Aug

18

Forty Years, Forty Posts #10

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My first writing space was a half-office and library in our attic, a place my parents rarely used outside of tax season and that I had mostly to myself. I hammered out stories on a manual typewriter, all in capital letters, since the shift key was too much to deal with given my hunt-and-peck methods.

I did have my own room; what I lacked was a desk. I asked for a desk for my birthday, where I could spread out my art projects, my chemistry set and microscope, and my notebooks of scribbles. Like most children, I was a real dilettante. My dad took me to various furniture stores and department stores. He was frustrated because I didn’t want any of the desks I saw. They were all made for children, pint-sized, with a modest work area and a few drawers.

Fortunately for both of us, I found the perfect desk at a garage sale. It was a massive, formidable workspace, made of real wood, and painted a deep shade of green that the can probably called “Tropical Rainforest,” or perhaps, “Oregon Pine.” I think my dad paid five bucks for it, but the real challenge was hauling the thing home.

It was my desk for the next few years, until we moved, when it went into storage and waited for me to go to college. I’d forgotten about it, and was delighted to find out we still had the green monster. The desk was too huge to take with me as I moved around the country after college to be a vista volunteer and a graduate student, and was certainly too big to fit into my Ford Escort anyway. I imagined eventually I would haul it in a buddy’s pickup to Minneapolis, once I bought a house. Unfortunately, like a lot of things I had back at my parents’ house in Grand Forks, it was lost in the flood of ’97.

By some miracle of fate, I found another oversized, incredibly heavy desk to replace it. It was obviously designed for an office environment, not a home. It was abandoned in an apartment building where I lived, and I took it for another ten years of productive use. That’s the desk that saw Mudville through its many phases. It got hauled away this year when my wife got her craft room. The room of my own is now a corner of the basement, and the desk is a practical, completely servicable, computer table… which I rarely use, preferring to sit on the couch with a laptop, half-watching a game or movie, and asking my wife to catch me up on everything I miss as I try to multitask. Torii watches jealously from the nearby end table, wondering how he lost his place to some other warm black thing.

He would have liked that green desk. There would be plenty of room for a computer and monitor, a few stacks of paper, and still serve a lounging panther-sized housecat.

When: 1978 - Present
Where: Grand Forks, Minneapolis

Aug

15

Forty Years, Forty Posts #9

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I spent my toddler years in New Mexico, near the desert. I don’t remember much about our house, because I think I was always outside. If I wasn’t playing with our puppy, Fluffy, I was playing with the neighbor kids and their puppy, which was from the same litter and the off-spring of our prolific dachshund Ginger.

Horny ToadI also enjoyed collecting wildlife. The stereotype of small boys have pockets full of lizards and worms was completely true in my case. My favorite specimens were grasshoppers, which were fun to chase and hard to snare, and the ubiquitous horny toad, which I learn now is not a toad at all but a lizard. They were small, bumpy, and easy to catch if you knew where to look. I’d keep lizards and grasshoppers alike in a box for an afternoon and then let them go. I was just a catch-and-release hobbyist, and I imagined they wanted, too, to get home for dinner.

One day a man came to our Kindergarten class and passed around preserved snake corpses. He wanted us to learn what to avoid if we encountered a snake on or joyful marauding. We all took turns rattling the tail of the rattler. Of course I went out looking for one of those remarkable snakes, but fortunately for me, I never found one.

When: 1972-1974
Where: Alamogordo, New Mexico

The picture above is by MotherPie on Flickr, and is used under the creative commons agreement.

Aug

12

Forty Years, Forty Posts #8

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I have eaten many of God’s creatures, including frog, snake, and alligator. It must have something to do with me being born in Louisiana. As a small child living in England, I had a bowl of turtle soup, and still remember how good it was: cubes of soft meat floating in a bowl of inexplicably delicious broth. I have never seen turtle soup on the menu again, nor have I seen turtles at the supermarket, or I would have it again in a heartbeat.

To set things even in the way of a famous fable, I tried rabbit several years later, also in England. This time we were just on vacation. I don’t remember anything about the meal, how it was prepared or how it tasted. All I remember is my oldest brother looking at me in horror. He knew one of my favorite books was Watership Down. Once my meal arrived, he started in: “That’s Hazel,” he said. “That’s Fiver. That’s Bigwig.” I may have sent the plate back, untouched.

When: 1983
Where: England

Aug

9

Forty Years, Forty Posts #7

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We throw out cobs of corn for the squirrels. By the miracle of nature, we now have corn plants popping up around the yard. Most of them are mowed before they get very tall, though I have half a mind to let the whole yard turn into a corn field and then put down a tiny, squirrel-sized baseball diamond*: Yard of Dreams, I’ll call it. A tribute to Field of Dreams.

I first saw that movie in the spring of 1991. It instantly became one of my favorite movies. It helped to know that Darth Vader in that movie was really J.D. Salinger, one of my favorite writers. You see, in the book on which that movie is based, “Ray” Kinsella (the author’s name is W.P. Kinsella) takes J.D. Salinger to a Red Sox game, which apparently W.P. really did. In the movie they have a fictional writer, played by James Earl Jones, whom Kevin Costner (as Ray) takes to a Sox game.

While I think Mark Harris is a bigger influence on Mudville than Kinsella, I think it’s inevitable that my magic realism meets baseball novel will be reviewed by somebody as “Kinsella for Kids.” I hope someone says that, anyway. It’s a great compliment, and who could pass up on such an alliterative and tidy summation? Kinsella is a fine writer and an interesting guy. I happened to hear him speak once… actually, just before seeing Field of Dreams. He was there, too.

So W.P. Kinsella got to see a Red Sox game with J.D. Salinger? I got to see Field of Dreams with W.P. Kinsella. Maybe one day I’ll take the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson to see the movie version of Mudville and the whole thing will come full circle.

When: 1991
Where: Writers Conference, University of North Dakota

* The following year I attended the children’s writer’s conference at UND and took a workshop with Avi, who has written about baseball-playing squirrels.

Aug

7

Forty Years, Forty Posts #6

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My only home run in my storied athletic career bounced off the hands of Chad and onto the stage. It was 8th grade gym class, and we were playing kickball.

I was a small kid, usually the shortest in the class. It didn’t help that for some reason to do with cutoff dates for kids starting school in various states, I was also usually the youngest kid in the class. At the end of 8th grade, for example, I was 13; most kids were 14.

I had played kickball for years, and knew the only way for me to take a base was to boot the ball hard between a couple of people. Anything in the air would be caught. Knowing my failings and my strategy, the opponents would “move up!” at the command of the pitcher or bowler or whatever the person is called in kickball who spins the ball at you. The shame of being the last one picked–which I also know well–is minor compared to the Easy Out Shift, especially when it proves to be a sound defensive maneuver. Most of my hard-kicked balls were easily fielded and lobbed to first base for an out. I actually had an easier time with baseball, where a guy could just bounce the ball and rely on the defensive incompetence of the his opponents, but kickball doesn’t have a lot of seeing eye singles or errors, and there’s no way to kick a chopper or lay down a bunt with a red rubber ball. Believe me, I tried.

This spectacular day, I decided to give it my all, and arced the ball nearly across the gym. Chad went for it, grabbed at it, and actually helped it onto the stage (they gym doubled as an auditorium at Sacred Heart Elementary in East Grand Forks, Minnsota)–that was home run territory. He complained later that it wouldn’t have been a home run if he hadn’t have been there. It would have bounced against the stage, and I would have settled for a double. Instead, I trotted around the bases. Every kid should get to do that at least once. For me, it was exactly once, and I ain’t givin’ it back.

When: 1982
Where: East Grand Forks, Minnesota

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