01. January 2024 · Comments Off on My Grandmother’s House · Categories: Uncategorized

I dreamed of going to my maternal grandmother’s house rather vividly the other night, of walking through familiar yet near empty rooms, waiting for Dad to come and pick me up. Weirdly, I was also taking care of Wee Jamie, who was reluctant to go down for a nap, and Benji the unruly dog, as I was clearing out the last contents of the house, and regretfully preparing the place for sale. I have no idea of why I dream so often of one grandparent’s house and not the other, save that the paternal grandparents moved several times. First from a small cottage in Altadena when I was barely school-age, to a tract house in Camarillo, and from there to a series of double-wide trailers in various senior citizen parks in Camarillo and Oxnard – of which no very firm memories remain save of the tract house, the star pine in the front yard and the St. Augustine grass around it which eventually formed a thick, spongy and mattress-like turf.

Granny Jessie and Grandpa Jim stayed put for fifty years, in a little white cottage on South Lotus Avenue, in Pasadena, about a block or so south of Colorado Boulevard, and a bit east of Rosemead. Even after Grandpa Jim died when I was eleven, Granny Jessie remained there for more than another decade, util she moved to the Gold Star Mother Home in Long Beach. I think that I remember that house so vividly because I spent so much more time there, comparatively. It was the place where Mom and I lived when I was born, and for another year until Dad was doing his Army time in Korea. Mom and her older brother Jimmy Junior had grown up in that house – the house that Grandpa Jim and Granny Jessie had bought when they married in the early 1920s. A long straight driveway ran across the left side of the lot, all the way to a single-car garage at the very back. Mom told us that she learned very well how to back a car, all the way out from that garage to the street.

Mom, in front of the house – showing the oak tree which towered over the house, and the garage behind it.

I can mentally walk through the house, front to back, and visualize just about all of the furniture in place, although some of it more clearly than others. The living room was carpeted in flecked white, black and gray low-pile, the walls were nondescript – only a few framed prints of dreary sepia-colored landscapes – and Granny Jessie’s windows were curtained in filmy white chiffon. Only the back bedroom had wallpaper, I recall. The living room carpet was lightly flecked with little burn marks from Grandpa Jim’s ever-present cigarettes. After he died, Granny Jessie replaced the carpet with the same pattern. More »

The work crew completed the short length of fence with gate across the font of the house last night – and today, my daughter bought six bags of rubber mulch, and rearranged the plants and the patio furniture! This doubles the pleasant living space in the front bedroom, and provides a sheltered outdoor play area for Wee Jamie.

It will also completely confuse anyone making deliveries as to where in the heck the front door is … but oh, well….

12. September 2021 · Comments Off on For 9-11: Recalling in Tranquility · Categories: Uncategorized

(This was an excerpt from Luna City 3.1, which came out five years ago. Reposted for this weekend anniversary.)

9-11+15

            “I know that it’s been fifteen years as of last Sunday,” Coach Garrett mused thoughtfully, hardly taking note of the beer in front of him. “But sometimes it’s as clear to me as if it was yesterday.”

            It was a perfect, autumn afternoon – a Friday afternoon in mid-September, just beginning to turn cool. The VFW had visitors’ night on Fridays, and now Richard sat outside with Joe Vaughn and Coach Garrett, at the splintery picnic table under the massive sycamore tree that shaded the back of the VFW.

             “You were there in New York, weren’t you, Coach?” Joe drank deep from his own beer. “You saw the Towers go down, up close and personal. Man … it was bad enough watching on TV in real time.”

            “Another life,” Dwight Garrett shrugged, but something in the look of that otherwise undistinguished, middle-aged countenance warned Richard to embrace tact and circumspection in his further comment.

            “It was a splendid day for me,” Richard ventured, reminiscent for the world of just a little ago, but gone as distant now as the Austro-Hungarian empire. “I know … the irony of it all. An evening in Paris – it was mid-evening. I had just won my first cooking contest, and signed with a talent agency. Some of my old Charterhouse pals and I popped over to Paris to celebrate. We were drinking in a bar in the Rue d Belleville, and wondering why they had a telly on, and tuned to some high-rise disaster movie.…it didn’t seem all that big a thing, not at first. The penny didn’t drop until we saw the headlines in the newspapers the next day. In my defense, we were all pretty pissed that evening.”

            “I’ll bet your hangover was epic,” Joe said, not without sympathy. “I was at Fort Lewis,” “First assignment to the Second Battalion … just driving into work, when it came over the radio. Airplane crashed into the World Trade Center tower. Swear to god, everyone thought it must be one of those little private airplanes, ya know – like a Piper Cub or something. The top sergeant said, ‘Oh, man, they must have gotten hella lost!’ And then someone turned on the breakroom TV, and there was this big ol’ gash in the side of the tower and the smoke just pouring out… Top said he remembered hearing about a WWII bomber hitting the Empire State Building, but that was in a fog. Two big honking silver buildings – we just couldn’t understand at first how it could happen by accident.”

            “It was such a beautiful morning,” Dwight Garrett nodded. “Cool, crisp … not a cloud in the sky. I had played a concert at the Alice Tully the night before, so I slept in. Gwen … my wife didn’t wake me up when she left for work. She left a note for me … that we should meet for supper at Morton’s on Washington Street, just around the corner, when she was done with work that evening.”

            “Didn’t know you were a married man, Coach,” Joe said, and Dwight Garrett sighed.

            “Oh, yes – I left it late, of course. Gwen and I were married for six years and three months. A dedicated career woman, and a divorcee with two sons she raised herself. We met at one of those musical soirees at a Mozart festival. Gwen was in finance. Did you ever notice that maths and music are deeply intertwined in some people? Anyway, we had a nice little condo in Tribeca, a stone-throw from where she worked.”

            “And?” Richard prodded. He had visited New York often enough during the high-flying years of his career as a globe-trotting celebrity chef, and had only the vaguest notion of where Tribeca might me. It was not his favorite city on the American continent; that would be Vancouver, or perhaps Miami. New York was too crowded, too … vertical for his taste.

            “She worked at Cantor-Fitzgerald – in the North Tower,” Dwight Garrett replied in perfectly level, dispassionate tones. Joe drew in his breath sharply, but said nothing, and Coach Garrett continued. “Even asleep, I heard the sirens – but so ordinary a sound in the city, I just went back to sleep. Until Gwen’s son Jeff called from White Plains. ‘Where’s Mom?’ he said, ‘Did she go into work, today? Turn on the TV – there’s a plane that hit the building she works in, all the top floors are on fire, and she’s not answering her cellphone.’ I told him to calm down – I’d walk over to the WTC and find her, make sure she was safe, and that everything would be all right …” He took a long draw of his own beer, calm and meditative, as if he were telling a story of another persons’ experience. “The sidewalks along Vesey Street were full of people looking up towards the towers – both of them just gushing smoke. Like water coming out of a fire hydrant. I started walking east, as fast as I could. I could see nothing moving on the street, but fire engines, lined up as far as I could see, once I got close. I kept trying to call Gwen – I thought sure that they would let me through the barricades once I explained. The South Tower fell before I got to the end of the block. It was … like a hurricane of black smoke, dust, soot. A policeman yelled at us to run like hell. A bunch of us on the sidewalk ran into the nearest place – a coffee shop on Vesey, to escape it.” Coach Garrett shook his head, slowly. “Outside that window – it turned as black as you could imagine. And the lights went out, too. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face for about five, ten minutes. That policeman was in there, too – he had a flashlight, but it didn’t help, much. When we came out – everything was grey, covered with thick grey dust. We were all covered in it, too. Needless to say – they wouldn’t let me come anywhere near the North Tower. There were too many people. And I think they were afraid then that the North Tower was going to fall as well.”

            “Did you find your wife?” Richard ventured, and Coach Garrett shook his head.

            “No. Not that day, or afterward. Nothing left – everything and most everyone on the floors just above the impact site were essentially vaporized. I accepted that she was gone forever, nothing to be done – no good going to the morgue, or hanging around as they excavated the pile afterwards. It was almost as if our marriage had been a wonderful, fleeting dream, and she had never been …  except for the boys, of course. And her clothes and things in the condo. It was just so … curious, how it happened out of the clear blue in the blink of an eye, on so ordinary day.”

            “Sorry, man,” Joe said, after a long moment. “I never knew about your wife, and all of that. That why you left New York and came home to Texas?”

            Coach Garrett nodded. “I couldn’t stay. Not without Gwen. The pile of rubble burned for months. The whole place smelled of smoke and death. I packed a suitcase and took the express to White Plains a few days later. I signed the condo over to Jeff and his brother, rented a car and drove back to Texas. I meant to go back to Kingsville … but heard about a job teaching music here. It seemed like a good way to start fresh.”

            “You do what you gotta do,” Joe agreed. “Another, Coach? My treat.”

            “Sure thing, Joe,” the older man finished off his beer and looked into the distance; the blue, blue sky and the leaf canopy of the sycamores just beginning to turn gold and brown. “There’s one thing I do regret about Gwen. I wish that I hadn’t slept in – that I had fixed her breakfast, kissed her, said that I hoped she would have a good day, and that I loved her. I never for a single moment thought that she would suddenly just not be there. Love shouldn’t end that way, on the flip of a coin.”

            “Nope,” Joe agreed, and to Richard, it looked as if Joe had suddenly made up his mind about something. “You want another, Rich?”

            “Only if you’re buying.” Richard replied.

            “Cheap limey bastard,” Joe grumbled.

The tenth Luna City chronical is now available for pre-release order in Kindle, on Amazon – soon to be available in other formats, through Draft2 Digital.

25. August 2021 · Comments Off on Pardon our Dust · Categories: Uncategorized

I am redoing my website, trying to make it a little more easily navigated, and putting the important stuff at the top of the menu bar. I am also moving over the Luna City materiel from the dedicated Luna City Texas website, as it has become an expensive and little-trafficked site, which seems mostly to attract Russian spammers attempting to add comments to certain pictures there. Makes more sense to concentrate my attention to a single book website, and to break out the categories of my books into three – the historicals, the YA, and the Luna City collections. I apologize for any confusion …