France, or bust

In true blog-spirit, I’m posting this meditation on a theme.  My wife and I are hoping to go to France for the month of June.  She hasn’t seen her mother, brother, sister, nephew, nieces and grandmother for eight years—since we left our home in Ramonville Saint Agne near Toulouse.  My sons, now six and nine, don’t speak French and don’t know their mother’s family.  We returned to the U.S. with the intention of getting back, ‘every few years or so.’  This hasn’t happened.  It’s terribly expensive and major car repairs and other emergencies take our money away each year. 

So this year I’m saying:

Check out my wife’s blog and look at the prints of her paintings.  Buy one if you can.  You’ll help us.  Here is Andrée’s blog:  http://andreelartiste.wordpress.com/

Staring at water (upcoming book excerpt)

This is my earliest memory:

It’s as though I were there yesterday, or still there.  I am walking on the beach with my Aunt Betsy and mom.  They are holding my hands and we walk in the sand.  They are talking over my head.  We are barefoot.  I am watching the water to my right as we walk in the dry sand along the shore.  We go along like this for a while.  The wind is blowing steady and cool and the sun warms my skin and the sand.  The two sisters sit near a grassy hill.  I see a rusted metal rack of some kind, left there with its bottom buried in the sand.  I cannot imagine what it is for.  I am confronted with my ignorance of man-made things.  I sit with my incomprehension.  I look out at the sea.  It must have been Lake Erie, the Great Lake on the east side of Michigan.  We were living in Utica at the time, 12 miles north of Detroit, in Macomb County.  It may have been a smaller, local lake.  I don't know.

Born to Wonder upcoming book excerpt (1996 journal entries)

These last journal entries illustrate a change in perspective that I had recently gone through.  This is a time right after Kathy divorced me.  It’s also three months after I had spent an interesting week in the West Virginia woods on the Rose farm in a tent followed by my ‘night of hell,’ as I used to call it.  

Lake Superior, Marquette, Michigan, 1985

This is a poem that I wrote in 1999 about my father's drowning and my 14-year-old brother’s terrible time trying to save him.  It's a Shakespearean sonnet.

Blueness fades as memories rearrange

And murmur of a father’s fateful luck.

Deliberate work-worn hands now blue as veins;

No chafing will unseize their frozen lock.

His lot was introduced to that cold date

Of timely men, who swim into their door

Through aqua blue marine, paternal fate

No human power’s able to ignore.

One Earthly sun dove deep to fight the tide,

Where desperate hands held hair, then arms, then naught.

With blackness, empty starving lungs replied,

And son lay gasping on the shore—his hours bought.

Superior lake, my father’s rendezvous;

Vacations drowned into a paler blue.

© 1999 David W. Weimer

Born to Wonder upcoming book excerpt

When I got to the bottom of the escalator at the airport in Detroit, Gino's dad, who never spoke much to me at all except in short, few-word, broken English phrases from around hand-rolled cigarettes, and who intimidated the hell out of me, took a step forward and grabbed me in a bear hug.  I stood there.  After a moment, I tried to back away, but he kept me in that tough, no words embrace.  He looked me in the eyes intensely and then did that.  He didn't say anything.  I didn't say anything either.  That's what I remember about coming back for the funeral.

I wrote this one as an undergrad at Pitt. 

I didn’t care what it said as much as how it sounded; I was obsessed with how it sounded.  Besides conveying images from my wistful life—time smoking on the roof at night as a kid, hearing arguments outside our apartment window in Pittsburgh or memories of a dream of flying over an island like Peter Pan—I wanted this one to be read aloud.  It’s a performance piece, to be read standing up in front of an audience...

King Bacchus

A New Story

by David W. Weimer

The ghost walked through a wall between the kitchen and living room.  Not walked.  Just moved.  Not moved.  Just was.  The ghost was, and it manifested in vagueness over here, then over there.  It was, as the man sitting in a wooden chair leaning back on two legs liked to think of it, out of phase with this reality, which, to the ghost, was as unreal and vague, dream-like actually, as the ghost normally was to those who sensed it to varying degrees.  It was, of course, possible for one member of one reality to notice the other, vaguely.  It was still possible, yet highly unlikely, for both members of respective realities to view one another at the same time.

But it happened naturally, Dawood knew.  In a certain instance, it happened every time. 

My Own Private Tsunami, 2004

So I remember thinking about this tsunami working on my wife’s van in the parking lot.  In the five years since then, up until now, I'd forgotten that moment--I'd even forgotten about the tsunami that killed 230,000 people.

And then last week I was looking for something unfinished to work on.  A friend and I regularly attend a philosophic discussion group called M&M Philosophy in Wheeling and we made a 2010 New Year’s pact.  He is a visual artist and I want to write, so we decided to bring something new every Tuesday evening to show each other.  An accountability arrangement.  

This artificial deadline has allowed me to finish some things that may not have been touched again—things that I'd begun while self-employed contracting for a living.  I put them on my desktop, and then put them aside.  Years pass.  Not returning to things; it’s a constant threat and theme.  

Well, here: 

Strawman, starman

Strawman, starman was another result of having to write poetry for a graduate poetry class in Memphis, TN in 1999.  I lived in an apartment alone with my two longtime companions, Grizelda and Emerald, my cats, left over from my first marriage.  I had a green broom in the closet and I imagined doing just what I wrote.  I was sitting in my chair at my computer corner in the bare living room of my apartment, looking out the front window.  I opened the door to let the cats check out the second floor concrete walkway.  I imagined the broom hitting the dirt road I used to live on, on Jewell Road, in Howell, Michigan, in 1977.  The thing about going perpendicular to the level of the solar system and galaxy, etc., was my notion that there’s got to be another way, a better way.  Some way to get at the first cause, the source, directly.  Some other way than usual.

An excerpt from my upcoming book, Born to Wonder

I’ve taken some leaves of absence from the world.

In '93 I went without food for a week in a remote cabin and stared the entire time at a candle, willing my mind and attention to that singular task—it was a self-crafted spiritual retreat that I haven’t repeated; In '96 I camped in the woods for a week—and woke into a motionless world the first morning, where the reflexive 'me' was out of the picture and yet 'I' remained.  After a couple days of motionless soundlessness, I suspected that I'd broken my brain.  In '97 I removed myself from the world and lived in a remote West Virginia cabin and saw only the animals and my self from warm July ‘til the frost of October.

This story is about the life of a part-time hermit and full-time dreamer.  I think that there must be others out there.  This happened.  This is why I did it.  This is what I got out of it.  This is what I thought before, during and after—and this is what I think now.

My brain seems to have been formed in the shape of a question: Why?  This book is about my life eventually becoming dedicated to finding an answer.

People mention the meaning of life, briefly, on piers at sunset, in bars late at night or in someone’s back yard during unexpected bouts of nostalgia.  The sane guy is the one who says, ‘I’m here, so I might as well figure this life out.’ I never met him.  I thought I was unique in this place where people chase things that I knew they don't believe in.  I always believed that they were going through the motions, only.  I often wondered when I'd be let in on the big secret.  It just kept going, like a car with no driver.  Why?

I'm going to make a photocopy of myself in this book and draw a picture in the air with a pencil.

When I was 25, I made a commitment to find the meaning of my life and the meaning of everything.  I was accidentally successful.