Friday, 6/28, I’m headed north to Millinocket Memorial Library. I’m reading at 6 p.m. with a few other writers who have work in Rivers of Ink, a charity anthology around the Penobscot River benefiting Friends of Katahdin Woods & Waters in support of the new welcome center. The publisher is 12 Willows Press.
I tried to convince the powers-that-be that the reading really belonged in Patten, but they insisted on Millinocket. So my apologies to all my people. I know some of you will not be able to make the trip.
Just know that I’m fully aware that without my people in Patten, Mount Chase, Sherman, Stacyville, Benedicta, and Island Falls, I’d never be the writer I am today. So many of my stories—including the one in this anthology—have their origins in the life I lived for decades among people who are truly extraordinary. I still call it home. I still call you family.
And I’d be remiss without noting that if Doug Fletcher, who was the editor of the Houlton Pioneer Times, hadn’t given me a chance and if the community hadn’t read my twice-monthly short essays on not quite my “life,” but something akin to the place’s life, with me as a kind of witness participant, I wouldn’t have published more than a thousand pieces (nonfiction, fiction, poetry) in journals and magazines, anthologies. I wouldn’t have had work broadcast on NPR. I wouldn’t have a musical I’m involved in creating premiering at a theater in Connecticut this August.
I’m a writer who learns what I even think through the words, the actual process of writing, the exploration on the page. It’s always been that way.
If you can make it, I hope to see you Friday. If you know someone who might want to know, please spread the word.
ANGEL IN THE SKY (late in the cycle of publishing in HPT before I moved away)
Let me tell you about what my son saw, home for the longest stretch of days we have known together in two years. I wish I could say that I saw it all with him, but I both wanted to be with him every waking moment and needed that particle of personal space that has become mine for the first time in my life. And so, unspoken, we worked out the balance that is uniquely ours—the balance in which we each recognize the other’s need to make their own unencumbered walk, unmonitored by mothers or sons.
It has been this way—this natural rhythm of human respect—since he dressed himself at eighteen months in checkered pants he now howls at in the old photographs mired under plastic in those cheap self-stick albums that eventually destroy images, and leave you only with the memories of them on the page. That will happen a few decades from now.
This son takes photos of everything—insects and nostrils and panting moose, friends, acquaintances, people on the streets—and doesn’t put them in albums. He will have his photos just like Ansel Adams and Peter Ralston and Abelardo Morell.
But in the day of the sky angel and the day of the rainbow in a cloud, he had no camera with him.
And so I know them only by the sound of his voice and the animation of his strong, large-boned body in the kitchen, the sun glittering everywhere. I hadn’t realized how much glass my kitchen held through which to glitter light until the day of the angel. Driving back from town, he turned, he tells me, from the main road into a sky filled with a cloud shaped like an angel. His voice is bright and fast. When he looked again, it had turned—its wings perfectly shifted and aligned to accompany its face in profile, its head tipped delicately chin-down, its palms extended. This is not a spiritual boy in the formal sense.
The rainbow In a cloud, a lumpy sphere of color, was the palette he will carry with him always. They are rare he has read—these clouds of illuminated hues.
This rare son of mine is the right person to carry rare gifts. He will know what to do with them eventually.
And so today I watch him pack away the angel and the rainbow-in-a-cloud along with the one firefly that slipped out of one of many spectacular firefly skies, alighted on his thumb and rode around the nighttime house from hand pump to summer’s tablecloth-covered cookstove for hours, twinkling that green, so-summer-light-with-a-son.
