Category Archives: Colorado

Red tape, green tape

August 26, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New (College) Moon

Today Islam went in a green tape box. Some of it. Those Tafsir books I got at the Dar-el Salaam Mosque in 2012. Red box. A bunch of outdated travel guides: Thailand, South America, Venice, Turkey. Some books on India and Japan, too. But I kept a bunch on Islam, Japan, Korea, India and Hinduism.

Now the empty bookshelves outnumber the filled, the boxes have begun to assume mass, large rectangles with colorful liquor ads spread out in random patterns. The green tape boxes now far outnumber the red, though a very large number of red have already gone. As the book mounds grow and the shelves stand empty, the reality of Colorado comes closer.

Colorado Gardening-for thinking gardeners-came yesterday. Not sure how they got this address, some random form filling probably, but the news is welcome. Up in Idaho Springs, Clear Creek County, our target destination, the last frost of the season looks like it will come on time, September 12th. Makes the necessity of hoops and plastic evident.

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, The Move, Third Phase

A Confrontation About Time

August 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New (College) Moon

This week on the calendar I have on Monday through Saturday: pack, Latin. Thursday will be our state fair day. Other than that packing, Latin and work in the garden will occupy us.

Today and until I’m done I will be packing the study in which I work every day. That means the sorting will get harder, green tape boxes outnumbering red tape ones. Probably by a lot. It also means the confrontation between time remaining (in my life) and the projects (intellectual and creative) that keep me excited will come center stage. I’ll try to sort out the ones I feel I can fruitfully engage over the next 20 years from the ones I can’t.

That means I’m considering active intellectual and creative work at least into my late 80’s. That feels like a stretch, maybe, but one I believe my health and potential longevity justifies.

Let me give you an idea of what I have in mind. Complete the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Write at least four more novels. Write essays or a book on Reimagining My Faith. Write and read much more poetry. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Enlightenment, liberal thought, modernism. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Great Work. Include in this work considered attention to Asian literature, art and thought, especially Chinese and Indian. Continue regular art historical research and write essays about aesthetics and particular art/artists.

Why? Because I can. I’ve no evidence so far that my thinking is strikingly original or unusually deep, but my intellectual maturation has taken a longer time than I imagined it would. So the best may yet be ahead. Or so it feels to me. Under any circumstances such work will keep me alert and focused.

As for right now. Where are those empty boxes?

Colorado, Poetry, Writing

Poetic and Chaotic

August 24, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New (College) Moon

Things to do in Colorado: write poetry. Read about the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Wright. He sits in the same place, sees the same view and has done for over 30 years. While there, he notices his moods, captures them in his way.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry regularly, a very long time. Over 45 years. Then, all I’d written got stolen along with my 1950 Chevy panel truck, a favorite vehicle that truck. It had three on the column, a sticky clutch and burned oil. Somehow, though, it stole my heart, just like that blue Volvo station wagon and that red Toyota Celica.

Somebody stole it, or else I parked it while drunk and never remembered I owned it. Coulda happened like that, too, I suppose. Life was like that back then in Muncie, Indiana. Poetic and chaotic and political. Another college memory, coming under the college moon.

(could be it. now if that file of poetry is still under the seat.)

So anyhow I think I’ll find a study in the mountains with a window where I can put a table and a pad of paper, a mechanical pencil. And I’ll sit there, noting what passes beyond the window and within my mind, jotting it down, see what the mountain air conjures.

The other kind of writing, this blog, fiction, I can do at a typewriter (oops, there’s an anachronism. I meant, keyboard.) but poetry has been manual for me, maybe because I started writing poetry before I knew how to type. I learned typing in high school, my senior year.

You know, I’d like to have that Chevy panel truck back. Wonder if whoever took it is done with it now?

Colorado, The Move

Fun.

August 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Here’s an unexpected thing. I’m having fun. Complex projects taken from ground zero to functional used to be my main strength. Lots of project elements, interlocking timelines, decisions getting made, things getting done. Once the decision to move was final and the process began to gain headway, old work habits began to emerge.

We’ve got contractors, realtors, family and most of all ourselves committed to a next February put the house on the market date. That means we also have to find a new place in roughly that time, too. Pacing and execution spread over a year, a bit less, has made the work move smoothly and, except for psychic disjunction, the occasional cognitive dissonance of trying to be two places at once, without pain.

There is, of course, the climax of the whole matter governed by the sale price of this house. It’s a big unknown right now and will be for several months. But we will get the whole move finished and become Coloradans by some time in the first half of next year.

Colorado, Music, The Move

The Way West

August 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

More decluttering. Harder than it seems. Each decision means a bit of the past, or at least physical evidence of it, gets dismissed. It can feel harsh. I threw out today all the tours that I had designed while a docent at the MIA. Why? They are based specifically on objects at the MIA and will not be useful in another museum except in a very abstract way, too abstract to support moving them to Colorado. Still. Those tours, with 8-10 items, hours, sometimes days of research and the memories associated with the tours themselves were not just pieces of paper, but parts of my life.

(trails west)

It’s easier to throw out or box up to sell Minnesota focused gardening books and files. They’re related to a geographic particularity and we’ll not be here. The space those took up will have xeriscaping, Rocky Mountain flora, bee-keeping in the mountains books and files.

Now all of the files and books in the garden study, the six bookshelves in the exercise area and the three in the area outside the garden study have been sorted and almost all boxed, appropriately taped, or tossed.

Today’s music was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. You gotta serve somebody, it might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. The anti-libertarian ballad.

Colorado, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Leave Taking

August 19, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Last night was a good example of what I’ll miss. Where will I learn about Flogging Molly? Who will want to play Rodrigo and the first movement of Appalachian Spring so I can appreciate their appreciation of them?

(Rodrigo monument in Aranjuez, Spain)

It was a sweet evening. And it started around a meat loaf, with ketchup squirted on top, ears of corn boiled and slathered with butter, roasted potatoes, a garden salad. This is Midwestern comfort food at its zenith, the ne plus ultra of small town supper tables. Cooked by Ode who said, “I like to cook. Have everything come out at the same time.”

These men. I’ve been with them so long. They know my stories and I know theirs. We want to know what each other listen to. Not to judge it, but to absorb it. It becomes part of our knowledge of each other, broadening our tastes as we deepen our understanding. Sort of like a book club only better.

These meetings are once a month and where once they stretched on to the horizon, now they have a terminus. Each one counts down, moving toward my last, at least my last as a Minnesota resident.

In more settled times, where moving on meant having the carpenter make a pine box, the preacher give a sermon and the gravedigger complete the work, this kind of leave taking most often happened unawares. One moment you were here and then either suddenly or after a brief illness, you were not. Unawares and remarked by rituals of leave taking, the pilgrim gone on ahead.

In this instance though the leave-taking stretches out and even after there will be the right of return. Not final, at least not yet.

Colorado, Garden, The Move

Way In The Move

August 16, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Interesting. I’ve been living in the move. Too much. Pushing to get stuff packed, get the exterior work, house and grounds, underway, looking at movers and thinking about storage. Pushing. Turning on my phone and my jambox, listening to country music, Porgy and Bess, the blues, Coltrane while I fill boxes. Stuffing my life in liquor boxes, slapping on red or green tape, some packing tape, stacking them up. In the move. In it.

So much that this week I’ve done no Latin, little gardening, no writing other than the blog, been to no museums and taken little time to just consider life, be with it, flow toward the future. Except with the move. It’s as if I’ve time-shifted myself to next year, setting aside now for then.

But this is a long walk, not a sprint. And I’ve been sprinting. Time to slow down a bit. Smell the Latin, pick a tomato. Thin the third crop of beets and carrots. Bring in the onions from the shed.

Tomorrow we’re going to work outside and in the garage. A combination of then and now.

This balancing first toward the future, then back to the present, a sort of see-saw of attention and energy seems understandable to me, part of the inner work of leaving while staying. Staying while leaving.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

August 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.

Colorado, The Move

Slow, steady

August 14, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

After picking the wild grapes, the garden study packing. With some minor exceptions it is now clear and all the furniture in it, three bookshelves, two file cabinets, a work bench, a drafting table and a desk (which sounds like a lot I know) can go either to the consignment shop or into storage for staging.

(Albert Bierstadt-Estes Park, Colorado, Whyte’s Lake)

The bookshelf that held all my gardening related books is, too, almost empty. After I parse the files, quite a few, I’ll be ready to begin in the study itself. Kate has gotten a good start both downstairs and upstairs. We’re making progress, slow and steady, just like we planned.

Kate made grape jelly today from the grapes I picked, 24 quarter pints and 12 half pints. As we watched the end of State of Play, the musical clicking of jelly jars sealing punctuated the evening. In spite of my low carb ways I sampled it. Pretty damn good.

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, The Move

Memory Train Passing

August 11, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

The garden study packing, nearly done, came to a halt due to a need for some more packing supplies that won’t arrive until Wednesday. But it’s close to empty. By packing up the garden bookshelf tomorrow, I’ll be able to finish that whole area when the new plastic file holders come.

That means Wednesday the biggest push of the project will get underway. The culling and packing of the study itself. In some ways it may go quicker than the garden study, but there are many more books involved. There will not be though, in here, the picture I found today of my two and half-year old self trying to crawl while my mother and a post-polio rehab specialist looked on. My neck is on the floor, curved up at angle. I’m looking up at the photographer. Brought a pang of empathy for that little guy, long dissolved into the man, but still present.

Nor will there be the hot picture of Kate taken beside the Siah Armajani bridge between Loring Park and the Walker Sculpture Garden. Or the polariods of Mary and Dad, of our house on E. Monroe Street and the one on Canal. Each of these stopped me and I had to wait for the memory train to pass before I could cross the intersection and get back to work.

Also, I packed in a red tape box, sell, my copies of three volumes of St. John of the Cross. To anyone else they would be have been old books, fat paperbacks that cost $1.65. To me though they were the touching gift of a fellow philosophy student at Wabash College, a senior, who saw something in me and wanted to share his passion. Yet now 40 years removed, even that connection no longer made me want them.

They were not the only decisions like that. Books, for me, often entrain memories in just the same way a photograph or a travel souvenir does. That makes these choices hard sometimes and feelings slow the process down. Taking a year makes a lot of sense.