Looks like screenwriters Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pierce rewrote that line for their movie. Check out the new trailer for “Gatsby” – it’s so much more dramatic and romantic than the earlier trailers:  Gatsby