With nine days left, she’s down to under a thousand bucks needed to fund her project. This makes it pretty much a done deal, so get on board and say you were part of it before it was a bandwagon. Nobody has to know you were among the final donors!
If you’re unfamiliar with the Kickstarter idea, it’s basically way for creative people to raise money to launch their projects. Nora Jane set a target of $20,000 and had thirty days to raise it. Backers pledge money toward that goal, and receive in return something neat. I’ve seen authors offer home-made cookies. Nora Jane is offering Skype sessions and even (for a rather large donation) to write a song about one of your family’s stories, something she’s especially talented at anyway. I committed thirty bucks, which will get me a digital download of the album when it’s ready, plus a signed physical CD and a postcard from the road. Plus a thank-you email. Ten bucks gets you a digital download before the official release and the thank-you email. And I can tell you with near certainty that the album’s going to be worth more than the ten bucks if you like good Americana music.
Check out this (kind of mind-blowing) original, a murder ballad called “Willie.”
What’s something you were unreasonably forbidden from doing when you were a kid?
I was twelve when MTV went live. I remember it. As we now know, MTV changed everything. I didn’t know it at the time, of course. All I knew was that here was a way to combine two of my favorite things: music and television. My dad was offended by the concept, explaining that music was meant to be something participatory, not something you passively observed on the TV. Which is interesting because I think for most kids who were forbidden from watching MTV, it was because of the content, not because of the cognitive, philosophical, ontological implications. My dad turned out to be right (in theory), of course. But TV commercials exploiting classic rock songs are just as guilty and perhaps so is Guitar Hero. For that matter, perhaps so is Disney’s Fantasia.
In what area of your life would you say you have especially conservative boundaries?
I’ve got a lot of them, but one that leaps to mind is physicality in romantic relationships. I am a notoriously slow mover, and I like it that way. I’m so old now that I actually prefer cuddling to smooching anyway, most of the time.
In what area of your life would you say you have especially permissive boundaries?
As a borderline anarchist (I can hear some people who know me well saying,”Borderline?”) and a philosophical libertarian, I have extremely permissive boundaries for acceptable expression over the airwaves. I pretty much think you should be allowed to say just about anything you want, whenever you want.
In what area of your life do you routinely go over the line?
There are two closely related areas in my life in which I do this: work and sleep. When I work, I work too much. And then when I allow myself time to relax, I relax too much. During especially hectic times at work, I’ve been known to get thirteen or fourteen hours of sleep on the Saturdays that follow. These extremes are certainly not healthy and I’m going to make an effort to moderate the behaviors.
How many keys do you have on your key ring?
I keep three sets of keys. On my work keyring I have five keys. On my house-car keyring, I have two keys. Then I have a keyring with keys I need but almost never use (you know…keys to other people’s places, for example, or to locks I seldom open) which has about six keys.
I just pledged a few bucks to help this project along. Nora Jane is the lead singer of that band you keep hearing me talk about, Bearfoot. Get on board: her solo stuff is great.
I have Rich on my mind today for some reason. You know I’m no fan of pop music, but Rich knew how to do pop music thoughtfully and creatively. I’ll never get why people like him have to die in car crashes while people like Carman stick around forever.
edit: Oops. I didn’t realize that Carman had been in a terrible car accident last fall when I wrote that. I certainly don’t wish ill upon him. His music just sucks; I’m sure he’s a wonderful human being.
The fourth book in the Chronicles of Prydain, one of the most precious series of books I have read, is called Taran Wanderer. It is the The Empire Strikes Back of the five-novel series, and although the series conclusion, The High King, is really the star, that fourth book is the one that makes it work. It’s a lonely, heartbreaking novel, one in which our hero confronts his own selfishness and the probability that he, a nameless Assistant Pig-Keeper, will never be worthy of the princess he loves. It was my least-favorite in the set when I first read it in the summer after sixth grade, but as I grew older I came to love it more than the others, sometimes signing my letters to R with my own name followed by Wanderer. Yeah, I know that’s idiotic, but I’m not above a certain amount of idiocy.
I am also not above a certain lack of originality. Inspired by Holden Caufield’s brother’s baseball mitt, the one on which bits of poetry had been written, I wrote lines of poetry on the umbrella I carried with me while in school at UH-Hilo. It was mostly quotes from whatever I’d been reading at the time, but the one poem I wrote in its entirety on the umbrella (and writing poetry neatly on the inside of an umbrella is not as easy as you might think) was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong.” This is the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, the one you see most often:
Thou that from the heavens art,
Every pain and sorrow stillest,
And the doubly wretched heart
Doubly with refreshment fillest,
I am weary with contending!
Why this rapture and unrest?
Peace descending
Come ah, come into my breast!
You can see the appeal for my overwrought, tortured soul.
Side note: That was really a crappy umbrella. I bought it in the UH-Hilo bookstore. Its panels were alternating red and white, and there was a black UHH logo on it. It was too small for the kind of daily rain Hilo is known for. It did the job, sorta, but I was an umbrella amateur (c’mon…except for people in Hilo, why would anyone in Hawaii even own an umbrella? I was a bus rider for years and never used an umbrella even during rainy season) and hadn’t thought that there were different types (and sizes!) of umbrella. I should have paid more attention to what other people were using before I bought that awful bookstore thing.
Before Lois Lowry wrote two Newbery-winning novels, she wrote a wonderful series about a girl named Anastasia Krupnik. I loved Anastasia before Number the Stars was published and honored, but had never ventured backward into Lowry’s bibliography. Then one Saturday last spring, I was exploring Wahiawa and found A Summer to Die in the Goodwill store for ninety-nine cents. It went into the trunk of my car for those times when I needed something to read but didn’t have any of my current books with me.
That happened early last week.
And you know what? I’d forgotten how good Lowry is at putting words together. It’s easy to think of her two Newbery novels strictly in terms of the ideas they generate or the inventiveness of their stories, but here is an author who writes beautifully, with a wonderful grace and elegance that had me wishing for a longer book. Her prose is very readable but it catches one off-guard sometimes, and to the attentive reader it is quite rewarding:
My father, even though he always recites a poem that begins “April is the cruelest month” to my mother when she’s scrubbing the kitchen floor in the spring, agrees with me that it’s February that’s the worst. Snow, which was fun in December, is just boring, dirty, and downright cold in February. And the same sky that was blue in January is just nothing but white a month later–so white that sometimes you can’t tell where the sky ends and the land begins. And it’s cold, bitter cold, the kind of cold where you just can’t go outside.
Meg and Molly are sisters forced to share a bedroom in a small house in the country while their father, a professor of literature, completes a book. Molly has always been the pretty, popular, resilient one: quick to laugh, eager to have fun, always surrounded by admirers. Meg, a couple of years younger, is the brainy one: contemplative, artistic, conflicted. The sisters clearly love and appreciate each other, but their relationship is put to the test when they are forced to share their bedroom.
As life in their new, temporary country home begins to open up for them (Molly makes the cheerleading squad and has a boyfriend; Meg meets a neighbor who encourages her passion for photography), the sisters seem to be settling into a workable relationship until Molly becomes seriously ill and has to spend time in the hospital.
You can guess from the title that it doesn’t look good for Molly. The shadow of her illness falls over the entire household and draws in their close neighbors, too.
The summary on the back of my edition concludes with, “That’s the day Meg’s world changes forever. Is it too late for Meg to show what she really feels?” I get why someone felt the need to establish some kind of tension for the potential reader, but that’s not what this book is at all about. There is enough tension just in the reality of Molly’s worsening state and the family’s efforts to deal with it. Playing out the sibling rivalry angle is unnecessary and thankfully, Lowry doesn’t go that route. What she does instead is let us inside this girl’s difficult spring and summer, a time blanketed by her sister’s illness but by no means all-consumed by it.
Meg establishes friendships, and through the pursuit of some of her passions, she develops an identity not defined by a comparison (by her or by anyone) to her older sister. She is exposed to new people, new thinking, and new concepts for how the world moves, the way we all were during our special summers. This is not a novel about the relationship between a dying sister and the sister who’s going to live; it is a novel about one teenage girl’s emergence into herself.
There are a million such books. A Summer to Die is just better than most of them, given its audience and length (about 120 very short pages). My one little quarrel is with the elderly character Will, who speaks in a way that’s rife with stereotype and cliche, the way old people supposedly speak in movies aimed at young people, loaded with “my dears” and other archaic formalities that I suspect never really existed except in literature and film. He’s a well-thought-out character, but his manner of speech is maddening at times in its unbelievability.
Recommended especially to middle-elementary girls, but thoughtful, open-minded boys will also find this rewarding.
San Diego to spend the summer after ninth grade with my grandparents and uncle.
The Big Island. Senior trip in high school.
L.A. in college to be on Wheel of Fortune.
Glorietta, New Mexico for Student Week (a conference).
Molokai in college on a one-week mission trip.
Seattle for a week and then San Francisco for a weekend in May of 1992. Visited Reid and Marc in Seattle, then R at Stanford.
Kauai on two consecutive weekends in September 1992 to help with the hurricane cleanup.
Hilo to live for two years.
Nashville to help R get settled in for grad school. Trip cut short when HBA called to interview me for a teaching position I didn’t get.
Richmond, Virginia. Actually part of the Nashville trip. To be in JB’s wedding.
Nashville the following Christmas.
Portland, Oregon for spring break, 1998-ish. A week with R visiting Tasha and Captain Daveman.
San Francisco and northern New York for a summer.
Cooperstown, New York to see Nolan Ryan, George Brett, and Robin Yount inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Big Island for a senior trip with the class of ’98.
Molokai for a senior trip with the class of ’99.
The Big Island for part of spring break with Traci, George, and Ross. Visited with Pamela and Ian in kind of an awkward situation.
Hilo for part of summer break about ten years ago.
Hilo again for part of spring break about seven years ago.
Kauai with Anto, Cathy, and Amy for Thanksgiving weekend seven years ago.
Maui for part of spring break with George and Anto about six years ago.
I think that’s it. I haven’t been off-island since that Maui trip. Kind of depressing, but travel conditions nowadays don’t make me eager to get on a plane. I prefer my flying without my government looking at my naked body.
Our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our den mothers all said it. “If there’s a flash flood and you’re in the Canal, you’re gone.”
The Canal was a flood drainage canal. Most of the time it guided a trickle of runoff to Pearl Harbor; when it rained heavily, it was a fast-moving stream, usually no more than ankle-high. I always wondered why the canal had to be so wide and so deep; I don’t think I ever saw more than a foot and a half of water in that thing, ‘though I guess that’s about what you’d want.
Here was the problem. The Canal ran right past the back of my school. And a couple of blocks downstream, at the next street that crossed the Canal, my house was only five lots away from the Canal.
And walking to school the legal way involved this, which as I look at it now isn’t really bad at all. It seemed a lot longer thirty-five years ago:
It was the same distance walking either up Hene or Hoaeae. Hoaeae seemed less steep, but it felt like a longer walk. Hene was a steeper climb, but it felt shorter, and I had four classmates who lived on the way, including Jessamine all the way at the top of the climb, at the corner of Hene and Honowai. She was one of two major loves of my elementary years. Rhoda lived a few houses up on Hene, and I never complained if I saw her on my way to school either. And two of my teachers (two!) lived along the other route, so Hene it usually was. These photos don’t really show how steep the climbs seemed, but here’s what they look like now:
You can see how tempting the Canal was. As much of a rebel as I was, I pretty much followed rules, and we were always forbidden from entering the Canal. My sister was known to take the short cut on occasion, but I stayed out of it.
With a couple of exceptions.
The first time I really walked the Canal, my summer fun was on a walking excursion to Rollerworld 2, across Farrington Highway near the Waipahu City Mill. We were late walking back, so our leaders led us into the Canal. Because we kind of had to walk carefully, I don’t think we saved any time, but whatever. I was in the Canal and kind of enjoying it.
I learned the hard way about Canal slime. There were a few places where we had to step through the trickle. That stuff was slippery! My feet went right out from under me and I splashed lightly into the gross water, staining my clothes and embarrassing me in front of everyone.
But at least I didn’t do what Travis did. For most of our walk, we hiked along the top of the Canal, at the edge between its cement wall and the untended brush and dirt that skirted the Canal on both sides. I opted early to walk through the bottom of the Canal, but Travis stuck mostly to the top. Then the brush was too thick to get through, so he had to come down into the Canal, but the walls were pretty steep where we were, so walking down the sloped side wasn’t really possible. He sat at the edge of the wall and slid on his butt (he was wearing jeans) down most of that wall. The last few feet, he tumbled.
We got back to the school late, dirty, and exhausted. It was a lousy first Canal experience.
I think I did it one or two times after that, but it was no fun. It just seemed impossible to do it without getting dirty, and even when I didn’t get dirty, I always worried like crazy that one of my teachers or parents would see me emerging and I’d be busted.
I lived on Waipahu Street for six years and saw a million kids go down into that Canal and come out of it. There never seemed to be negative consequences. And the certainty I felt that I’d eventually either get severely punished for venturing in there or washed out to sea was too strong for me; I always resented that, the way I resented all my classmates’ ability to cuss like crazy in school without being caught or scolded or whatever. I swore once and my teacher embarrassed me about it in front of the whole class, which I knew I deserved but why the heck was I the only one who got called on it?
It was like that. A regular temptation that I mostly managed to stay away from. I think it’s weird what a presence the Canal was, what a dominating geographic fixture it is in my mind when I think about the neighborhood where I grew up, since I only entered it a few times. But there it is, looming, except I guess canals don’t really loom.
My parents both say it really started with the labels on cans. My mom would put all the groceries on the table before putting canned things in cabinets, and I’d try to read the labels while she did it. This goes beyond my memory and I have no recollection of this. When I ask my mom where I started to read before the cans, she says it was Sesame Street. I don’t remember that either.
What I remember was reading street signs from my back seat in the car as we drove past stuff. Man, I think that must have been super annoying to my folks. To their credit, I don’t remember being asked to shut up. I don’t honestly know how patient I’d have been if the roles had been reversed.
We moved from California when I was five and about to turn six. I joined my kindergarten class at Pearl Harbor Kai Elementary midway through the year, already knowing how to read everything in class. My teacher was impressed. I didn’t think it was a big deal. What I really don’t remember is reading any books, ‘though that must have been part of it. I don’t remember being read to very much either.
I do remember that in first grade, I moved from my non-HEP (Hawaii English Program, or Hawaii English Project, depending on whom you ask) kindergarten class to a first- and second-grade HEP class. I was a year behind everyone else in the program, so my teachers worked with me individually in that first week of school, testing me on the various components of HEP and just skipping me ahead to the material I was more challenged by. The best part (and I mean the best, best part) of HEP was something called Instructional Library. Every HEP room had bookshelves with titles divided by IL reading levels. You were supposed to start at IL Level 1, from which you had a bunch of books to choose. You’d read a book that appealed to you, then sign up for a conference with the teacher. The teacher would spend one-on-one time with you, asking questions about the book you’d read. Some of the questions were content-based, to see if you’d actually read the book and retained much from it. The better questions were interpretive. Why did so-and-so do this? Did you agree with so-and-so’s decision? Which character was the most likeable?
After five books at IL Level 1, you were advanced to IL Level 2. Five more books. This went all the way to Level 25, which I suppose you were supposed to reach at or around grade six. I remember sitting at a little round table with one of my teachers (our joint first- and second-grade class had three teachers), reading selected pages from books she opened for me. I’d read a page, she’d put the book down, she’d pick up another, and I’d read another page. When we finished, I looked at my record book (we all had these folders in which we tracked our HEP progress through the years) and she’d initialed me past the first IL Levels to Level 17.
There were two or three classmates in my first-grade class who were at the same level, but they’d worked their way up there from Level 1, beginning in kindergarten. This was a point of contention with my friends all the way through elementary school, but (I think!) always in a playful way. I might have been the first of my classmates to finish Level 25 (I was) in third grade, but I didn’t do it the honest way!
When I really became ravenous was in first or second grade; I can’t remember the year. My grandmother started sending my sister and me my uncle’s books when he was done with them. They were almost all Scholastic books, ordered by my uncle (who was only four years older than me) through those book-order programs Scholastic has. I still have some of the paperbacks they sent me, still with my Uncle’s textbook, loopy cursive spelling out his name across the tops of title pages. I read these over and over: Jason and the Money Tree and The Wednesday Witch were two particular favorites.
I was in HEP in two different schools, all the way to the end of sixth grade. By then I was reading books of my choosing, writing the titles on a page in my folder after Level 25. The word OTHERS was written across the page, and it was just a page full of blank lines on which I wrote the titles of whatever I read.
Those individual reading conferences were the best, because it was the one-on-one time with teachers I craved, a time when I didn’t have to suffer the glares of classmates who weren’t as into whatever we were learning as I was, something I’ve actually kind of suffered most of my life, even at my fairly rigorous private high school. Nobody except my dad and teachers ever asked me about what I was reading; my classmates who were at the same level never read for pleasure so of course they never talked about books. Reading is already a solitary pursuit, but it really, really alienated me from my classmates for all of elementary school because there was nothing I’d rather do and I didn’t know anyone else like that.
In third grade, one of the IL books was Beverly Cleary’s Ribsy, the first book I can remember that was part of a series. I was off and running and I’ve never looked back. I didn’t have to re-read the same books if I wanted to spend more time with the characters I liked because the author had written more. Many of the bookworms I know now point to a certain childhood series they say really got them started. Mine was the whole Henry-Beezus-Ramona series from Beverly Cleary. From third grade on, if I had free time, I was reading, at least until the day the Atari 2600 made its appearance. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to spend unholy amounts of time playing those games and still keep reading.
Actually, I do know how I did it. I didn’t play organized sports and I didn’t hang out with friends much outside structured activities. I was in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, and every summer I was in the parks and rec summer fun program, and I did church stuff, so it’s not like I was a boy in need of socializing, but when I wasn’t doing a service project or at a pack meeting, I was reading. I watched a LOT of TV, but I almost always read while I watched.
Thank goodness for seventh grade and HBA, where I met Grace, another bookworm, and Mark, not a bookworm but someone who did like to read on his own. There were others I’d meet over the next few years: Marc, Lisa, Greg, Mark (a different Mark, not a friend but still quite the reader), Valerie, Kim. I still remember what everyone was into, the way guys always remember what their guy friends are driving or the way we know their favorite sports teams. Marc read a bit of everything. Lisa, Greg, and Mark were all about fantasy. Valerie was mostly fantasy but she read a LOT of other stuff. I’m not sure what Kim read, ‘though we talked a lot about Madeleine L’Engle.
You know how at some schools the seniors purchase ad space so they can publish photos of them with friends and leave little notes thanking everyone? I included a line in mine that thanked “my friends who were always there for me: Madeline L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, and John Steinbeck.” It was sincere and heartfelt.
How did it take me so long to declare English as a major? It should have been obvious. But I was so interested in so many things! I graduated high school with an extremely low GPA (sixty-second in a class of eighty) but with five and a half credits of science, five credits of math, and five and a half credits of English, and at different times in college I intended to major in all three fields.
Most of my close friends now are heavy into reading. Probably Penny and I are the most fanatical, but I’m a grownup now, and I know a lot of people who majored in English or who could have, and most of us are readers. I wish someone had told me it wouldn’t always be so lonely. Not that that would have helped much, I guess.
It’s that time of year when people ask me every day what I plan to do with my summer. All I can think of is go to the beach and read books every day, and to see friends once or twice a week. For some reason I feel I have to give a better answer than that, and I can’t really think of one. It’s what my heart wants. And although I’m not sure that’s how my summer is going to play out, quality time with my books has got to be part of it.
I haven’t written much about my travels, something that I’ve only become aware of since reading a friend’s journal lately. Though travel is expensive, and I haven’t done much of it, I think there might be a few things worth jotting down, so that might be a project for the next few weeks. I did live in Hilo for two years, so there should be a few things there at the very least.
A few years ago, some of the Village Idiots started a kind of oral history of the neighborhoods where they grew up. I held back because the effort was going to be huge, and I was in the midst of writing a Master’s thesis. I always meant to get to it, though, so that may also be something of a project for a few weeks.
One thing that I’ve been daunted by is the thought of trying to get it all right the first time. That’s kind of silly, now that I’ve seen how others have gone about it. There’s no reason not to attack both themes piece by piece, in whatever order they pop into my head. I don’t have to start at the beginning and finish at the end, and there’s no reason I can’t fill in blanks later if I remember important details after I’ve written about something. This is something I will have to force myself to get over. Starting…not now.
The fourth book in the Chronicles of Prydain, one of the most precious series of books I have read, is called Taran Wanderer. It is the The Empire Strikes Back of the five-novel series, and although the series conclusion, The High King, is really the star, that fourth book is the one that makes it work. It’s a lonely, heartbreaking novel, one in which our hero confronts his own selfishness and the probability that he, a nameless Assistant Pig-Keeper, will never be worthy of the princess he loves. It was my least-favorite in the set when I first read it in the summer after sixth grade, but as I grew older I came to love it more than the others, sometimes signing my letters to R with my own name followed by Wanderer. Yeah, I know that’s idiotic, but I’m not above a certain amount of idiocy.
Before Lois Lowry wrote two Newbery-winning novels, she wrote a wonderful series about a girl named Anastasia Krupnik. I loved Anastasia before Number the Stars was published and honored, but had never ventured backward into Lowry’s bibliography. Then one Saturday last spring, I was exploring Wahiawa and found A Summer to Die in the Goodwill store for ninety-nine cents. It went into the trunk of my car for those times when I needed something to read but didn’t have any of my current books with me.
My parents both say it really started with the labels on cans. My mom would put all the groceries on the table before putting canned things in cabinets, and I’d try to read the labels while she did it. This goes beyond my memory and I have no recollection of this. When I ask my mom where I started to read before the cans, she says it was Sesame Street. I don’t remember that either.
I do remember that in first grade, I moved from my non-HEP (Hawaii English Program, or Hawaii English Project, depending on whom you ask) kindergarten class to a first- and second-grade HEP class. I was a year behind everyone else in the program, so my teachers worked with me individually in that first week of school, testing me on the various components of HEP and just skipping me ahead to the material I was more challenged by. The best part (and I mean the best, best part) of HEP was something called Instructional Library. Every HEP room had bookshelves with titles divided by IL reading levels. You were supposed to start at IL Level 1, from which you had a bunch of books to choose. You’d read a book that appealed to you, then sign up for a conference with the teacher. The teacher would spend one-on-one time with you, asking questions about the book you’d read. Some of the questions were content-based, to see if you’d actually read the book and retained much from it. The better questions were interpretive. Why did so-and-so do this? Did you agree with so-and-so’s decision? Which character was the most likeable?
When I really became ravenous was in first or second grade; I can’t remember the year. My grandmother started sending my sister and me my uncle’s books when he was done with them. They were almost all Scholastic books, ordered by my uncle (who was only four years older than me) through those book-order programs Scholastic has. I still have some of the paperbacks they sent me, still with my Uncle’s textbook, loopy cursive spelling out his name across the tops of title pages. I read these over and over: Jason and the Money Tree and The Wednesday Witch were two particular favorites.