Buck, buck, bucket

A journalist, a detective, an idea

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Take a moment to remember who you are: Beloved Forgiven Present Whole

Set your feet firmly in today. There is only now.

Be Here Now

Yearning. Photo by Fran Gardner

The rhythm of renewal and remembrance

~A Tibetan Buddhist prayer~

May I be filled with loving kindness
May I be well
May I be peaceful and at ease
May I be happy.

May you be filled with loving kindness
May you be well
May you be peaceful and at ease
May you be happy.

May we be filled with loving kindness
May we be well
May we be peaceful and at ease
May we be happy.

Repetition

~Massage that memory muscle~

This little ditty by the three wise guys is one that you will instantly grasp, if you haven’t already. It may become earworm of the year. And dig that all-girl harmony!

Bucket baloney

~Resist people telling you what you should think~

Despite my resolution for this month (February), to avoid thinking, saying or writing negative things, I found something to object to in an article from my files: an Editorial Notebook from the New York Times. The title is “Last Things First for Patients With Bucket Lists,” by Clyde Haberman. It begins:

If a new study is correct, more than 91 percent of us have a bucket list—things we wish to do before we die. This revelation is interesting on several levels, including a question of what that minority of nearly 9 percent is thinking. Surely those people are aware that the chance of their kicking the bucket is 100 percent. Are we to believe that nothing in their basket of wishes is unrealized?

See, I’m in that 9 percent. I don’t have—or need—a “basket of wishes,” and furthermore, I know exactly what I am thinking: that a writer who can’t conceive that one may choose not to have a “bucket list” might need a job that’s more in line with his intellectual abilities.

Do. Be. Doo-be-doo-be-doo

The whole idea behind such a concept is that, somehow, “doing” is important. Well, I am 73 years old, and I am retired, and I don’t have to “do” anything. Which is fine with me. I do have things I want to accomplish, but what is most important to me now is not doing, but being.

Being=bliss.

I had the ineffable pleasure this morning of just lying in bed, my body perfectly relaxed, with no desire to move a corpuscle, much less any major muscle group. I was totally blissed out just being warm and comfortable and having nothing pressing to do, nothing on my mind.

Leave Earth alone

It’s also important to note that by “doing,” we all become complicit in further degrading the resources of Earth. People answering surveys about their bucket list, Haberman notes, list travel as their most common desire.

But these days, it’s not exactly carbon neutral to be jetting off to your eco-vacation on the Galapagos Islands or the Outer Hebrides. Yeah, I’ve done some traveling and I’d like to travel  more. But balance that with ecological awareness; the drawbacks of traveling with a disability; general inertia; and having plenty of places to be and interesting things to do, think, and read at home in Portland.

There are plenty of places I’d like to explore: Venice, Riga, Slovenia, Seoul, Saigon, São Paulo. . . . But age comes with the realization that you can’t—won’t—do everything.

Relaxing back into being, rather than doing, isn’t a constriction of my life choices; it is a revelation of how wide my humanity is even when I am just occupying the same few meters of physical space day after day.

Sometimes a great goal

The wider point of the NYT article is that a recent study found that having in mind the things they’d like to do before dying seems to help terminal patients focus more and live longer. I’m reminded of the mildly comedic movie The Bucket List.* 

But I am really, really happy with my life. I don’t need a phantom list of things I may or may not be able to get around to. I live in the present; I’m filled with gratitude; I love my life, my pursuits, my creativity, my friends and family.

“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” the poet Robert Browning wrote. My reach has caught up with my grasp; I have an intimation of heaven. I know what it’s for, and I am grateful.

*That’s the one where two terminal patients, patrician Jack Nicolson and working stiff Morgan Freeman, flee a cancer ward for a road trip of experiences. Unfortunately, it’s not streaming anywhere for free just now.

Buck Tharp

I’m indebted to Rich Read, former colleague at The Oregonian, for posting a link to the obit of Michael Eugene “Buck” Tharp. I never met Tharp, but I admire him. To quote someone who knows how to write obits:

In another life he would have been a poet or a rock star. In this one Mike Tharp was a reporter’s reporter with a poet’s heart and a magnetic vibe that pulled into his orbit colleagues, friends and complete strangers who wanted some of that life force for themselves.

Michael Eugene Tharp, universally known as Buck, was a model foreign correspondent, revved up, rugged and resourceful. He was a professional listener with the unfaltering patience of a gem cutter, the bullshit detector of a great detective and a low boil for the deceit and tomfoolery of the powerful and privileged. . . .

His magic in the classroom is perhaps best summed up by Ameera Butt, now with the Los Angeles Times. She remembers the day guest-lecturer Buck strode into a journalism seminar at the University of Texas “in full-on motorcycle gear—all leather and looking like the badass [correspondent] he was. His speech was like lightning in a bottle.” 

. . . On that first day at work in Buck’s newsroom (he was editor of the Merced, Calif., Sun-Star,) Butt jotted down advice from the boss: “Show up. Be on time. Do the work. Tell the truth.” 

This article by Tracy Dahlby first appeared in No. 1 Shimbun, the house organ of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. I found it on the Asia Times website.

Rabbit hole redux

Buck is an odd name. I got to thinking about another one, Yip, as in Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” which I wrote about last week.

The name wasn’t familiar, but it should have been, since Harburg, a high school buddy of Ira Gershwin, wrote a lot of famous songs:

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
“April in Paris” (with Jay Gorney)
“It’s Only a Paper Moon”
AND
All of songs in The Wizard of Oz, including “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow,” for which he won an Oscar.

He burned through a couple of names, having been born Isidore Hochberg in 1896 and having died as Edgar Yipsel Harburg on March 5, 1981.

Like a lot of Hollywood figures of his era, he was blacklisted over his supposed Communist leanings. He was a member of the Socialist Party, not the same as Communism, and joked that “Yip” referred to the Young People’s Socialist League, nicknamed the “Yipsels.”

Here’s a quote from Harburg from a website devoted to his work:

“Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.”

Winter in Ithaca, New York. Photo © Maggie Gardner

Just a good yarn

~More news from the frozen North~

As I’ve written, the tiny Rainy Lake Gazette in International Falls, Minn., offers the occasional offbeat story. Here’s one from January 26, 2023:

By MARGE VEEDER, RLG Contributor

From the files of William “Huntz” Wagner; from “Rainy Lake Legends,” by I.W. Hinckley

In January 1927, on a night when the thermometer was hovering at about 30 below, Marian Hofdahl was staying at the Pearson home on the West Fork River with her two younger sisters, Lillian and Alice, and her younger brother, Roland.

All were members of the pioneer Hofdahl family residing in the Fairland community. Marian had the care of her two younger sisters who were attending school in the neighborhood. The Pearsons were away; Oscar Pearson was logging farther up the river, and his mother, Mrs. Pearson, was staying at the Roger Perle home on the Big Fork River.

The siblings had gone to bed for the night, but awoke to find the home ablaze. Marian was confronted with an awful choice, Hinckley writes. “To remain was to be burned to death, to flee was to encounter freezing temperatures while only scantily clothed.”

“The closest shelter was a neighbor living a quarter of a mile distant,” continues Hinckley. “Undaunted, Marian and these three young children headed for this refuge and reached it despite the ordeal of walking through snow clad only in night clothes and in temperature of 30 below. After reaching this shelter, it took quite a long time for this sleepy farmer to awake and let them in. This waiting period seemed like ages to them.”

Hinckley recounts that Alice and Roland’s feet were badly frozen from the ordeal, but with good care, they made a full recovery. Marian later married Oscar Pearson, Lillian married Carl Martin and Alice became Mrs. Bill Torseth, according to the account.

“I think this outstanding event of Koochiching County should have a place in its recorded history and when it finds this place, we must not fail to pay tribute to the hero of the story: to a young woman whose courage and fortitude in the face of great odds saved several precious lives,” the author concludes.

Butt affairs

Here at Valhalla Estates,* the head chef, Andrea Staggs, reminisces about her days in a restaurant. One of the specialties was mussels served with a compound butter.

A coterie of Asian women whose first language was not English were in charge of assembling the butter. Andy would open the freezer, and there it would be, a package labeled “Butt Muscle.”

Long ago, when I was copyediting books for Meredith, the publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and other imprints, I worked on a gardening book called All About Attracting Hummingbirds and Butterflies. The editorial staff called it “Humbutts.”

*Aka Rose Schnitzer Manor, my humble abode. Valhalla Estates is the retirement home featured in David Friedman’s fun series about retired Memphis police detective Baruch “Buck” Schatz. Buck (the second “Buck” of today’s title) is still solving cases despite encroaching dementia.

Check out:

Here are a few writing prompts:

Write about something fuzzy.
What do bridges mean to you?
“Reverse it!”—a headline from a recent Land’s End catalog
Find that thing just beyond the edge of your vision.

These are the sorts of topics you can explore in your daily writing. But the best ideas, images and stories come from within you as you enter the zone and let the words flow from your heart through your fingers, onto the page.

Resist the easy words that fall into place like obedient soldiers. Let the oblique arrows, those ideas the arise from places uncharted, pierce the complacency of your ordered prose. If you must, step into the pool of your unconscious with word association. This works for me.

What comes, what comes is your poetry, your essence.

Writing brings you to you. It is that basic.

And with that, beloved, I take my leave. Please comment or hit the like button above. I crave connection.

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