Here’s a cool app that will help you construct the world of historical characters: Video Time Machine. Since the novel I’m writing now is set in two time frames, 1963 and 1951, and since I was 3 in 1963, I need help visualizing clothes, cars, houses, politics. This app allows me to select the year and then the news, sports, advertizing, and more. Wow, it is amazing. Just saying.

It wasn’t easy, but yesterday, in Mosier, I rode the loop from Dry Creek, down State Road to Mosier proper, east on Rt. 30 to The Dalles, right on Chenoweth Loop Road, right on 10th, right up State Road. The last 2.5 miles were 1800 feet up.(In the picture to the left you can see the summit sign.)  I didn’t know my bike could stay upright when I was going so slowly: 3.6 miles an hour, but it did. I did. Slow and steady. No land speed records. Just perseverance.

Saw two sets of hawks dueling it out in the air, aeronautic acrobats, crying and diving.

This week at Bud Clark the table was nearly full. We had 7 around the table, the most to date. If laughter were people, the table was crowded. During the first long write, though, there were tears. One woman excused herself, took her journal, and left the room quietly. I followed her into the hall, and asked if she were OK, if I could do anything. She held her journal close, the other hand opening her apartment door down the hall, her sobs coming harder. She shook her head.

But she came back. When she came back, she came over to my side of the table and held her hand out with a little something in it. I extended my hand, and she put a book the size of my palm in my hand: Native American Wisdom. And in it was an inscription to me. Here was someone who has so little giving me something. I stopped the tears of gratitude before they rose up.

And it was the same woman who had a great line about the postcards. We write postcards to each writer after each session with very specific comments about their work that week. The postcards are really fun to write. And this week they mentioned them for the first time. The same woman said, “I wondered when I saw it, ‘who the hell was writing me a postcard?’ and then I realized, ‘so cool!'” She was on a roll.

It was a wonderful, raucous, real session.

Today will be session #4 of the group at Bud Clark Commons, and I know enough to expect nothing. I do hope, though, to see the writers from last week, and the week before. Session #3 of any group tends to turn a corner, and last week followed that pattern. Even though there was only one person from the week before. Even though there were only 3 people. It was sweet. We laughed. We were quiet. We talked about silence.

This evening with its 60+ degrees, with the full moon last night, with the daffodils and cherry blossom buds, who knows what stories or writers will emerge.

     Incantation for the Man Outside

There is no silence like the night by the train station
after trains leave, after moonset, after Venus moves
in an arc across the night to a spot blocked by Earth.

There is no silence like the brown bag, wet, crumpled, worn,
the doorway filled with sack and trash, the way the eye
speaks so loud the man with weather-beaten skin cannot.

There is no silence like the one in the tongue, between fat taste buds
and epiglottis where words wait for tooth and breath and nerve,
where threat floods the brain, knocking thought out.

What silence can there be for him when all sound is threat, when outside
is razor wind, when smell rims the nose with citrus piss, when inside is
forbidden, or more daggers from a daddy’s hand, or food used cruelly?

The desert stretches dawn to dusk. Pray.
The morning is still very dark. Pray.
Pray, make a place for a silence that is safe.

On Sunday, when there was a break in the cloudbursts, I hopped on my bike. Twenty miles for training, but the day was cold and wet. So, I chose flat, north-south, and didn’t think there’d be many folks on the Springwater. There weren’t too many.

After the Steel Bridge, so exciting to ride next to a moving train, all steel and noise, I had to move through a crowd of folks lining up for some free meal beneath the west side of the bridge. There was a gap in the line, so I had no problem riding through.

Awhile later, after potholes, train tracks, loading docks of Front Ave, crossing the rail yard and coming back to NW via Yeon, I came back under the Steel Bridge. There was no gap in the line. But one man saw me, yelled ahead of me at the men in line, “Move aside. Taxpayer coming through.”

His gristled face, my cold face, we shared a laugh, big, full, the joy in his words.

If I were just an English instructor, I’d ask, “Inside what?” and my mind would grind and whirl on prepositions and their dependence on objects, the way they finish each other’s sentences, the coffee ready in the morning and left in the thermos, hot and ready.

But instead I heard, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been inside,” and the Land of Inside spread out before us last night, the writers around the table: carpet, painted walls, chairs. And heat and doors that lock and clean water. And lights that make waking and sleeping their own thing. The Land of Inside keeps some out, can give some such dignity.

random inside space

When you’re not from the Land of Inside, you enter as a stranger, and sounds can knock the lid off, can pry open. Especially electronic sounds, like TVs and fans and central heating vents, the smallest rattle because what’s Outside is bigger.

I didn’t know. Being an Insider, I haven’t known Inside.

It’s taken a week to be able to write about the first session of the Write Around Portland group I’m facilitating. I was right: this group will change me.

The first meeting was more challenging than I had imagined it would be. I’ve never facilitated a group with so many folks managing so many things pulling on them, tugging from the outside and the inside. Unfortunately, one writer couldn’t manage the strain of those forces, and I didn’t know how to help him. The group unraveled.

But they wrote a lot.

This week the sun is out, and I have support coming to the group, and I have more plans, a better idea of who and when and where and how much. It’s such a privilege to be able to walk in.

This morning the view across the water is dark teal, a little muddy, maybe silver here and there. I’ve stood at a ferry dock before, stood on the deck of the ferry, rumbling with huge engine power, and understood: the shoreline ahead will change me. Fact. No doubt. And I’m choosing to move right into whatever I will be, after the crossing.

Today I meet with someone from Bud Clark Commons who will answer questions, show me around. Today I head into change.

Have a sweet Valentine’s.