caleb walker

last week

KR and I were on vacation last week. We were trying to plan two weeks in September in Maine, sitting on the granite boulders watching the tide and lobster boats, but that is now conference-paper-deadline month for me (though I haven't started writing any conference papers) and we can't quite afford the in-season rental rates. So Plan B.

At the exact time we were fishing around for a Plan B we got email from friends of ours. They had just opened a bed and breakfast in New York's Finger Lakes region and had just launched their new website. Perfect, serendipitous Plan B. So last week we drove up there to spend a couple days in a bucolic context before continuing to KR's mother's place in Massachusetts.

click for the photo set

Within an hour of our arrival at the B&B on Sunday our friends walked us across the pasture to the Amish dairy farm next door. Elam, the farmer, was in the barn. He was a tall, thin Amish man who wore a dark blue shirt and black pants and a straw hat whose brim was barely attached, so it tipped badly to one side. He was just finishing the evening milking. His two young daughters--barefoot--were busy around the barn, but came over to show us a brand new litter of bunnies in a metal cage. The dog and kitties were interested as well.

KR introduced herself to Elam and cut right to the point: "I want to milk a cow." Elam motioned toward a nice black and white one and said, "Go ahead." KR said, "I don't know how to do it," and Elam said, "I don't know how to do it either." We all laughed. His operation is all mechanized, run on electricity from a generator. KR stepped up to the cow and gave a few tugs, and she got a few good squirts. Later she said that she had wanted to do more, but hadn't wanted to "waste the milk." We should have found her a bucket. Then she'd have something to put in her tea.

Tuesday was the ultimate vacation day: our friends went to work and Kristen and I sat on the porch of the house and read, birdwatched, waved at the passing cars and Amish buggies, and defended ourselves as we could from the barn kitten, Keeper. She liked to hunker under my chair and lash out at my ankles and calves with her claws and teeth. After her second or third attack I started calling her Little Fucker. I'm not a cat person. I find them completely resistible, which is fortunate, considering my allergy to them. I have no problems pushing them away or blocking access when they start positioning themselves to jump into my lap. And they know whose lap they are least welcome in.

We miss a lot of things from those few days--wine tastings, great meals, cow milking, chats with the innkeepers--but I miss that damned little cat as much as any of them.

at chi07

I'm in sunny San Jose, attending the CHI conference. This is its 25th year, so the organizers have made it a big retrospective, with photos from years past and posters commemorating its history and stuff. Back in grad school, ten years ago, I attended CHI a lot. Three or four times. Except that's not right. It turns out, looking at the list of past CHIs, that I have only been to two: Vancouver in 1996 and Atlanta in 1997.

I am having dinner tonight with a friend I met at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival a couple years ago. That will be fun. I'd say that it will be the highlight of my week, but just about anything has the potential of being the highlight since so far my time here has not been a bowl of monkeys. I know very few people here, and my friend-making skills are feeble.

When I called my friend yesterday to confirm our plans she said, "How do you like San Jose?" and I had to say, "It's awfully sunny and warm. I'm not sure I can stand much of this."

I had the same reaction on my first visit to Silicon Valley, maybe 17 or 18 years ago, on business. It was winter, and I had a hard time adjusting to the brightness and warmth. The streets looked like movie sets. The cars were all rustless, the people were all attractive, the plants and trees were all exotic. I wanted to peek behind the building facades to see if they were fake, held up by two-by-fours, empty behind. The perfection of everything made me uneasy and I couldn't wait to return to cold, windy, slushy, overweight Pittsburgh.

what i did on summer vacation

Sunday morning I stood at the window at my mother-in-law's house for several minutes before I realized that I was looking for the ocean. This was in a little town near Concord Massachusetts, hundreds of miles from any ocean view. KR and I stayed the night there on our long drive home to Pittsburgh after a week's vacation in Stonington, Maine.

We stayed in a cottage in Stonington where we watched the ocean every day. There was no net access and no cellphone service (as if we had cellphones). We did have satellite tv service, but we quickly got tired of Rachel Ray and sitcom reruns.

We watched bald eagles and crows and goldfinches fly over. We saw a Great Blue Heron. We saw squirrels striped like chipmunks that we named squirrel-munks. We saw a crow that quacked like a duck (the crow-duck) and we heard a rooster that crowed every morning at 10:30 when the crows came through (the rooster-crow). We sat on giant granite rocks on the shore and saw something bobbing in the ocean that KR insisted was a goose and I thought might be a loon. KR was upset when I suggested that it might be a buoy and said the best thing I heard all week: "It's not a buoy. It's a loon-goose!" We saw shooting stars and identified constellations invisible here at home (light pollution an' 'at).

We awoke early each morning since the sun rises and sets early out on the eastern edge of the time zone. We lounged around the cottage until we felt like having lunch, then we drove to town. We ate chowder, lobster rolls, cole slaw, and fries. We drank Geary beer and lots of bad tea and coffee.

Everywhere we went curving skidmarks covered the roads. There is a Stonington man named Chuggy whose artistic medium is asphalt plus the tires on his pickup. We took a boat tour around the Stonington harbor and saw a couple seals, bunches of little ducks bobbing on the waves, and a memorable sunset. We hiked to Barred Island through a pine forest whose ground was thick with moss. The sand bar to the island was covered by the tide so we could not get to it. While KR sunned herself on the cottage porch I walked out on the gravelly parts of the tidal flats and watched clam diggers wearing high rubber boots.

We met the owner of the island's oriental carpet shop. We had made an appointment to meet him and we resented having plans that day. We met the owner of a used bookstore who told us about the famous authors and artists who lived nearby, both living and dead. We met the woman who owns Suzy Q's cafe and her sister, both with thick Maine accents, who talked to us about Stonington real estate and the tax system. We met the woman who manages The Clown, a nice wine and gift shop. She gave us excellent wine recommendations and gave me excellent career-counseling advice. She offered us her house on the island during the winter when she lives at her other home.

Everyone I asked told me that Stonington has mild, sunny winters. If that's the case then we might take our new friend up on her offer. And we might think more seriously about moving to the island year-round. That's a big decision to make based on two vacations, but we do love the place and KR is determined to do it. I guess if we do we'll have to increase our tolerance for Rachel Ray.

weekend in erie pa

KR and I were in Erie this weekend for my youngest sister's wedding. It was held at a hotel near Presque Isle (what the locals call "the peninsula"). On Friday we had the rehearsal outside in the hotel's courtyard, but we woke up on Saturday to steady rain. The ceremony was moved indoors. Whad'ya gonna do?

(On Friday we went to the peninsula to see the sunset It was a bacteria day, so nobody was allowed in the water, but it was the smell that made KR stop short of stepping in. Then, on Saturday morning, KR and I took a drive around the peninsula in the rain. It's a unique ecosystem, with sand, grasses, aspen trees (or are they cottonwoods?), and grapevines threatening to cover everything. The peninsula is full of holes [pdf map], with marinas and wildlife in its little coves and bays. We even found a small bay jammed full of houseboats. Houserafts, I suppose we should call them since they didn't seem to be very mobile. I think they were hunting cabins for fishing.)

A string quintet provided the music for the wedding and my other sister sang. Most of us in the family think she needs to get herself a professional gig, she's that good. Everything my mother and sister are involved with has great music. And I'm pretty snobby about music, especially in church.

Now, I love giving my siblings advice, but I'm not sure what I can offer to a couple who have been together for twelve or fifteen years already. I assume that marriage changes things in a mature relationship just like it does in a young one. But how? Are there changes in expectations once the relationship is legal and binding? Any insights from the readership?

lessons

I learned a bunch of things at the Iowa Summer Writers Festival:

• My three finished stories are not finished. They are not even "finished" (note the waggling finger quotes). They are crap and need complete rewrites. That was lesson one. This realization made it hard to select something to read on Open Mic Night. I picked something relatively non-crappy, though, and read it. The audience sat quietly, politely for the three minutes. But maybe they were bored or simply waiting for me to finish. The other guys from my class read too, in mutual moral support, and I appreciate that.
• I had always been told that the main character has to change at the end of a story. But I learned that change is not what's necessary; it's the possibility of change that's necessary. The reader has to believe that change is possible, whether or not the character actually changes. That opens up a whole 'nother world. What if my guy has the opportunity to change but doesn't? Now that's interesting.
• When submitting work to publications and contests they often specify that you cannot simultaneously submit work to other places as well, and they often charge a reading fee. It is the view of our teacher that both of these requirements oppress writers, and that writers should not voluntarily participate in their own oppression. So always submit to many publications, and never pay anyone to read your work.
• If you blog about real people without their permissions, make sure to change their names and disguise them. Otherwise you risk pissing off people who you like and respect.

rudeness on flight 532

I was rude to a woman on the flight from Cedar Rapids to Cincinatti. She had the window seat. I sat next to her on the aisle. When she started talking to me I answered politely but curtly since I really wanted to put my head in my hands and focus on keeping all the cells in my body from dissipating into the airplane's recycled ventilation system. It takes great concentration for me to keep everything together. But I told her I was from Pittsburgh and she asked if I was a Steeler fan. I told her that when the local news reported a few weeks before the Super Bowl that they had found a family who were not Steeler fans, my wife and I peered out the windows and wondered how they had found us.

But she kept talking to me about her son and son-in-law and nephew, all of whom played for the Oilers and the Cardinals and some European Football team. And her leg surgery. And some other stuff. I couldn't keep track of much that she said, and I could barely keep my head cells together. But still I nodded occasionally and said "uh huh."

Once we were on the ground in Cincinatti she told me she should have me send her a giant Steelers cup from a Kwiky-Mart for her son or grandson, who was a huge fan. (Apparently Steeler tchotchkes are hard to find in the Heartland.) I chuckled and said, "yeah," but didn't offer any additional support. Then she asked what I had been in Iowa for. I told her about the writer's workshop and she asked for my name so she could look for my book when it's published. If I still had all of my head cells I might have come up with an alias. Caleb Walker, maybe. Or Don Keys. We said goodbye. She said, "Good luck with your writing," and I should have said good luck to her with her football-playing family or her leg, but none of my thoughts made sense to me and I said nothing.

Someday she will find my book on the Barnes and Noble remainders table and recognize my name. She will recognize my photo in the back of the book and say to her friend, "I met this guy on a flight from Cedar Rapids to Cincinatti and he was rude to me." I'm sorry, Ma'am. My brain cells had dissipated from each other.

posts galore, coming up

Well, this is sort of different. Usually bloggers post something saying that they are going on vacation so their posting will be light. But I'm announcing that I'm going away so my posting will pick up. I've been unmotivated, busy, distracted, and unmotivated lately. But now I'm off to the Iowa Summer Writers Festival for a week. Maybe some cool stuff will happen there that I'll post about. Maybe.

You know what, though? Great bloggers don't need interesting events to write about. They write about the mundane in interesting ways. So look for some of that next week.

facts about austin

Blues plays in the Austin, Texas, airport. The security officials there smile and say "howdy" and "y'all." The airport t-shirt shops sell shirts that say "Keep Austin Weird. Support Local Music." It is possible to see "Kinky Friedman for Governor" ("Why the hell not?") flyers hanging on neighborhood doorknobs. The airport restaurants include The Salt Lick. On my first trip to Austin in 1997 EA took me to their original location, little more than a giant picnic shelter in the middle of nowhere filled with picnic tables and a huge barbecue pit. Their airport shop is much smaller, but if you find yourself in need of a barbecue fix at the airport their sliced briskit sandwich is pretty darned good. (We split one with a Lone Star beer.)

When you get take-out lunch in Austin for friends you get a "sack of tacos." If you have breakfast at El Sol y la Luna on Congress Street you can have chips and salsa with your delicious breakfast tacos. Congress is, it seems, Austin's coolness epicenter. This weekend it was the location of a huge hotrod festival. We saw lowriders, antique cars, and other bizarre machines, including a stubby lowrider school bus.

Austin is overrun with architects and twins. Or maybe not. EA told me that it just seems that way since so many of her friends are architects like she is, and others have twins like she does. I'm more certain that Austin is overrun with musicians, though we met only a few of them, the ones in AF's band.

It is always hot and sunny in Austin. All weekend it came close to hitting ninety. My forehead is sunburnt. I'm thinking about installing solar panels up there since it seems to get more direct sun than any other part of my pale body. This evening we returned to Pittsburgh, which rolled out the welcome mat with forty-degree rain.

I took some photos.

more whining: no hand

I am trying to buy a flight to Iowa City for this summer's Iowa Summer Writing Festival. I go to Travelocity.com and plug in my locations and preferred times. I have a Delta frequent flyer account, so I pick one of the few Delta flights that will get me there in time for the Sunday evening welcome dinner. There is only Delta flight out of Iowa City on my departure date, though, and it is in the middle of the afternoon before my final class lets out.

So I start over and pick a United flight that gets me to Iowa City in plenty of time, and a return flight that leaves a couple hours after my last class (arriving in Pittsburgh at 11:20pm; KR won't be happy about that). I click to buy it and I get a notice that United does not offer e-tickets through Travelocity. So I need to have them send me the tickets via FedEx. The cheapest option costs me $20. I close that browser window without going any further.

I visit United.com. I plug in my dates and places and hit submit. I get a page that asks me to pick my destination city from the list below. (Planes don't fly into Iowa City, so my destination is really somewhere else, a place I can never remember the name of.) However, that is all the page says. There is no list to pick from. A poorly programmed web page, I assume.

I try again. I make no changes to my request; I just press Submit again. This time I get a list of flights into Cedar Rapids, the city whose name I can never remember. I see none of the flights I saw at Travelocity, and none of the fares. There is a "more flights" link, and I click it. The next page shows a long list of flights, with the flight I want, the one I picked through Travelocity, at the top. I cheer, and click to select it. The following page says, "We're sorry. We're unable to process your request as submitted. The flight that you've selected has either very recently sold out or is no longer available." This is a flight three months from now.

I run the search again. The flight now costs 160 dollars more. I can't fucking believe this. (Sorry, Dad.) I decide to fucking drive to Iowa City. (Sorry again.)

This is why I hate to fly. It has little to do with falling out of the sky, eating bad food, and breathing bad air. It has to do with consistently inconsistent service. It has to do with paying hundreds of dollars to jump through hoops. It has to do with having no understanding of how they price or schedule their flights. I have no control over the relationship I enter into with this company. I have no hand, as George Costanza once said.

Happy ending: I go back to Travelocity and change my return date to the next day. I get e-tickets on Delta. I notice that the FedEx charge to deliver tickets is now $40.

four

There is a thing going around these days among the bloggers that seems to be invitation only. But Melly at All Kinds of Writing has opened a loophole. She has invited anyone to pitch in. So I am. Here it is.

Four jobs I've had

1. Dishwasher at a country club
2. As a teenager, I did yard work for the Harris Funeral Home across the street from my house. (Not the Branson Funeral Home two houses down the street.) I never got inside, though I longed to. Mr. Harris gave me my assignments—mowing, edging, cleaning the pool, washing the cars—and at mid-morning I was allowed to take a break and help myself to a 7-up from the stacks of cases in the garage. I don't drink soda much anymore, but when I try 7-up these days it never tastes like it did in that funeral home garage after a few hours of yard work.
3. At that time I also worked in the local vineyards and orchards. My mother and I tied grapes in the early spring. We went up and down the rows in the vineyards, looping the long canes over the top wire and tying them to the lower one. It was freezing in late March and early April (the frozen lake kept the air cold long into spring), so we wore our winter coats and gloves with the fingertips cut out. In the summers I picked cherries with my friends. We climbed around in the trees filling the baskets we had looped onto our belts. The cherries were Napoleans, a beautiful yellow with a pink blush. At the end of the day we took them to the barn and dumped them into 55-gallon drums of brine, which bleached the cherries and burned our sinuses. They then went to a maraschino cherry factory.
4. Every summer through college I worked at a summer camp. I have no idea what made me think I could be a camp counselor. I was too young to think that I couldn't do it, and it was the best job I've ever had.

Four movies I can watch repeatedly

1. We have a copy of Amelie in the house specifically to cheer us up after days like Sunday, when we saw Capote (full of painful-to-watch deceit), we watched Palindromes (full of painful-to-watch pedophilia and murder), and finally Grey's Anatomy (full of a bomb and empty of recognition for those who saved the hospital from it).
2. Blood Simple (plus Raising Arizona, Fargo, and Miller's Crossing)
3. The Man Who Would Be King
4. Simple Men

Four places I have lived

1. I grew up in a little lakeside farm town called North East PA.
2. I lived the first few months of my life in Portsmouth NH.
3. Athens PA
4. I've lived in Pittsburgh PA for—oh, let's call it 26 years.

Four TV shows I like to watch

1. Grey's Anatomy
2. Seinfeld reruns
3. My Name is Earl+The Office
4. Letterman+Ferguson+O'Brien

Four places I have been on vacation

1. KR and I have been to Turkey together four times. I am mining that experience for stories.
2. We went to Tuscany once, too, with four friends. We stayed at a vineyard outside of Florence for a week and an olive grove outside of Siena for another week. I'd recommend it.
3. I went on a road trip to my birthplace in Maine with my mother and nephew a couple summers ago. We drove through the White and Green Mountains, and ferried across Lake Champlain. It was the first time I had been to Maine since being born there. Then, just a few weeks later, I went to Maine again and sat on the deck of a rented house in Stonington for a week and watched the tide go in and out in the harbor.
4. I once went to Toronto with KR's sister and our friend NP to see the Toronto Film Festival.

Four favorite dishes

1. I like simple foods. KR thinks I'm nuts for loving her Broccoli Pasta so much. But what's better than pasta, broccoli, and garlic together?
2. KR makes a terrific marinade for Pork Tenderloin. I light the charcoal.
3. As a kid I hated asparagus. It was tough and stringy and soggy. Then KR made it and, well, you know the rest.
4. Is Coffee-Heath-bar ice cream a "dish"?

Four websites I visit daily

1. You know 'em, you love 'em: Dooce/Kottke/Defective Yeti
2. Ask Metafilter
3. Writers Almanac
4. Comics: Doonesbury, Diesel Sweeties, Scary Go Round, Questionable Content

Four places I would rather be right now

1. Someplace warm.
2. In Florence, visiting all of the places I wanted to see but didn't when we were there.
3. At home, on the couch with KR watching Six Feet Under. She would lay her legs across my lap and I would tug her pantlegs straight.
4. Sitting in an overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace in a tiny coffee shop in Stonington, Maine. I would be drinking a good hot cup of black tea and eating a good thick ginger cookie. (When we were there this place did not exist.)

Four people to tag (that is, people who I think should post their answers to this thing)

1. Art Underfoot
2. Take Two and Call Me
3. Valloq, er, Pres.umptuo.us
4. A Flying Leap