Today
(Friday) I was on my way to the writers’ and artists’ retreat I go to
every Labor Day weekend near the Russian River north of San Francisco. I
was lunching on sugar snap peas and dried-tomato jack from the farmers’
market as I drove, so I wasn’t really hungry, but I stopped in at the
Sequoia Drive-In on the way into Sebastopol for a fruit milkshake
because they are so good. It’s a little place with tables outside. After
he’d taken my order, the younger of the guys working there said, “Could
you do me a big favor on your way out? Could you tell that guy I hate
him?” gesturing at the older guy who was fixing something on my side of
the counter. “Sure,” I said, as cheerfully as I had been asked. “What I
want to tell both of you is that I started coming here with my parents,
and my dad died in 1971, so it would have been before that.” The younger
guy said “How long has this place been here, anyway?” Older guy
answered, “The longest ago anyone has said is 1956.”
I
was most of the way through my raspberry shake when the young guy came
out and asked if I’d told the other guy he hated him and if I’d tried
their new french fried onion rings. I hadn’t done either, but told him
the shake was all I needed. He said he would make a couple of rings for
me just to sample so I acquiesced. He brought half a dozen and oh, my! I
ate them all. Thin and crunchy. I went back to the counter and told
them these were the best onion rings I had ever tasted (they were) and
that I’d put them in my blog. I’m now telling everybody up here about
them. The place has a web site, too.
When
I got to Occidental, which is a few miles short of the camp where the
retreat is, I found they were having a farmers’ market in the big
parking area in front of the main street stores. On the way up I’d been
listening to a Simon and Garfunkel tape I’d picked up at a yard sale in
the next block down from my house and thinking that Paul Simon was my
favorite contemporary songwriter, but here at the farmers’ market was a
grey-bearded white guy and a young Asian guy singing John Prine’s “Make
Me an Angel That Flies from Montgomery” and I thought, well, maybe John
Prine...no, he’s my second favorite. (On the way home I realized that
listening to a good songwriter on my way to a writers’ retreat was a
good plan, only I didn’t plan it.)
I
usually find something to buy in the book/craft/card stores, but not
today. Got to St. Dorothy’s Rest (I did not make that up, it is the name
of the summer camp where the retreat is held) and signed in at a coffee
table laden with brownies (I can’t eat chocolate), cranberry-pecan
banana bread (I don’t like pecans) and peanut butter cookies. I love
peanut butter, but usually don’t like PB cookies. I broke off a little
piece. Uh-oh. These were the kind I like. Gee, only an hour till dinner.
Oh, well. As the tee-shirt says, “Life is short. Eat dessert first.”
But actual dessert tonight was mixed fruit crisp, no nuts. So I ate that
too. Somebody recently told me that Zen practice can be summed up as
waking up in the morning and saying “Whatever” and going to bed at night
and saying “Oh, well.”
If you go east instead of north out of Occidental, you’re on the Occidental-Graton road, where Lou Gottlieb of the Limeliters used to have a place called Morning Star Ranch that was notorious for a while as a hippie hangout.
Before Lou Gottlieb got ahold of it, Morningstar Ranch belonged to the poet John Beecher
and his wife. There were two houses on a fair-sized piece of land, one
where they lived and ran Morning Star Press, and one rented out to some
people who were raising chickens on the property. My parents got to know
the Beechers somehow, and we all visited up there. The Beechers were
looking to sell, but my parents couldn’t afford to buy. They told the
Gottliebs, who visited and decided to buy it, thinking that we would all
use the Beechers’ old house as a weekend place. Mostly my parents did,
my husband and I went with them most of the time, and sometimes we went
with our friends.
The
house was kind of run-down, and squirrels played ninepins in the attic
when you were trying to sleep, and poison oak was coming in around the
edges of the bathroom window, but there was a year-round creek and lots
of trees, including a large hachiya persimmon in front of a row of firs
near the house. It looked its best around Christmas when the leaves were
off and the orange fruit stood out—even on misty days—against the dark
green mass of the firs.
One
New Year’s weekend a bunch of our friends went up with us. My then
husband Jerry and a friend were playing in a band at a party in Marin
that night and were planning to drive up after. They weren’t the last
band to play, but still, they wouldn’t get to Morningstar till after
midnight. So those of us waiting decided to go out for a walk on the
quiet country roads. It was a strange night. In some places the mist
hung in the trees, in others we waded through patches on the ground and
we could see the stars clearly above. Suddenly a shot rang out. It was
scary until somebody looked at their watch and saw it was midnight, and
we all remembered that it was New Year’s. We pictured some old guy
looking at his watch, taking his rifle off the rack, standing out on the
front porch in his slippers, shooting into the treetops, putting the
rifle away and going to bed.
We walked back to Morningstar, Jerry and his friend arrived safely, and we partied on.
The
round oak coffee table I have in my living-room now is one my father
cut down from a Roycroft library table. In going through my mother’s
files I found a letter from John Beecher affirming that he and his wife
intended my parents to have the furniture they had left in the
Morningstar house, including a Roycroft library table and a sheet music
cabinet, also now in my living-room. It has an odd shape and
art-nouveau-looking carvings and we refer to it as “the funny piece of
furniture.”
*Carl Sandburg’s description of poetry
©2007 by Nancy Schimmel
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
A SYNTHESIS OF HYACINTHS AND BISCUITS*
