Amber light flowed through the windows as I listened to the crowd at a Durham Bulls game yelling for their team. I never cared about the Durham Bulls, though their field stood only four blocks from the house on Trinity Street that I shared with four roommates and a calico cat who was mine. She would come in and out by the windows. And I would tell her about California.

My dreams of California did not pave the ground and throw up strips. In my head, I cleared all the car lots, fast food places, chain stores, supermarkets, bars, and odd businesses. Or I just turned my back to them, floated out to my California.

Once, in a bookstore inside a converted brick tobacco barn, I found a greeting card featuring an Ansel Adams photo of a live oak tree. I still have that card, somewhere among my things. Though rendered in black and white, the Adams image captured the true image of California. I painted in the colors: the hazy, pale blue sky, the rumbling dark green of the leaves, and the singing gold of the grass. Oaks on rolling, bowl-shaped lomas represented California for me.

When you can’t stop dreaming of a place, you have to go there. Like Santiago who lulled himself to sleep seeing the lions on the beach in Africa, you feel the pull. A friend of mine dreams of the streets of New York City. She desperately wants to go back. Some tell her that she should just forget about the East Coast, that her place is here. I say to do as I did and, at the first opportunity, rush back to the place that spawns these images.

I returned to California twenty one years ago. I have heard all the bastardized half truths about what it is like to live here, about what I think, and what my neighbors are like. This California where I live on the edge of the metropolis, echoes the dreams I had at the crack of a bat in North Carolina. I do not have to walk far to rest in the shade of a live oak or grasp the yellow stalks of wild oats. This is Home.

While I was at my appointment, the National Weather Service issued a dire warning:

Bulletin – Immediate Broadcast Requested Tornado Watch Outline Update For Wt 30 Nws Storm Prediction Center Norman Ok 1110 AM PST Tue Feb 22 2005

Tornado Watch 30 Is In Effect Until 600 PM PST For The Following Locations

Cac037-059-065-073-083-111-230200- /O.New.Kwns.To.A.0030.050222t1910z-050223t0200z/

Ca . California Counties Included Are

Los Angeles Orange Riverside Santa Barbara San Diego Ventura

You should understand that while we have high winds running across the scalp of this hill all the time, they don’t generally go in circles. Santa Anas pour off the mountains, following the straight lines of corsetting canyons, then whipping out of the mouths like a blast in the ear by a trombone. They gust up to 90 miles an hour, carrying off lawn chairs and flags. They tear down tree limbs and sometimes push over the enormous eucalyptuses that are the remnants of old windbreaks from the days when this was ranchland and orchards. But they do not level buildings — at least not solid ones like we have here.

During the early eighties, I lived in tornado country, specifically North Carolina. Over the course of two or three days in the spring of 1984, several twisters touched down all over the state. I was home alone with my roommate, Trent, my two cats, a mother cat, and a litter of kittens sired by the male of my two cats, Wendell the Bear. The radio announced that there was a tornado watch in effect for the county, so we gathered a few precious objects such as our notebooks and, of course, the cats for a trip down to the basement. Just as we had all the animals corralled, the NWS called off the alert. So we decided to go out to dinner at a local hofbrau, conveniently located in the basement of a nearby A&P.

Just as we reached the place, the radio announced that a tornado had been sighted west of the city. We jumped out of the car. As we reached the edge of the parking lot, there was a loud crash and a sudden downpour of rain. We ran downstairs, praying that the car didn’t fly off like Dorothy’s house. Once in the restaurant, we just ordered ourselves a meal and hoped for the best.

Four blocks away, the twister had touched down and taken out the auto repair garage of a Sears Roebuck. The whole sheet metal building had collapsed into a pile of tin playing cards. Over the next few days, a comic story developed: the insurance company tried to claim that a freak wind had destroyed the structure. This was because Sears had covered themselves for tornados but not for wind damage. I am not sure how this turned out.

We don’t have tornado insurance. If a storm rips the curved clay shingles off our roof, blasts out our windows, and throws the walls into the street, we’re in trouble, I think.

When I lived in North Carolina, I had a calico cat named Brandywhine or Ms. Whine for short. She saw her first snow when she was nine months old. She whined at the back door. I let her out. She put one paw in the snow and pulled it back up. Then she pressed it deep into the accumulation. Mewed. Pulled it up again. This continued until I had enough of the warm air leaving the house. It upset her that I closed the door. She fancied herself a female, feline Janus, I suppose.

There may be ice storm nodules on the ground in the morning. I just checked out the window. You can just make out the roughness of the sky rocks amid the drizzle. This Californian hasn’t seen a hail fall in California since his childhood. Lynn’s quite used to it. I don’t know what to think should this become a regular part of our winter up here on the hill.

Predicted snow level: 4500 feet.

Many years ago, when I was living in North Carolina, I had a conversation about the “importance of accepting Jesus” in my life. This person, a student at the University of North Carolina who had been venting about a “Bible as Literature” course that he’d taken, told me that there had been no other person who had taught what Jesus had taught, citing the Golden Rule as given by God.

“Um,” I said. “The Buddha taught the Golden Rule four hundred years before Christ lived.”

He snorted and insisted that the sections where the Buddha sounded like Christ were added after the dissemination of the New Testament. I rejected his explanation and went on” “The Buddha did much that was admirable. He gave up his wealth, his sex life, and his power to live in the woods. He suffered there and when he realized that this suffering was only killing him, he began eating healthily and left the forest to help others live compassionately. Before Christ was born, the Buddha was living the life which Christ told the rich young man to follow.”

“Yes,” the disappointed Jesus Freak snorted. “But Christ allowed himself to be crucified.”

“Yes,” I replied. “And you have neither given up your wealth nor suffered for your conscience, have you?”

One might also consider how different the social environments that the Buddha and the Christ lived in. The first lived in a society where the people were ruled by men of their own ethnicity. When he preached, he was allowed to settle himself in a deer park by a wealthy benefactor. The latter lived in the considerably more dangerous situation of occupation under Roman rule. The Romans liked to kill people. If Buddha had come walking through Roman provinces preaching the Eightfold Path and the idea that the gods deceived themselves into thinking that they had created the universe, he probably would have ended up on a cross, too.

In Buddha’s India, Jesus might have been granted refuge in a deer park.

Here’s a page which lists Twelve Buddhist Influences in the Near East.

People got to talking about cities in the South on IRC tonight and my head began to swirl with images of Durham, North Carolina. Chiefly a street with green edges that swerved wildly to the left and shot towards Raleigh. It existed about four blocks from my home.

I drove around Durham some, but until the day I left, there were corners of it that I never explored. Fanning out from this street, for example, were neighborhoods which remain a blank for me. I found places only as I needed them. One of the last locales I discovered was the Western Union office, with a yellow sign out front, a glass store front, and a barred window through which they dispensed cash to me.

I regret never having stopped my car to investigate the cemetery which crossed the street a few blocks from the last place where I lived. Durham had two plans about it: a neat north-south-east-west plat and a few sections — owned by Duke University and other large landowners — where the common sense was cast aside to fill plantation landscaping sensibilities.

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a bedroom.

It was the best bedroom I ever slept in and I have missed it ever since I moved out of the house on Trinity Avenue in Durham, North Carolina. It wasn’t the people who made the place but the room. A corner room in the back of a massive house, windows opening out on two sides, an old-fashioned radiator, and best of all — space. Space for my bed, space for a desk, space for the big red easy chair that I’ve carted from place to place ever since. I could take two strides from my queen size bed, situated in the middle of the room, to any wall. I placed two sawhorses and an old door against one wall and made it my desk. (I still have the Michigan armchair that I used, too.) My time there wasn’t much for romance — I slept with my girl friend once in that room and we broke up two days later — but there I exercised for a time my insatiable habit for writing.

The room offered plenty of objects and vantages to stimulate me. Next to one of the windows was a seat with a chest built into it. The view out the side and out the back wasn’t the greatest: I enjoyed a view of the abandoned house on one side and our backyard, which was perpetually filled with old cars, out the back windows.

I loved opening all the windows when a storm swept through the brick tobacco warehouses and shook the house. I loved pressing my nose to the glass when it snowed. The room mates left something to be desired, but I held my tongue mostly, because the room was so damned special. You could close the door on them and be elsewhere in two seconds.

I don’t know when the house was built. Wood made up the whole frame. We didn’t have grass in the front yard because it was too heavily shaded. I could step through my window onto the roof of a side porch — which one of my room mates didn’t like because she was afraid I’d fall through. So I didn’t do it very often. My cat at the time, a harlequin-face calico named Brandy Whine, loved to go out on the porch roof or jump from the window sill onto an elm where she ambushed squirrels or slipped into the adjacent derelict to chase rats. When I packed my things and Ms. Whine to move down the road to Chapel Hill, I knew that it would always be there, my perfect room, a memory of the honey that had once slipped over my tongue.

• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: If only….

Note: This is twenty-fifth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a time you gave someone a present..

Judy. First Christmas. I wanted to give her a gift that was both luxurious and inexpensive. So I went to Belk Leggett’s in my torn-out faded blue jeans. Those blue jeans were my trademark, my protest against polyesters and Izod sports-shirts in an age before grunge became a fashion. Thread-gagged mouths opened at the knees and along the seams– I discarded them when a hole opened in the crotch or the ass. When I wore them, I got offered handouts or questioned intensively before I was allowed to enter restaurants.

I wore them into Belk’s that winter evening with no snow fall, that evening when I skirted the crystal counters and beseeched a clerk to help me select a gift for my fiancé. Something special. Something that would sew up the holes that she had in her mind about me. The clerk overlooked my feigned impoverishment. She suggested the rich gift which was within my budget: a silk scarf. So soft, so iridescent. I turned each scarf like I was flipping the pages in a book filled with reproductions from a favorite museum or photos of a place I had visited such as Firenze. A most tasteful design caught my eye. A simple geometric done in tangerine, dark lime, and lemon — the colors of a California winter to warm the heart of this woman who would be opening it on a white New York Christmas.

I gave it to her just before we both left the state — this was North Carolina, the scene of many sorrows and some joys. I went to Portland, Oregon for Christmas with my West Coast family.

After the holiday, I picked her up at the airport, drove her home, and brought the luggage through her front door. En route, she told me how she loved the present. “What did your mother think?” I asked. “Oh she liked it,” and then Judy told me stories about her mother and the maiden aunt who shared the house.

I did all my duties as I have described when we got there. While she rifled around up stairs, I spied the open white box and the scarf on the kitchen table. The lie could stand no more. When she came down, she confessed. She hadn’t trusted me. What if I had packed a joke gift — “candy pants”, something in latex, or a rubber wonder of the kind they sold in adult book stores? Oh the embarassment! Her mother — who toyed with fundamentalism mainly to irritate people she didn’t like — would have seized upon this and nagged her until she promised to see me no more. “But I love you!,” she cried and I bought it. For the time being.

Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: I can’t remember.

Note: This is twenty-third in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a cold snap..

The part of Durham where I lived before The Wits End consisted of straight avenues that slashed across each other at right angles. The houses — built during the 1950s veterans’ loans boom — were lined up precisely along the street and strictly parallel to each other. The contractors had the mercy to vary the design slightly so that by varying the shade of paint and the variety of tree that you planted out front, searchers could find your address easily.

The second winter that I lived there, it snowed heavily. Three days of enclosure started my heart on strumming a dull, jabbing beat on my rib cage. My legs protested “We want to move!” Thus, I came to the moment when I knew I could not sit through another minute of that listless white noise. So, though it was eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, I pulled on two layers of socks, long fishnet underwear, a down jacket, my fuzzy grey hiking boots. Against the exclamations of my roommates who could see no point in leaving the comfort of the four bedroom duplex, I stepped out into the cold.

Earlier, the city scraped the streets, leaving a thin layer of new frost, broken ice, and snow flakes from a lazy afternoon storm. I heard only the wind teasing the naked elms and, now and then, a television set playing too loud.

I trudged towards the nearest main street and checked to see if there was life at the laundromat. Businesses along that whole block extinguished their lights early that night for want of customers and fear of larger drifts ro be formed in the passing of clouds during the night.

As I stood at the window of the laundromat — feeling disappointed that I could not go inside to warm my hands next to one of the dryer windows as I talked with the attendant — I heard a schlussing sound. I turned, ready to defend myself, however pathetically, against the attack of the wendigo come out of the north to steal the warmth I hoarded beneath my skin. A creature that was red as a brick tobacco warehouse slid along the center of the street. It eased itself to a stop at a red light, leaned on an extra pair of licorice stick legs, and turned to study me with enormous, single-lensed eyes.

I nodded to the cross-country skier and he returned the gesture. When the light greened, he moved on, vanishing in the darkness beyond the North Carolina School of Science.

My soles of my feet felt like a pair of lead plates, loosely clamped to the ends of my legs. Nevertheless, I raced home. I breathed the news of what I had seen and my delight at my witnessing it to three, doughy faces that glowed silver in the light of the television set. My roommates — a pair of good old boys and a beer-sucking Xerox repairman, stared at me. I went upstairs to think about it, alone, in the backroom overlooking the yard that had nothing in it except a collapsing garage and a snow-covered lawn that stretched seamlessly into the neighbor’s yard.

I hated that house and those people ever after. They did not know how to sing while they drew a breath of the cold night air or how to dance with the snowflakes.

In case you were wondering, I don’t present the raw work to you. After I get to a comfortable (or forced) stopping place, I carry my notebook to the computer and write what has erupted from me during the session. You see refined sugar here, not cane in the rust-bottomed fields.

Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a premonition..

Note: This is twenty-second in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Some things you’ll never forget..

I don’t know where I first heard the song Smoke gets in your eyes. It’s one of those that people whistle to you when they think you’ve whined enough and they want to restore the feel of the party to the gathering in which you’ve sobbed.

I remember the tune in connection with the parties we used to have at the house we called The Wits End, in Durham, North Carolina, just two blocks down the street and a block over from the stadium where the Bulls played — just behind the two long rows of brick tobacco warehouses which stank at summer’s end with the new harvest of bright leaf, the chaw that made George Washington Duke rich and gave a reason for the town of Durham to be born five years after Generals Sherman and Johnston signed a peace at a tiny farmhouse amid the soil-killing tobacco fields.

Durham made its money off cancer and was proud of the fact. The barns made for tourist attractions. One was converted into a shopping center with a bookstore, a new age massage practitioner, a commercialized folk art store, and similar trash shops.

It’s the red of the sun shining on those barns in the late afternoon that I recall, a red that wasn’t quite the color of the blood that smokers coughed up; nor the color of the “red delicious” apples — they weren’t delicious — that they sold at the A&P across the street from Duke University.

I remember the crushed chain link fence that separated our desolate backyard and parking area from the verdant, mostly untended grass of a city park. Parks in North Carolina didn’t need caretakers except to mow them. They didn’t require sprinkling systems because the clouds dumped cargo imported from the Pacific Ocean several times every summer. It was an alien place for a California bred in the lands of aqueducts, tract houses, and earnest, frequent waterings of the front lawns….

[To be continued....Time was up in the group. But it will be continued!]

This blog by Donna could have been written for today’s meme.

Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a cold snap..

I’m leading a Wednesday writing group at the Aliso Viejo Barnes and Noble now. (Hi Nannette.) This group works differently from other groups: we don’t gather to critique or just to socialize as others do (these are valid reasons to meet, too, IMHO); we gather in the cafe to write together. Because last night was the first night, a few things went a little rough but I’ve noted what needs to be tweaked and we’re doing it again next Wednesday at 6.

We wrote for thirty minutes nonstop. I choose the topic of “a town that I had passed through”. Here are the better parts of what I created in that frenzy:

Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. The name always reminded me of dog food. The divided highway spread extra wide and never really went through the town. The lore back in Durham was that some wealthy egotist by the name of Fuquay gave money to the town with the condition that they rename it for him. [Some people objected: they liked the old name] Peace was made between the boosters and the traditionalists. A hyphen was inserted. The town surrounded by green could keep its sense of history and meet the practicalities of the 20th century. Towns needed money to survive and Fuquay-Varina wasn’t close enough to either Raleigh or Durham to be a suburb. Folks in North Carolina just didn’t drive as far as Californians or New Yorkers. The distance wasn’t much more than that from El Monte to downtown to Los Angeles, but people back there just didn’t drive it, except to sell some of the tobacco crop or make a pilgrimage to the shrines of conspicuous consumption in the bigger cities — malls, which were usually located on the farther end of the cities because the owners/promoters just didn’t think that Fuquay-Varina had enough magnetisim to merit pushing their property development sights in that direction.

I don’t remember much [about the place]. It had the usual brick buildings and white-walled wooden houses that you saw all over North Carolina. More brick than wood because this was tornado country where Class Threes hit every other spring, sucking up the delicately built and leaving the sturdy brick. Natural selection was at work all over [the state]. Only the brick and the concrete survived the bashing storms and brick was prettier than concrete.


Tourists came for the brick and the matching autumn leaves. Fuquay Varina, however, wasn’t old enough or pretty enough to merit even a single bed and breakfast then, though that could have changed by now. I think it more likely that rather becoming a tourist draw, the edges of the cities to the north have crossed the loblolly pine lots and tobacco fields and crept up to the town limits.


Tobacco allotments, I learned, were movable. Many years ago I used to visit a Trappist monaster that lay in the opposite direction from Fuquay-Varine. A cluster of cabins was all that it was, really; just cabins, a main house with a kitchen and a library, a weaving studio, a small chapel, and a field that the monks rented out to a neighbor. They had a tobacco allotment and they sold it for reasons of conscience. How could a crew of nonviolent monks sleep knowing that their land produced warring cancer cells in the lungs? So they sold it and after they did, I went up for a visit and was surprised that the land was still there, uncultivated. [The allotment had moved to a different parcel.] I flew kites there and chatted with the brothers in the field which they let grow a crop of ragweed because it took a few years for the tobacco poison to leach out of the soil. So, to this day, as far as I know, it still grows ragweed and pokeweed and the other native wildflowers that mot of us allergy sufferers and tamed garden lovers call “weeds”.


And I still see my kites flying up there, blue and purple sleds in the sky, a dark growth of loblolly pines squaring it off at all ends, a wall to be watched because. as Charlie Brown knew all too well, kites eat trees. Big child that I was, I cried whenever I lost a kite or experimental balloon. I was only twenty four, you see, and catching up, playing in the ways that I had always wanted to play. For the first time in my life, I was keeping a journal because the Piedmont was a strange and alien place where incessant trees blocked the horizon lines and there were no hills to speak of. Flat. Almost pure flatland except now and then a high hill reared up and the locals called it a mountain, which made me laugh. It made me cry, too. because this kind of terrain went on for miles and there was no desert or rocky ocean shore or mountains to break the monotony of the loblollies and and the tobacco fields. I cried sometimes because I missed the chaparral. When I dreamed of California, I dreamed of live oaks in golden meadows. Here, dammit, everything was green, except for blue grey rivers and the brick warehouses and homes.