The Furious Spinner

Or should I call this Under the Tucson Sun, Part Deux.

Mario is reading Shadow Cities, and I'm sitting at the table with you all, listening to Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison. I grew up on Johnny Cash. Listened to my mother belt out "Burning Ring of Fire." I'd roll my eyes, but I enjoyed his songs. Mario and I went to see Walk the Line tonight. I was impressed. I never caught the leads acting, and the story was compelling. Had me crying and singing and wishing they were still alive. (Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash died within months of each other in 2003.)

We're still having a fine time in Tucson. I'm living the perfect life. I wake up next to my sweetheart. Eventually we get up, have breakfast, then walk the wash or a trail at the park down the road. If we walk the wash, we stop by the Quail House first and turn on the heater and air purifier. Then we walk. After our walk, I go to the Quail House and write, and Mario goes back to the casita—the opposite of what we did last year. At lunch time, I walk back to the casita and Mario feeds me, usually beans and rice or a sandwich and soup. Then I go back to the Quail House and write some more. Usually I take a break to walk the wash. The character in my novel walks the wash, too, so I'm usually walking the wash for her or with her. (How many times can a person say "walk the wash" in one paragraph?) I'm looking with her eyes as I walk. And she has found some astonishing and ordinary things: bottles, pieces of metal, pieces of plastic, an arrow, a shovel, and more. I've been putting what I find in the novel. It goes something like this:

It was Saturday morning, and Myla walked the wash looking for trash in the dirt. She looked for treasure too. One man’s trash was another woman’s treasure. And vice versa. She always said. She carried two bags over her right shoulder. Into the plastic bag, she dropped garbage; into the ruby-colored cloth bag, she put those bits of refuse she thought she might sell on 4th Street, at the Church of the Old Mermaids. It was not a real church. At least not how most people defined “church.” It was the space where she put her table, chair, and wares on Saturdays, shine or shine. She called it the Church of Old Mermaids because her mother told her when she was a child that the desert had once been a vast sea. She liked imagining that the mermaids had not dried up when the sea did; they merely changed their attitudes. And maybe their skin and fin-ware.

Her feet slip-slided over the sand. A ground squirrel scurried out from beneath a palo verde whose bare green branches stretched out over the wash, dangling dry bean pods as though it wanted her to snatch up a couple. So she did. She dropped them into the ruby bag.

“Thank you,” she murmured. Wasn’t about to say she wouldn’t be able to get a nickel for them. Unless she came up with a particularly good story. Like how these pods came from the wash that used to be a river where the mermaids were stranded, when the sea began to dry; these pods came from a tree hanging over the wash where the mermaids were stranded, where they finally came to shore, and the first thing they did, these Old Mermaids, was to plant themselves a palo verde. All green, just like the Mother Star Stupendous Mermaid’s tail had been, you know, before she had to leave the sea, the river, the wash.

Around 4:00, I go back to the casita. Then we walk again, or we sit and talk, or make dinner. Afterward we play games or read or go to a movie or a bookstore. They have a place here where you can see first run movies for three dollars. We also watched one season of Upstairs, Downstairs on my computer while playing cards and Sorry.

I'm very happy. I was sitting in the Quail House yesterday thinking, "I could do this the rest of my life."

I love my sweetie, love this place, love my book.

Love, love, love. Makes the world go 'round. Well, actually...

Today I had lunch with the Southwest Director of The Wildlands Projects here at the house. I talked to him about the recovery of the jaguar. Did you know the jaguar is indigenous to the United States? The director called the effort of the jaguar to reestablish itself in the Southwest as nothing less than "valiant." (But I'll write more about this later.) This is all part of a bigger project about healing ecological wounds I'm doing. By the way, I wrote an essay for the Journal of Mythic Arts while I was here (the first few days we were here) called "Healing the Wounded Wild." I'll let you know when it's posted.

My surgery is scheduled for February 28.

I talked to my mother-in-law yesterday (I love her!), and she said, "This year has started out very badly." And she began listing all the terrible things that had happened. She had been watching CNN. I said, "Don't watch that stuff!" What can she or anyone else do about those poor miners, or people on a skating rink, etc. Just listing tragedies and beating them into the ground doesn't help anything or anyone. Mario's father was a nickel miner. He was involved in one accident--it left him partially deaf in one ear. He also helped in at least one rescue. They were digging out the man with their hands so that they wouldn't dislodge any more rocks and cause another cave-in. Unfortunately, by the time Mr. Milosevic and the others reached the man, he had already died. It was very hard on all the men involved in the rescue.

Johnny Cash has finished. Kate Bush is singing now. Not sure I like this album. Have to wait and see. I haven't listened to her in about twenty years.

Enough of this. Hope you're all having a grand New Year.

Ta!

Labels: Arizona, travel

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