"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, 

self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. 

This is too much of a temptation for the editor.”

Ring Lardner

            Many of us write. Some of us, at best, are mediocre, turning out prose with all the zip and bounce of a bowl of gruel. Others of us are able to rise above that, writing stories and essays that are at least acceptable, occasionally rising to the level of very good. A few  (and I no longer say “of us”) rise to great heights, writing in ways that make the rest of us (there it is!) shake our heads in envy, frustration and admiration. This kind of writing is a gift, but it’s a gift that these writers have worked at  cultivating, usually for many years. Pinpointing precisely what it is that makes these writers so very good is impossible. For one thing, their talents are uniquely different, one from another. For another, there are so many ways in which writing can rise to the level of greatness.

             Some years ago I read Adam Bede by George Eliot, followed by Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dust Tracks on a Road. In these three novels I found at least one element that helps boos a writer from the merely “good” category to “great,” and that’s spice.

As an example, a good cook regularly turns out tasty, appetizing dishes; occasionally she’ll put a little something different in her stew or casserole, something unexpected that makes the diner sit up and say, “This is great!” Great writers do the same thing. Here are some “spices” served up by Eliot and Hurston. Enjoy:

From Adam Bede:

• Adam’s father has drowned in the creek and his mother is saying, “But if thy feyther had lived, he’d ne’er ha’ wanted me to go to make room for another, for he could no more ha’ done wi’out me nor one side o’ the scissors can do wi’out th’ other.”

            • From Mrs. Poyser, the wife of a tenant farmer: “Ay, it’s ill livin’ in a hen-roost for them as doesn’t like fleas.”

            • Mrs. Poyser, talking about the fuss made over someone after they’ve died: “It ‘ud be better if folks ‘ud make much on us beforehand, I’stid o’ beginnin’ when we’re gone. It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering last year’s crop.”

            • Mr. Poyser has just come into the house to find the old Squire, his landlord, talking with Mrs. Poyser. “As he stood, red, rotund and radiant, before the small wiry, cool old gentleman, he looked like a prize apple beside a withered crab.”

            • Mr. Poyser entered “ . . . warm and coatless, with the two black-eyed boys behind him, looking as much like him as two small elephants are like a large one.”

            • Lisbeth, Adam’s mother, telling a young woman (Dinah) why she’d be better off marrying Adam instead of his brother, Seth, who is much like her: “The runnin’ brook isna athirst for th’ rain.”

            • And finally: “Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information. He saw so far beyond the mere facts of a case that really it was superfluous to know them.”

Zora Neal Hurston – from Their Eyes Were Watching God

She throwed de door wide open and stood dere, lookin’ outa her eyes and her face. Look lak she been livin’ through a hundred years in January without one day of Spring.

You, behind a plow!? You ain’t got no mo’ business wid uh plow than uh hog is got with uh holiday!

You cannot have no town without some land to build it on. Y’all ain’t got enough here to cuss a cat on without getting yo mouf full of fur.

An her with her hair jus’ as close to her head as ninety-nine is to a hundred.

You don’t know dat woman uh mine. She got ninety-nine rows of jaw teeth and git her good and mad, she’ll wade through solid rock up to her hip pockets.

From Dust Tracks on a Road

Like snowflakes, they get that same look from being so plentiful and falling so close together.

I felt as timid as an egg without a shell.

A few posts back I lamented my inability to draw (or, at least, to draw something on purpose). I have, however, come up with dozens of ideas for great cartoons. Here are a couple of more.

Cartoon #18: Smokey the Bear is sitting on a couch in his living room. Across from him sits his wife who’s saying, “Smokey, I want you to stop fighting fires with your bear hands!”

Cartoon #22: A dog being walked by its owner is commenting to another dog on the other side of a fence, “Yep, I’ve got a new leash on life.”

This must be why we don't keep cows
as indoor pets.

  How is that little children are so intelligent and men are so stupid? 

It must be education that does it.

            Alexandre Dumas fils

      The above quote reminds me of something a second grade girl told me many years ago. "You know, Mr. G., kids are like butterflies and adults are like cocoons." I doubt she'd ever read Dumas. 

      I'm now in my 40th year of teaching and I like to think I'm still a butterfly. Teaching little kids does that to you, keeps you young in heart and spirit if not in body. (It never used to creak when I bent over!) Children have few preconceptions, few biases (I like to think they have none) and a wide open belief that anything is possible; they are well-springs of spontaneity and creativity. They open the doors of my own imagination when I listen to them or read what they've written. Einstein famously said, "To know is nothing; to imagine is everything." I believe he, too, was a butterfly. 

     Here's an assortment of similes penned by second- and third-graders. In most cases, I supplied the first half and the students finished it.

• The trees were bunched together as closely as a crowd of people around a
   talking cat.

• The water in the lake was as still as death.

• The flower stretched to the sky like a man begging for light.

• Her teeth chattered like tap dancing feet.

• Fresh snow covered the land like frosting on a cake.

• The path twisted and turned like a never-ending pretzel.

• The trees were bunched together as closely as the candles on an

   old man’s birthday cake.

• The buses ram their way through traffic like worms struggling

   through dirt.

• The desert was as flat as a map on the wall.

• The babies were crawling all over the place, like ants on an old

   doughnut.

• The runner was out of the starting blocks like pop-tarts out of a 

   toaster.

• The teacher was as mean as an unfed dog.

• The old woman’s face was as wrinkled as a boy’s shirt.

• The book she was reading was as boring as a room full of

   business people.

      On a darker note, consider the following. Pacific Northwest magazine some years ago noted that in the 1940s, teachers listed the following as their top seven student discipline problems:

            Chewing gum

            Dressing inappropriately

            Not putting paper in the wastebasket

            Passing notes

            Running in the halls

            Skipping class

            Talking

      In the 1980s, the top seven student discipline problems faced by teachers were:

            Assaults

            Drug abuse

            Possessing alcohol

            Possessing weapons

            Skipping class

            Theft

            Vandalism

      And not much has changed since then.

      Finally, a wonderfully whimsical little poem by John Updike; it appeared in the New Yorker  probably forty years ago:

                       The cars in Caracas

                       Create a ruckukus;

                       A four-wheeled fracacas,

                       Taxaxis and truckus;

                       Cacophono-comic,

                       The traffic is farcic;

                       Its weave leads the stomach

                       To turn Caracarsick.

                                 John Updike

Many years ago, when the Seattle P-I was not only still around but competitive with the Seattle Times (and the Times was still an afternoon paper), the P-I had a cartoonist by the name of Ray Collins. Ray created a cartoon strip featuring Cecil C. Addle and his sidekick, Dipstick Duck. His cartoons were whimsical and at times wry or satirical commentary on life in the Puget Sound region. Cecil and Dipstick appeared for only a couple of years, as I recall, before Ray returned to his native Ohio where, a few years later, he died. Nonetheless, Cecil and Dipstick live on in my memory and in the two cartoons below that I saved. If there are others of you out there who remember Ray and his creations, let me know. If you have cartoons of his, I'd be glad to post them. In any case, thanx, Ray!

A whimsical letter, also
from the P-I.

In my first post I mentioned that it was my hope to provoke you into thinking and responding. Here's the first attempt to do so. My Mom always said never talk about sex, religion or politics with people you don't know. Sorry, Mom, this one's about religion. So, whether you agree or disagree with what follows, please let me know. If your comments are short, use the comments box (I think I've got it fixed). If they're longer, you can use the comment box or email me directly and I'll include your thoughts in my next post: davgg@comcast.net. 


Following my comments on God are a couple of pix I took in Mexico at various times and a couple of word cartoons. I'd love to be able to draw but it's an art that escapes me. Nonetheless, I've got a collection of some 90 cartoons I've visualized over the years which I've written down. You'll have to supply the visuals. Here we go -

“So, do you believe in God?” This seems a simple enough question on the face of it, requiring only a “Yes, I do,” “No, I don’t” or “I don’t know” response. But there’s another question that never gets asked, one that has to precede the question of belief for any meaningful answer to be given. That question is, “What do you mean by God?” For unless we establish common ground, or at  least arrive at a mutual understanding of what each of us understands by “God”, the belief question is meaningless. This is probably less true for two people who are both steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition: they share much in common already as to the who or what of God. But even in this case, much is to be gained by asking “What do you mean by God?” And for two people who do not share a common tradition this question is essential. I can’t answer your question until I know what you understand by the term “God”, nor can you answer mine. And I’m sure our conceptions will be vastly different, particularly if you are a Christian or a Jew.

What do most Jews and Christians mean by “God”? God is an iconic figure for most people; God’s assigned characteristics represent the reality for Christians and Jews. What are these characteristics? And why do I call them “assigned” characteristics?

Second question first. “God” is too important a concept to leave in the realm of the abstract. Humans want and need something we can relate to, something concrete and identifiable. Accordingly, over the millennia men (for men, not women, have been  instrumental in defining and describing God) have developed a God who looks like us and, in large measure, behaves as we do, only with allegedly superior morals. Thus we have a God whose characteristics have been ascribed to him by mortals.

What are these assigned characteristics? First, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is an entity, a being separate and apart from all of humankind, both before and after death. And, because God is omnipotent and omniscient, he is superior to everyone else. This means that heaven must have a hierarchy, just as corporations do here on earth. To borrow some mundane terms, God is the President and CEO, Jesus the Chief Operating Officer and the Holy Ghost is the Chairman of the Board, which is made up of the twelve apostles with a multitude of televangelists hoping the board will expand to include them. (For Jews, of course, God alone fills all three functions and probably has a different board). With this assigned characteristic of separation, we might join God but we will never be of God; we will be with God but never in God.

The second iconic characteristic of God is that he is a male. This has been so for thousands of years, ever since the evolution of the belief that there is only one God. There are, of course, a few who will refer to God as “she”, but that’s usually done humorously, not seriously. In the Bible, religious treatises, philosophical works, even when mentioned in passing, God is male. And, to add to the proof,  when God is depicted, he’s a male. Always.

Next, God is white. With the exception of some black churches, Christ is always depicted as a white man and, being the son of God, God, too, must be white. And, again, depictions of God always show him to be a white male.

God is old. He’s been around since at least the time of Moses. That alone is enough to qualify him as old. Going back to depictions of God, he is always shown as an old man with wrinkled face, long white beard and long, flowing white hair. This is an interesting concept. Old implies aging. Is God getting older? Will he become infinitely old? If he looks old now, what’s he going to look like in a hundred thousand years? Or a million? And if God is aging, he must have been younger. He must have been a young adult. He must have been a toddler. And, taking it to its logical conclusion, he must have been born! That’s as far as I’m willing to take this one.

God is perfect. This is perhaps the most intriguing characteristic of all. To be perfect means never making mistakes, never being wrong, but we’re going to paint God into a corner with this one. To begin to question God’s perfection, we could start by looking at all the wars throughout history and ask why God would let those occur. But those wars, it can be argued, are the result of humankind’s free will, our ability to choose one path over another, regardless of the consequences. But many of life’s miseries are inflicted on us through no choice of our own. The Spanish Influenza epidemic of  1917-1918 that killed millions. The Black  Death of Europe. AIDS. People born with defective genes that produce Down’s Syndrome, dwarfism, gigantism, deformities and hundreds of other afflictions. Leprosy, malaria, cholera, polio. We don’t choose these miseries; they are given to us, and, apparently, given to us by God. So there are two ways to look at this. If God is perfect, never makes mistakes, then these misfortunes are purposeful and God is cruel. (Can there be any possible reason for doing this to babies? To children? To anyone?) Or, if we refuse to believe that God is cruel, then we have to admit that God makes mistakes. Cruel or mistake-prone? Either way, God cannot be perfect.

So, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we are told that God is an old white man who sits apart from all the rest of us, purposely creating or helplessly watching untold miseries inflicted on humans. Is this what people want from their God? Is this what they’re willing to put up with?

For me, the truth lies elsewhere.

PUERTO VALLARTA
BOTANICAL GARDENS

PUERTO VALLARTA

"MUTUAL-HELP FOR NEUROTICS"

Cartoon #10: A prisoner is in his cell, gripping the bars with his hands, looking pleadingly at the guard. The guard is saying, “For the last time, no! You can’t have a cell phone!”

Cartoon #13: A woman is standing in her bathroom. On the counter is a bottle of aspirin. Next to the woman is a large, mean-looking seal. The seal is wearing a badge, a guard’s cap and a large caliber pistol strapped around its middle. The woman’s husband, from outside the bathroom, is saying, “Don’t worry about anyone tampering with the aspirin, dear. It has a security seal.”