To begin this series, A Writing Life, I had to wait for our sleeping tortise-shell cat to vacate the cushioned chair beneath the desk that holds my laptop. I've never been one to disturb a sleeping animal; on a day off, I can easily procrastinate busily elsewhere--always a book to open and read.
We brought Tigre, or Tiggy as we call her, back from Honduras when we lived there as overseas teachers (well, it was over the Gulf of Mexico, and valleys of the Carribbean). Cat ladies thrive in all cultures, and in a single-story brick houses neighborhood we found her as a kitten hiding in the back of an empty wine box (the lady of the house had many other dogs and cats wandering with ease and good tidings from room to room). We brought her back to our rented townhouse in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, overlooking lush green mountains of La Tigre National Park. Hauling her home in her carrier after three years at the American School of Tegucigalpa, through customs, checkpoints, and busy airport waiting rooms and baggage claim, was greatly traumatic for all of us.
But Tiggy has wandered to another soft landing somewhere in the house.
A Writing Life title is a bit of cheating, though early January of a new year is a good time. Annie Dillard certainly can lay claim to that prestige, but I cannot. Nevertheless, it was the first sparrow spearing out of the nest, and so it alights. I just need to get words working themselves down. I was inspired by the December 22, 2025 article in The New Yorker by longtime contributer, Calvin Tomkins, "Centenarian", a journal the writer began in his 100th year on Earth, aligning with the 100th anniversary of the magazine's first publication, February 21, 1925. I began reading the article this morning, and find it, not surprisingly, engaging. Tomkins first contributed to the magazine in 1958, and has scored his reputation writing on art and artists. Delightedly, February 21 of this year, 2026, will see me exiting the working world, for I turn 65 a few days later.
I shared with an aquaintence, Amy Reiswig, who lives on the coast of British Columbia, that in my struggle to find time for thoughts and writing for my current project on poet Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanism, I decided a few months back to shelve it until time opened in the new retirement era. From Ms Reiswig's Master's thesis for the Department of English, McGill University, Montreal, March 2000, titled "Robinson Jeffers, Hermit of Carmel: Recontextualizing Inhumanism", I've discovered insights and direction for my project. She maintains that the poet's seeming misanthropy was rather kinship with the Christian eremetic tradition of leaving the hectic, superficial, and corrupt cities to seek quies, or tranquility in the desert, or what Jeffers would later call the "wild god of the world". When I'd emailed that I was surprised she hadn't blossomed her thesis into a full length book, she regretted not having done so, but time got away from her with other committments intruding, including articles written (I should look these up; wonder why I haven't). I wrote her that instead of remaining unpublished and ignored while busy in my full-time job, why not wait until I have all the time in the world to be unpublished and ignored? Truth is, my essays have been published, three of them, but the last was eight years ago, and one essay was published in an online literary journal, Cargo Literary, which is now defunct, and even Google's AI cannot find the eclipsed link to it (just checked), so the question is: does that essay count as published?
Thoughts of Jeffers' Inhumanism follow me always like a thirsty dog (Nietzche used that simile in a letter). Notes for the proposed essay fill pages of the notebook I carry with me to work daily; not a teacher anymore, but to quote a line from Tracy Chapman's classic song, "now I work in a market as a checkout girl". But one scene I want to include, or fit into the essay. An early memory, misty bluish white in mind or veiling the dawn of the day it occurred in my childhood home in Sacramento, sees my mother and brother and me on the sidewalk along the side of our house and yard. Our Siamese cat appears to be going away, leaving us. She wanders down the street, pausing to meow back to my mother who attempts to follow her. My mother finally turns, distress lining her face, and she tells us our cat is going away to die. I must have believed it, not fully knowing about the reality, but understanding my mother's sadness. I remember to the cat's hesitancy, turning back around, as though unwilling to carry out her instinct's orders, her love for her human family struggling to defy fate. Would she die alone? We never saw her again. My mother died alone in her bed in August 2002. I should have been sitting beside her, and was not.
Last night, in the rainy dark, I pulled my car out of the driveway to park along the street, so my wife, driving back from Oakland where she gathered with her old book club friends, could pull right into the driveway. Parked streetside the next house over was a small, dingy white pickup truck, with a large rickety fenced bed. Besides some tools, sticking up shadowy gray in the night's rain, stood a huge rough-shaped rock, five or six feet tall and round. Why, truck, haul you the rock? Industrial size, will it find home in a some landscape? And how does the driver propose to hoist the colossus from the truck bed? In the rainy morning the truck was still parked, driverless. Suddenly a light wind rose, and the mud brown rock shimmered gently as a flag. I saw now that solidity was illusion. A rock-colored tarp covered and protected other valuable tools, or perhaps a lawnmover.
Wind reveals truth.
