Writing Life

Archive for June, 2009

It was 34 years ago today that Rod Serling died. Since then, his “Twilight Zone” narrator persona has been parodied by so many people, that it is sometimes easy to forget that Serling was a real person and not merely a pop-cultural construct like, say, Max Headroom or Betty Crocker. Born Rodman Edward Serling on Christmas day, 1924, Serling, like the recently departed Michael Jackson, was destined to live only 50 years. But, also like Jackson, he packed a lot of creativity into that smallish envelope of years.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Serling served as a paratrooper and demolitions expert with the U.S. Army during World War II. While serving in the Pacific theater he was seriously injured in combat and awarded both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But the worst of his war-time experiences occurred when Read the rest of this entry »

Years ago, when we lived in rural El Dorado County, my wife and I argued constantly about the disposal of dead bodies. It began one day when I discovered a terrifying-looking creature lying dead on the back porch. I stepped into the kitchen and called for Julie.
“Honey,” I said. “Can you come here? I need you.”
Julie, who had been relaxing on the living room sofa with a cup of coffee, came shuffling reluctantly into the kitchen. “You rang?” she said.
“Hon, I need you to get a broom and a trash bag or something. There’s a dead thing on the back porch.”
“A dead thing?” I saw her eyes widen in alarm. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife was a Christmas baby. As a child, she never had birthday parties on the actual anniversary of her birth. Her parents knew better than to invite a bunch of Julie’s school friends over to the house on December 25th for cake and ice cream and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Those children were too busy having a merry Christmas to care much about whether or not Julie had a happy birthday. To keep Julie from feeling deprived, however, her parents threw a birthday party for her on or about June 25th of each year. Her friends and family members brought presents to her, everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to her, and her parents presented her with a cake that had the appropriate number of candles planted in it. Everyone knew, of course, that this wasn’t her actual birthday but her Read the rest of this entry »

America’s love affair with grassy lawns has been blamed for numerous environmental problems, including rapid diminution of the nation’s water supply. With this in mind, my wife set out three years ago to transform our tiny back yard into a haven for drought-tolerant plants that can survive on a fraction of the water necessary to keep a lawn alive.

It took nearly a year for all of this newly planted flora to thrive and become dense. The result was lovely: lots of lush Mexican sage, and rosemary, and other hearty herbs that sip rather than guzzle water. She also dotted the yard with small trees and woody plants that have long roots and can drink from deep within the soil and thus do not need daily watering.

As the landscape matured, however, we began to hear scratching sounds in our walls at night. At first, these Read the rest of this entry »

On this day, eighty-three years ago – June 23, 1926 – the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson stunned the world by wandering into an Arizona town called Agua Prieta and announcing that she had escaped from a trio of kidnappers who had been holding her hostage for over a month. On May 18th of that year, Sister Aimee, as she was known to the members of her Foursquare Gospel religious franchise, had swum out into the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Santa Monica and Venice and vanished from sight. When the news of her disappearance was made public later that night, much of the country went into mourning. According to her biographer, Daniel Mark Epstein, “Such a deep and universal expression of grief had not been seen since the assassination of Lincoln. It would not be seen again until the death of FDR.” For thirty-two days the story of Sister Aimee’s disappearance and Read the rest of this entry »

The topic of my June Writing Life column was my wife’s longtime love affair with cast-iron cookware. The essay began its life as a poem. Oftentimes, to put my thoughts about a subject in order, I try to write a poem about it. My preferred poetic mode is the sonnet, which forces me to compress all my thoughts on a subject into a scant fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (i.e. lines that average 10 syllables each). But my thoughts about my wife run deep and wide and it is often impossible to confine them to a mere fourteen lines of poetry (or even 1500 words of prose, for that matter). Such was the case with “Seasoning,” the poem I wrote about Julie’s attachment to cast-iron cookware. But though it is Read the rest of this entry »

My grandson Spencer recently graduated from Casa Roble High School. To commemorate the occasion I wrote him a poem. It’s a little bit of grandfatherly advice in the form of a sonnet. I wanted to warn him about just how quickly life can pass by if you don’t seize every moment and make the most of it. A lot of people spend their youth daydreaming about the great things they’ll do in the future. Sadly, a lot of these same people will spend their old age regretting the Read the rest of this entry »