The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

A Tiny Miracle on Napa Street

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Lacunae — blind spots —
like black cats prowling midnight,
but just out of sight.

Napa Street, Berkeley, Summer 1977: In Christine’s room, Richard W. and I were yakking about nothing in the late morning. The windows were open; the day would be warm. A fat fly buzzed lazily around Richard where he lounged on the floor beneath the window.

Our talk turned to magic and miracles. He’d seen some; I’d seen some. I was relating a strange experience in England. How magic can happen in an instant, with no sense of effort, and as though something else is acting through you. I’d felt it before. It feels natural, more natural than most days’ living; it’s hard to describe.

“It was as if, suddenly, there’s a kind of a wave, and you’re being carried along. You’re caught up,” I said, trying to capture it.

He looked dubious.

Suppose I said, to the fly …

A Fat Fly Buzzed Around.

“It’s like this,” I said. I pointed to the fly. “Suppose I said to that fly, ‘Come here.’”

The fly flew across the room, and landed on my finger.

“And then suppose I said, ‘Fly out the window.’”

The fly took off, flew past Richard and out the window.

And it was so …

Richard gaped. I nodded. It had come; it had gone. I felt no sense of triumph, or strength; it wasn’t exactly me that did it. It felt … right. At the time, it seemed inevitable.

Is this something that’s always in us, waiting to emerge? Or does it pass through humanity like a wind through the boughs? Why does it appear seemingly only at great need, or, like today, in no need at all? Is it a matter of attention, or, like conscious dreaming, a matter of exactly the right amount of inattention? What is it?

These things — miracles, epiphanies, synchronicities — surround us, like nebulae of faeries, visable and hiding in plain sight. Magic breathes into and out of our world, transient lacunae, trailing thin and smoky tracks like cosmic rays in this cloud chamber we call Earth.

A blink of the mind; they are gone.

 

The Canyon

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Henrietta, Texas, 1952-1957: To the northwest of town, the homes came to a sudden stop, at the Canyon. We boys called it the Canyon, but our town being built on Texas rolling hills, it wasn’t exceptionally magnificent. Except to us, of course.

A stream or creek emerged from the rock, and fell twenty feet into a small pool, in which lived a legendary large fish. From the pool, when there was rain, the outbound creek trickled and cut through a wide and expanding sandy basin.

To either side, the long arms of rocky shelf stretched, reaching down to meet the plain, and beyond, a hazard of tumbled woods, open plains, and a great and empty distance.

For us boys, this was Heaven.

For one thing, no grown-ups. For another, the mind could range free, because a quarter-hour hike took you beyond civilization. That is, beyond houses, roads, telephone poles. It was wild country, and roaming free in the Canyon, we were wild creatures.

With my gang of friends, on a long Saturday hike, eventually we became lost. We’d found some burrows near the bank of a winding stream. We’d crawled into these burrows, and back out again. We’d followed a blue racer, a dark-colored snake capable of great speed upon the grasslands. It ran from us and finally glided up into an ancient mesquite tree.

We’d walked through a wood, never seen before or since. When the sun was high overhead, we became disoriented. Opinion differed as to the correct direction. Just like in the horror movies, where the incredibly stupid people decide to split up, we decided to split up.

The reason being that three of us believed that town lay over that way, and the other four were pretty sure that the town lay over in this other direction. As it turned out, both groups made their way back to town. This was just perfect for a Saturday adventure for us boys. We felt like mighty woodsmen.

In early teen years, Bobby M. and I used to head out to the Canyon after school. We were learning to smoke cigarettes. It takes a certain amount of practice. We got pretty good at it.

Then things changed. In Texas, you can get a driver’s license at age 14 1/2, if you take Driver’s Ed. That summer following, Driver’s Ed was a popular class. Most of the mighty woodmen were there, going to school in the summer, because automobiles beckoned.

With licenses, we began importuning parents to drive the family car. Some earned and bought their own. With my parents help, I managed a green 1951 Chevrolet which my mom had traded on a Chrysler. I was very proud of this green car, and managed to get into a wreck soon after, the repairs of which gave me an outstanding two-toned color scheme.

The canyon? Forgotten. Abandoned. In all these years following, I’ve never been back, and I’ll wager the others haven’t either.

But don’t feel bad for the Canyon. All of us had younger brothers. Some of those had brothers younger still. And now, many of the mighty woodmen have sons, and these now grown up with boys of their own. No, the Canyon isn’t lonely.

You can trust boys. They will find the Canyon.

The Abandoned Road

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Dallas, Texas, 1966: On this particular day, my girlfriend and I decided to take the psilocybin before heading out. Driving the Morgan from Dallas to Shady Shores was an odd adventure. It was about thirty miles, and seemingly many days driving.

I knew of this place from years earlier. College roommates and I had lived nearby, and some scouting trip discovered an abandoned roadway that had once run atop a dam built across Lake Dallas. In a concrete building halfway out, remnants of the dam’s machinery remained, huge wheels and vast pipes, going nowhere.

Whoever these mysterious builders were, they were fickle, for after building the dam across the lake, they’d cut a hole through it, so it was no dam any longer. Just a finger of elevated land reaching toward, but not touching, a finger of land from the other side. On the elevated crest, earth and stone and even trees, and the once roadway ran, and stopped at the cut.

Just the spot for our picnic.

I recalled a time from college when the gang of us, plus the girl gang too, hiked beyond the road’s blockade, and spent an afternoon with beer and burnt hotdogs and more beer, on the crescent moon beach that formed at the end, beside the cut.

Now, above the Morgan, the day was turning overcast, the air keen and wild. I parked beneath the trees, and we hiked. It was a strange journey. Past the old spillway’s jumbled boulders, and there among the mesquite trees, we stumbled across a horrible and alarming black and orange snake, which proved to be a fragment of nylon rope.

The ground was heaving, and the trees whispered. The sky darkened, and a breeze began to blow. As we sat beside the abandoned roadway, to the west the sun peeked out, low across the lake.

The water between sparkled with flashes of God and the unseen heavens beyond this Earth. Bright flashes, as bright as the sun, and the water’s chop swirled them round and round in a pattern we could sense, and could almost see clearly.

And then clouds came in from the northwest, and the sun was covered, and the clouds drifted, a million miles above the earth, and slowly across the lake. The breeze returned, lifting the grasses around us, whispering. Then, from the clouds, rain.

Falling in parallel streaks like a Hiroshige print, going on eternally, and the lake turned its face up to receive the gentle rain.

I’m sure we returned to our homes later; unless, of course, we are still there.

Bob’s Typing Service

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San Francisco, 1984: When I was married to Lori Ingram and Network Answering Service on Geary Boulevard, Lori’s friend Allison moved from Southern California to start a typing business in our office suite.

This was because I’d told her how very easy she would find running her own business. Wherever you are today, dear Allison, I deeply apologize.

Typing. She found the typing part easy. Business. She found the business part difficult. Particularly, she just couldn’t go up and down the street posting flyers, and she just couldn’t make calls to solicit business. The tiny yellow-page ad brought some business, but she just couldn’t stand the monthly cost.

After a while she packed it up. That just left us. And, of course, Bob.

Bob had once worked for me. From Tennessee, religious family, he’d worked in a broom factory and he’d worked fixing Volkswagens. Sounded just perfect for the job of helping me start up Network Answering Service from my studio apartment.

As our first operator (besides me), he did well. Next, he learned how to use my radical new and modern Cromemco computer, and soon he did our books and mailing list.

Then he took on managing the Thumbtack Bugle Postering Service for me. In June of 1983 he bought the Bugle (and a computer), and when we moved to Geary Boulevard, he rented one room of our new, spacious quarters.

Then Allison came and went, and that left the Network Answering Service, and Bob running the Thumbtack Bugle. One day Bob was working on his computer, when a guy showed up, looking for the typing service.

“They closed down,” Bob said.

The guy protested that he needed a letter typed.

“Sorry,” Bob said, “Can’t help you.”

The guy saw Bob typing on the computer, and asked Bob if he could type the letter.

“Nope,” Bob said, “Sorry.”

The guy said he’d pay $15.

Bob paused. “Can I see that letter?”

The man got his letter typed, paid Bob, and left. But this big money set Bob to thinking. At the Thumbtack Bugle, he had to do lots more work for $18.45, the fee to have posters put up around San Francisco. And here was $15 for just a few minutes work!

Soon after, he had an attractive signboard made, which he placed daily out on the sidewalk. And soon his office was busy all day with typing jobs. He got medical transcription from California Street, legal briefs from up and down Geary, and student papers from Lone Mountain College up the hill.

How did he get so much business so fast?

Posters! He was still running the Thumbtack Bugle, so Bob’s Typing! poster called out from bulletin boards all over town. Soon he had to hire help.

The typing service ran for many years, and Bob noticed that he did especially well at proofreading. Why not put up a website? I did a simple one for him; he wrote the copy.

These days, Bob has left the typing business. He bought some land up in the Trinity Mountains, where he has a cabin, a cell phone, a laptop, internet satellite dish, and that same website. He has all the business he can handle, and on nice days he works outside, overlooking the mountains and the lake.

Here is a life, and a success story. Here is a man who moved to the big city to make his fortune, and did so.

See how a life can twist and turn? Here is a man whose life took a turning because of a woman named Allison who gave up, and a pushy guy with $15.

 
 

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