I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life—duties, intellect, accomplishment—and see that most of it is nonsense. |  |
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MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-sixth post of fifty. Wisconsin (1976) Mary was a rookie teacher I worked with on my first assignment. When she attended the Christmas party, she brought a white elephant gift in the incarnation of an old candle in the shape of half a football. The colors—green and gold—were faded, but across the side were printed the words “Packer Backer.” It was one of those gifts that kept getting passed off, rather appropriately, like a lateral. We, after all, lived in Dallas Cowboy country. I liked Mary a lot. She often spoke of Wisconsin wistfully, and, although she had attended college in Denver, she wound up moving to Seattle with her Texas-born husband; I never spoke with her again.  In 1976, rather than follow the perimeter of Lake Michigan to head west, Ken and I put our car on a ferry and sailed from Frankfort across the lake to Wisconsin, a four-hour trip in those days. On the boat I met a young man about my age, who was in the process of divorcing his wife. From his flirtatious attentions, I got the feeling that we could have hooked up. When Ken and I met up for lunch in the bowels of the sad little ferry, I told him about the guy I’d met. Wisconsin turned out to be nothing more than a conduit to Minnesota, where we would pick up I-35 and take it south to Kansas to stay with my parents in Wichita. I would like to return one day. Wisconsin became the thirtieth state in 1848 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1998. Historical PostcardsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: TBD
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-26 Wisconsin
I recently had the privilege of attending a high school reunion in which we celebrated the fact that we were all born during the 1947-1948 span of time, which now makes us SEVENTY years old! Below I feature a slideshow of a few of the photographs I made of our Class of '66 reunion. On Friday, October 12, we met at Minisa Park in Wichita, and on Saturday, we were fortunate enough to gather at the home of one our very own, who happens to live in a dwelling known as The Castle Inn Riverside (or the Campbell Castle). For years it was a B&B run by classmate Paula Langenberg Lowry and her husband, Terry, but it is currently up for sale, should anyone be interested in acquiring a home with real history. Thanks to Paula and Terry for their generosity. Wichita HS South Grads Turn 70Sights of Wichita 2018My Other Alma Mater, SouthwesternNEXT TIME: My Journey of States-26 Wisconsin
NEXT TIME: Turning Seventy, Yikes!
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-fifth post of fifty. Michigan (1976) R. Jespers, Lighthouse, Lake Michigan, 1976 My only encounter with Michigan came in 1976 when Ken and I traveled to the upper Midwest to see his friends who lived in and around Kalamazoo, where Ken had taught for several years. We were there over the Fourth of July holiday, and the weather was so cool and rainy most of the time that we wore jackets and long pants. I’d never seen such lush gardens, so many aged and massive trees. One of the graduating classes that Ken taught sponsored a reunion every five years. Actually, it was a group of people that had rather adopted Ken and for a while they all lived in a large house they called the Pleasure Palace. Ken has attended several of these reunions. Michigan is the twenty-sixth state and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1987. HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk DecalsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book World Clements, Brian, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader, eds., with an introduction by Colum McCann. Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Boston: Beacon, 2017. There would nothing wrong with presenting a book-length collection of anti-gun poetry by itself, but Bullets into Bells increases its power by pairing each poem with a response written by a person who has been deeply affected by such violence. Note the eloquence of these lines from “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World,” by poet, Martín Espada. Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze. There are too many fine poems and too many strong responses to them to list here. Just buy the book and READ them for yourselves. Words alone may not solve this problem of gun violence but they can certainly articulate its many problems.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-25 Michigan — October 17, 2018
NEXT TIME: My Book World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-fourth post of fifty. ARIZONA (1975, 1993, 2004, 2017)I first made it to Arizona when, in 1975, I accompanied a couple of friends who wanted to drive to Phoenix from Lubbock. It was in June, and while Texas is certainly hot at that time of the year, it has nothing on Phoenix. One evening, as the sun went down and the temperature fell to 102°, someone was heard to say that it was nice that things had cooled off. Anyway . . . we spent a great deal of time either in a pool or inside bars with AC. The second time I visited the state was in 1993, when I drove my mother and father out to visit my mother’s sister, who lived in Mesa. Again, June. Again, hot! I met two of Mother’s cousins, and when we all sat in a circle in one cousin’s living room, Mother looked more at home than I’d seen her in years, more genteel, more loquacious. She was at home! We visited a friend, an interior designer who’d bought an old adobe home and was remodeling it. Dinner with him was a respite from hauling the folks around. R. Jespers, Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona — 2004 Ken and I visited Arizona again in 2004, staying with a cousin from my father’s side of the family, as well as working in a visit with my late mother’s cousin, whose wife and he greeted us with great hospitality, a meal, and a jar of preserves. From Our Hotel Room, Gilbert, Arizona — 2017 In 2017, I visited my aunt who lives in Mesa, eighty-six at the time. She called together all my cousins, one of whom I hadn’t seen since we were children (see below). More of my family resides in Arizona than any other state in the union.  Jespers and Summers Cousins with Grandma & Grandpa Richards —1960 HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk DecalsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World | Bullets Into Bells
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-24 Arizona
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-24 Arizona
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-third post of fifty. TENNESSEE (1974) When my in-laws came to Lubbock, in 1974, to see their daughter receive her master’s degree from Texas Tech, they brought bags of money with them (well, it seemed like it), and the four of us drove to Washington, DC, where then wife and I interviewed for teaching jobs with the same district in Fairfax County, Virginia. We took I-40 for much of the way, through the long, slim state of Tennessee, spending one night there. By that time in August, it was cool and rainy, and we did no sightseeing: no Graceland, no Grand Ole Opry, no Hermitage. More the reason to go back one day. Tennessee was the sixteenth state admitted to the union and celebrated its bicentennial in 1996. No wonder the people of Tennessee are so proud of their Vols. Their state goes back to the eighteenth century! historical postcardsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee
My Book World  Pam H., R. Jespers, K. Dixon, 2005, Taos I first heard Pam Houston speak in 2000 when she gave a reading for her new book, Waltzing the Cat. As she addressed a sizeable audience, and, as I met her afterward at a reception I told myself if I ever got a chance to take one of her workshops I would. I managed three: Taos, 2004 and 2005; I even journeyed to Mallorca, Spain to study with her. I didn’t do so as a groupie necessarily (though I am); it took me three different week-longers to digest her method for creating fiction—a method that resonated with me, using one’s own life and one’s own observations to create narrative.
I’ve always admired Houston’s ability to transform intensely autobiographical information into strong fiction. Some writers refuse to touch such material; others wallow in their biographies like dogs in the dust, trying but failing to rid themselves of their demon fleas. Pam has been the most influential contemporary writer, in that respect, on my thinking about writing. She taught me how to transform my autobiographical material, or perhaps she taught me to give myself permission to do so because by being that honest writers can hurt someone they love or even people they don’t. And you have to balance your honesty against how much you value the relationship, and honesty doesn’t always lose out. Anyway . . . I feel that I was in on the inception of Contents, as well as several of its chapters because during class or at a meal, Pam would share an anecdote that eventually wound up in this novel. In 2008, at a Point Reyes bookstore, I heard her read one of the book’s short chapters-in-progress. At the time, she planned, I think, to write 144 of those chapters giving voice to the many hundreds of trips she had taken around the world, the hundreds of places she had visited in the States, the myriad human beings who had influenced her life. Why 144? “I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves” (308), Pam declares in the very last section of her book, the “Reading Group Guide.” She ends up with 132 chapters and 12 airplane stories, but still, I think she delivers on her original plan. The novel feels very global, in its fast-paced, jet-flight episodes knitted together like bones on the mend. How else could she portray a trip around the world, one which may never end as long as she lives? Both Pam-the-person and Pam-the-author nearly lose their lives as four-year-olds when their fathers seriously abuse them, and their mothers cover up the story, amuse themselves through retelling it over cocktails, falsehoods about her pulling large pieces of furniture over on top of herself. Nearly losing their lives gives both Pams permission to push their lives to the limits because otherwise they might not be worth living. Planes that almost fall out of the sky. Boyfriends who don’t work out. Bedeviled by chronic pain since the childhood accident. . . neither Pam is comfortable unless her contents have shifted a bit since her last outing. She must be on the move, searching for that next glimmering glimpse of life, whether it is of a Tibetan monk or the life of a child whom she helping to raise. She must move. Such a novel reflects the life that Pam lives, right? In any given year, Pam-the-author is equally at home on her ranch in Colorado, which she purchased after the phenomenal success of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, equally at home on campus, equally at home teaching scores of workshops or giving readings, equally at home traveling to remote parts of the world to test her physical or emotional strength, equally at home revealing the parental abuse she was subject to as a child, lovers who have betrayed her. In this book, in particular, she manages to transform the latter three issues into a gross of clipped chapters, in which Pam-the-character (in the manner of Christopher Isherwood naming his protagonist Herr Issywoo after himself) makes herself at home on flights to Exhuma in the Bahamas, to places as obscure as Ozona, Texas. Tibet. New Zealand. Paris. Chapters named with a flight number: UA #368. Your life, as long as you are reading this book, is as discombobulated as Pam-the-character’s. You live it with her, the flashback in which Pam-the-character is hospitalized for injuries caused by her abusive father. Pam Houston—the author—gives her all to every minute that she lives, I would suspect, even when she is lying very still, devouring the pages of a new book or romping with her Irish wolfhounds through the meadowlands of her ranch. As long as she is breathing, she is inhaling the content of her next book, itself spinning inside her brain while all she seems to do is become a vessel for it, channeling the narrative burning inside her at that moment. That is what Contents May Have Shifted is about. After having been moved and enlightened by her first four books, I can now say the same for this one. And Pam Houston’s new tome, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, comes out January 29, 2019. You’d better believe I’ve already ordered it, that I can’t wait to begin feasting on her pages once more. You see, I’m still learning from Pam. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Contents May Have Shifted
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-second post of fifty. New Mexico (1972-2018)L to R, T to B: B&W images, Santa Fe | Ken and Friend Naomi in Taos | Larry & Deb, Cloudcroft | Larry, White Sands The first time I visited New Mexico was during the Christmas holidays in 1972, when M, my then wife, and I rented a crude little cabin in the skiing village of Cloudcroft. Thirty months into our wedded bliss, she and I were experiencing problems. I was in therapy and had given myself permission to sleep in a separate bed. Such a policy did not make for a very felicitous first Christmas vacation away from the folks, but I made the best of it. We both took a morning of skiing lessons. Every time I encountered M, her legs were splayed, still trying to master the snowplow—so unlike the graceful woman who handled water skis as if they were duck’s feet (not a comment on their size). I wasn’t magnificent, but I was able to come down one of the minor paths without stopping, falling, or tumbling—all afternoon long. And . . . I met a nineteen-year-old young un who thought I was pretty swell and struck up a recurring conversation as he and I met at the bottom of the run. Making my home in West Texas for over forty years, I’ve sojourned to New Mexico innumerable times: Albuquerque and Taos for writing workshops and to visit friends; Santa Fe for Thanksgivings at the La Fonda Hotel; visits to Roswell, Cloudcroft, Ruidoso, Carlsbad, and more. Ken and I might have moved there at any time, save for one factor: $$. New Mexico is a very expensive state in which to live, particularly Santa Fe and Taos. New Mexico has a history more ancient than the length of its statehood would indicate. The Spanish intersected with the indigenous people about 1598. The French in the 1700s. The Texans in the 1800s. No wonder those with Texas tags on their cars still get dirty looks (or worse) when they pass over the state line. At any rate, New Mexico is the site of more art, more poetry, and more novels than one can name in one breath. To visit the Land of Enchantment is to visit gentle people and gorgeous scenery. As the forty-seventh state, New Mexico celebrated its centennial in 2012. HISTORICAL POSTCARDSIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Contents May Have Shifted
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-22 New Mexico
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-22 New Mexico
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-first post of fifty. Mississippi (1971, 1994)
I first saw Mississippi in 1971 when I was almost twenty-three years old. The Bahamian woman I’d married had an aunt who lived in Laurel. For spring break we borrowed a friend’s Ford Galaxie station wagon and traversed the five hundred miles on I-20 and a few other roads. My ex-wife’s aunt, a smoker, was so unlike her sister, my mother-in-law, and yet the aunt was similar to my ex-wife in that America also had corrupted her cute little Bahamian accent. But M and I had a cozy double bed to ourselves and as still-newlyweds who couldn’t think of anything better to do, we made good use of it.  The second time I encountered Mississippi was in 1994 when another spouse, Ken, and I drove from Lubbock to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We stopped long enough in Vicksburg to view the Mississippi River near the famed bridge, and then we were off. I would like to return one day, to find out more about Mississippi's literary figures: Faulkner and Welty, to mention a couple. Mississippi, the twentieth state, celebrated its bicenntenial in 2017. Historical Postcards & Trunk DecalsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi
My Book World Potter, Margaret Yardley. At Home on the Range. With a foreword by Elizabeth Gilbert and introduction by the author. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012. This book was originally published by Potter in 1947 and may be the second cookbook I’ve ever read from cover-to-cover (the other, Mildred O. Knopf’s Memoirs of a Cook). Often, I’ll casually peruse the contents, checking out the ingredients of a particular recipe, to see if I might like to prepare it. But At Home on the Range is no ordinary cookbook. The author seems to create a story with each recipe. Even its presentation on the page defies modern conventions where one lists the ingredients above and directions below. No, Potter’s entire recipe is frequently a delightful but informative narrative, giving one the most minute detail about how to prepare it. Here is a notable example: CHICKEN CACCIATORE is made for six with 2 three-pound frying chickens cut up, dusted with flour, salt and pepper, and browned in ½ cup of olive oil. Fish out the chicken, put the pieces in a casserole, and add to the oil a chopped garlic clove, 1 cup of chopped onions, and an optional pinch of sweet basil and rosemary. When the onions are soft, pour in 1 can of tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. Let this simmer for 15 minutes. Pour over the chickens, cover tightly, and cook in a 350° oven for 45 minutes. Serve it with buttered boiled spaghetti, and pass the grated Romano or Parmesan cheese (51). I’ve prepared perhaps a half a dozen different recipes for chicken cacciatore (my late Italian uncle informed me cacciatore means “of the hunter,” intimating a certain flexibility of contents), but I find this one fascinating. First, Potter uses different phraseology, “dusted with flour,” instead of perhaps the more common “dredged;” she specifies “fish out the chicken,” instead of “remove the chicken”; “pass the Romano or Parmesan cheese” instead of “sprinkle with,” subtly indicating that cheese is an option. “Buttered boiled spaghetti,” however, sounds a bit redundant to today’s ear. Second, Potter departs from most cacciatore recipes by preparing the sauce separately and then pouring it over the chicken; most directions require one to add all ingredients following the browning of the chicken (usually with garlic and onion). And finally, her recipe is baked in the oven instead of simmering in a skillet or Dutch oven.
Overall, Potter’s directions are exacting yet flexible, her opinions strong, so much so that I shall have to try this one, too, just to see how it tastes—not to mention the other two dozen recipes I’ve marked with Post-It arrows! McSweeney’s has recreated the original end papers and added engaging chapter fonts, as well as pert little illustrations, giving the book its historical and artistic due. If you love to cook AND read, you'll love this book. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi
NEXT TIME: My Book World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twentieth post of fifty. FLORIDA (1968, 1984, 2003) St. George Hotel, Spanish Wells, Bahamas The first time I visited Florida, it was to pass through by way of Miami onto the Bahamas, a far superior spot, I believed. My plane, a two-prop job resembling a large goose, nearly went down in a violent thunderstorm, or so I was inclined to believe. I was head-over-ankles in love with a girl for the first time in my life, or otherwise I would never have traveled that far to stay in the home of strangers who just happened to be that girl’s parents. Two years later I would marry her and we would be given a large formal wedding in Trinity Methodist Church of Nassau and a formal reception at the Sheraton British Colonial Hotel. A friend from college would fly down to play the organ for the service. My brother, seventeen, would join the party as my best man and promptly get a bit drunk from drinking too much champagne.  R. Jespers, Bahamas, 1970 After spending more than two months in the Bahamas, I got a little sick of island life. It had never occurred to me, a landlubber, that I would tire of seeing the same people every day, that if all you had to do at the beach was grow browner, the experience might wear thin. That a city with only one movie theater was probably a little devoid of culture. I was too young to accept life as it comes to you, that the Bahamians have a unique culture going back hundreds of years. Though I would later divorce one really beautiful Bahamian, I would always recall the island’s inimitable treats: broiled crawfish, conch salad, peas and rice, and, oh God, baked grouper! Water skiing and hand trawling from a seventeen-foot outboard boat over swells larger than some hills in Kansas (see my catch above). And always aquamarine waters, a hue from which people concocted the idea to paint swimming pools.  Key West would be my destination in 1984, when I would tag along with two scuba-diving fiends, uh, friends. We stayed at an ever-popular gay establishment, The Pines bed and breakfast. Enough said. Again, got browner. Gorged myself on seafood, and, though my life partner was not with me, I behaved myself and only flirted with men gathered around the B&B’s tiny pool. Ten years later, one of the friends would die of AIDS, but I shall always recall the gales of laughter the three of us could create via those tiny in-jokes that only intimates can tell.  R. Jespers, Key West, 2003 In 2003, I attended a writers’ conference in Key West. A famous gay writer I’d always admired conducted our seminar, and I was pleased to be part of the group. I went in January thinking that the weather would be pleasant. I arrived in a gale of wind out of the north, and at the hotel I was placed in a freestanding cabin with no heat. No heat. I piled a couple of quilts on my bed, and that seemed to do the trick. In the remaining time, weather remained cool, almost like bright autumn days in New England! I purchased a heavy sweatshirt because I’d failed to heed the email warning sent by the conference’s leader. It was anything but a fun-in-the-sun event I’d anticipated. Note to self: never take another January trip to Florida. It may be just as nice in West Texas at that time of the year. Florida, the twenty-seventh state, celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1995. If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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December 2018
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