Monthly Archives: April 2018

Old Type Way to Slow Down

by Woody

Old Type Way to Slow Down and Smell Roses

My dear friend Michael Mariani recently texted – ironically, it seems to me – asking if I had a manual typewriter he could borrow. He was considering buying one, but wanted first to do a test drive.

I replied that while my circa 1910 Underwood No. 5 had been restored to fine working order, it still offered a fairly clunky experience.

Only days later, I received an old-fashioned typed letter. It was folded and tucked inside a card with a photograph of the gorgeous black-and-gold 1936 L.C. Smith & Corona Standard portable typewriter of which Michael had impulsively become the proud owner.TypewriterKeys_Screen shot

Unlike perfectly uniform lettering spit out by a computer printer, typed keystrokes create various shades of black which in turn create a kind of mosaic artwork beyond the words themselves.

Moreover, I believe the x’d out mistakes and typos – after all, a typewriter has no “delete” key or spell-check – in Michael’s letter add warmth and beauty.

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“Dear Woody,

“You are holding in your hand my third typewritten note.

“What is my fascination with the typewriter?

“I like the idea that it forces me to slow down. Like millions of people, (oh my, the sound of the bell!) I am in search of ways to slow down in my life. I have spent the past 35 years looking for ways to speed up and always striving to increase efficiencies. Now, i (sic) long for the opposite.

“I love to see my errors. No big bother waiting to correct my spelling or grammar. When I make an x (an “a” has been struck over with an “x”) error, it is there for all to see.

“I love the nostalgia of these machines. I x (an “o” has been x’d out) also was not aware of the very (there is that beuatiful (sic) ding again!) large following. It seems I am not alone in my quest to honor these wonderful machines. I am now the proud owner of not one, but three typewriters.TypewriterHands

“I imagine the people that first used these to write important documents or love letters or mundane business docments (sic). I am reading a book about this revolution, no surprisxe (sic), and it appears there are other books on the subject that I plan to read.

“I have alwasys (sic) wanted to write and the typewriter gives me an excuse and allows me to dream (an “a” is covered by a hard-struck “m”) and pretend I am writing some great work, even if it is only a simple letter.

“I love the sound of the keys hitting the paper. I love the history of them. I love that I can collect three of these special machines for about $200.

“I look forward to finding ways to share my joy with others in the future.

“Sincerely,

(Handwritten signature)

“Michael”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Part 2: Typing Free Verse For Tips

by Woody

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* * *

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Part 2: Poet Types Free Verse For Tips

Shannon, the vagabond street poet I met in New Orleans and wrote about last week in recognition of April being National Poetry Month, has collected half a dozen typewriters.

A couple of her manual machines, including a beloved Royal Aristocrat, are in distant repair shops waiting for her to pick up. Three more are stored with friends in different cities, also awaiting her return visit.

Her sixth portable, a white Smith-Corona Corsair made in the 1960s, is what she was typing on when I met her along a French Quarter sidewalk.

“It’s a conversation starter,” Shannon said, noting that a fair portion of her customers stop originally to ask her about her various vintage typewriters.1TyprwriteMural

As an acoustic guitar is to a subway singer, so is a portable typewriter to Shannon. Indeed, her fingers create music on the keyboard:

Click-clack-click-clack-clack go the keys and typeslugs striking paper.

DING! goes the margin bell.

Ziiiiiip! goes the return carriage sliding back to the right to begin another line.

The composing done, Shannon’s performance is not yet complete. Using a disposable lighter she melts a red blob of envelope sealing wax, about the size of a quarter, onto the bottom left corner of the stationary. Next, while it is still molten, she uses a stamp to imprint the image of a full-leaved tree – in reverence, I took it, to Joyce Kilmer’s famous line: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”

Shannon’s poem written for me, you will see, was plenty lovely.

Surprisingly, she does not make carbon copies nor snap cell-phone photos of her poetry to keep for remembrance.

“I want to release my art into the world,” Shannon explained. “Letting go reflects the impermanence of my life.”

She did not say this darkly.

“I hope to do this my entire life,” Shannon said of writing poetry for tips. “I love to travel. I love to meet people. And I make a good enough living.”

Asked how much she is typically paid for a poem, she replied, perhaps inflating the figures to prime the pump: “Twenty bucks is the average, I’d say. Some pay only five or ten, which is fine.”

She flashed a toothpaste-ad smile and added: “I’ve gotten a hundred dollars a few times.”

I asked if she had a repertoire of poems that she alters, twists and shoehorns to fit the topics people choose. She was half-insulted: “Oh no, never. My poems are all original content.”

The topic I gave Shannon was “running.” Here is what she clack-clack-click-clack-DING!-ziiiiip composed and then theatrically read aloud:

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RUNNING

I am devoted to the moment

My legs make good time

With my body, and I move

Forward, through the wind

I feel the breeze on my cheeks

My heart beats fast

Soil, earth beneath

I seem to ascend

My potential, limitless, without

Bounds, I am running

Free and nothing can stop me

But the racing of my heart

The only way I can get

My mind to silence

Is to go for a run

I’ll allow the world to

Fade away, I’ll consider only

My steps and I’ll tap in

To the great enigma of

Existence then

Running

Is freedom

*

It may not be of Robert Frost or Maya Angelou fame, but it is fairly wonderful all the same – all the more so for having been typed on the fly in less than 10 minutes with no rewriting or XXXX strikeouts.

Indeed, I tried to be generous and still believe the original poem I received from Shannon was a bargain at the price.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Poet For Hire, Name Your Price

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

* * *

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Poet For Hire: Your Topic, Your Price

April is National Poetry Month, proclaimed to be the largest literary celebration in the world, and so I am naturally thinking of Whitman and Dickinson, Longfellow and Frost, Angelou and Shannon.

“Shannon?” you ask, confused if not bewildered.

Shannon is a poet I met in New Orleans, a street poet in the French Quarter, a poet for hire along a storefront sidewalk two doors down from a Cajun restaurant with a 30-minute wait. That was about 25 minutes longer than she needed to compose an original poem for me.

Shannon, seated in a folding chair behind a TV tray table, had her nose in a novel as the world walked by. Intrigued by the vintage typewriter before her – actually, I suppose the word “vintage” is redundant in the 21st century of laptops and tablets – I stopped.1TyprwriteMural

Intrigued also by the handwritten sign hanging from the table, “Pick a Topic, Get a Poem!” I interrupted her reading.

“Any topic?” asked I.

Looking up from her paperback, she smiled and assured: “Yep, anything.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you like,” she answered.

“What if I don’t like the poem?”

“Then it’s free,” she said, sounding earnest. “Even if you like it, it’s free if that’s what you want.”

I decided I wanted a poem. I also decided that even if I hated the free verse I would pay something. Indeed, I imagined that was the brilliance in her marketing: very few people would stiff her for work already performed. Chatting later, she confirmed this was true.

Shannon, a comely 26-year-old, looked the part of a poet with her raven hair buzzed to the length of velvet on the right side, standing tall at attention in the middle, and falling like a crashing wave over her left ear.

While waiting for a dinner table to open, I learned this poet has taken a road less traveled by. At age 13, Shannon moved out of her house for her own safety and after high school fled New Jersey for vagabond excitement.

For a while she “ate fire” as a street performer and also did tricks with a Hula Hoop set ablaze. She eventually gave up fire eating and instead fed people as a short-order cook. Five years ago, she traded a gas stovetop for a QWERTY manual keyboard.

“Words have always been my love,” Shannon told me. “My grandma was a positive influence on that – she forced me to read. She wouldn’t buy me toys, but she’d get me as many books as I wanted.”

Armed with a secondhand typewriter off craigslist, Shannon became a wayfarer poet. She has traveled the country the past few years, from New York to Philadelphia, Nashville to Seattle, San Francisco to Santa Barbara to Ventura – “I set up by your beautiful pier,” she shared – to San Diego.

Shannon has journeyed largely by hitchhiking with occasional hops on grainer train cars and boxcars. Arriving in a city, she couch surfs with friends or sleeps in abandoned buildings – “Urban camping,” she calls it. When needed, she rents a room.

“I like the variety,” Shannon says of her circus-like existence.

For income, she writes poetry for tips along busy boardwalks and sidewalks, on subway landings and at farmers’ markets.

In the early going, Shannon says composing a poem took her 15 minutes or longer. Today, with a few years of deadline experience, her fingers dance on the keyboard confidently and without hesitation, producing word artistry in half the time.

In next week’s column, I will choose a topic and share the resulting original poem by Shannon.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Rose Rises From Thomas’ Ashes

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

* * *

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

* * *

Rose Rises From Thomas Fire’s Ashes

 On its homeward voyage, the Apollo 11 capsule – like all spacecraft returning from a lunar visit – crossed an ethereal Rubicon where the moon’s gravitational attraction yielded imperceptibly to the pull of Earth’s gravity.

It seems to me there is a similar invisible line where the gravity of grief and loss is overcome by the pull of healing and happiness. The aftermath of the Thomas Fire, a heinous monster that claimed two lives and more than 700 homes and also turned a million collective photographs into ashes, has reinforced this thought.

For some property victims, this Rubicon of Healing was crossed the moment they safely escaped the fire’s destructive path. For others, it came when they returned to their ruins and uncovered a keepsake piece of jewelry or a treasured heirloom miraculously intact among the cinders.

For many, however, the Rubicon of Healing remains a point far off in the distance of their journey back from the dark side of the moon.

The Thomas Fire razed my childhood home in the wee hours of Dec. 5. Come dawn, however, I honestly felt I had bypassed the gravitational pull of overwhelming loss because all that truly mattered was that my father, who had lived in the house for 44 years, fled harm’s way.AudreyRoseHome

I was, it now seems obvious, in denial. More than being my dad’s house, it was my late mom’s dream home. She died 26 autumns past, come October, and yet the overpowering aura and warmth inside was still of her.

The living room, decorated in her favored blue, was of her. The kitchen, where she rolled out pasta by hand, was of her. The dining room, with her cherished Wedgewood china displayed in a hutch, was of her. Her piano, her books, on and on, her presence in every room.

Every room gone now, burned, cinders and soot.

Because I have the memories, I did not want to see the ashes. Alone among my family, I chose not to go see our home that was no longer there.

I made a similar choice half a century ago. I was two months shy of turning eight and Grandpa Ansel was the only grandparent I had known. I refused to join the procession walking by his open casket because I wanted to remember Grandpa as I had always seen him, alive not dead.

So, too, it was with my childhood home. I stayed away.

But the gravitational pull of loss did not stay away. Finally, the day after Easter, I returned. I drove high into the foothills of Ondulando, turned into a familiar cul-de-sac I no longer recognized, walked up a short driveway leading to where a two-story white house with a front balcony supported by square pillars once stood proudly.

Now, nothing. A moonscape. Even the cement foundation has been removed.

Actually, next to the “nothing” there is something. At the left side of the backyard, near where a hot tub had been, a round fire pit made of red brick remains.

In truth, it ceased being a fire pit a quarter-century back. The first spring following my mom’s death, my dad filled it with potting soil and planted a rose bush. Specifically, a light pink hybrid tea variety named after actress Audrey Hepburn and commonly called simply the “Audrey Rose.”

My mom’s name was Audrey.

In the fire pit-turned-planter on the day following Easter, in a vision filled with symbolism and metaphor, there it was rising from the ashes most literally: our Audrey Rose bush in full bloom.

The gravitational pull of healing took full hold.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …