From the Finalist for the National Book Award

The Finalist for the National Book Award has pumped up her bicycle tires and gone for a ride. She has washed several sinks of dishes, but has not vacuumed the floor in more than a week. Her concord grape wine has reached twelve and a half percent alcohol (yea!). Her leeks and tomatillos are harvested. The National Book Award finalist had her yearly exam today, and her PA commented, “There’s something strange about your ________,” and I had to explain about the National Book Award, and how such a status as finalist can warp space-time, even within a body. “You don’t have to take Xanax,” my health care provider offered. “We can put you on something that will time-release all day and all night. No more ups and downs” The Finalist for the National Book Award declined. The Finalist for the National Book Award has been given a clean bill of health, does not have fleas or lice or too much waxy build-up in the ears (though has a genetic predisposition to waxy build-up), but still something is nagging her, something more than having forgotten to give the cat a pill. Perhaps it is the desire to thank all her glorious friends again. Thank you, friends and family, for supporting me, for lifting me up with all the good wishes. I am awash in good wishes and good will, and I am feeling loved, loved, loved. I'm feeling appreciated. Thank you like a flight of birds setting off, like warm breezes and like wine flowing. And snacks! Snacks flowing too.

I'm pasting in a great picture of Darling Christopher, who puts up with the most from the Finalist for the National Book Award.

In case anyone wants to know more about all the buzz, here are a few articles:

From the National Book Association:
http://www.nationalbook.org/index.html

From Publisher’s Weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6702755.html?nid=3333

From the Kalamazoo Gazette:
http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/10/local_writers_bonnie_jo_campbe.html

From the Detroit Free Press
http://www.freep.com/article/20091014/FEATURES05/91014066/1322/Kalamazoo-author--little-WSU-Press-up-for-national-book-honor

From Chicago Reader
http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2009/10/15/bonnie-jo-campbell-national-book-award-finalist-in-fiction

For Sale From the Pole Barn

As our 22nd wedding anniversary approaches (Aug. 21), the clutter increases, and we are trying to get rid of some things from the pole barn. For instance, the 120 gallons of fry grease we collected in order to make our own biodiesel; it seems unlikely now that we will make biodiesel, but surely somebody needs the grease. If you know that someone, please mention it. The grease is on our truck, which we cannot use to haul anything else until we get rid of 80 gallons of fry grease.

Does anyone want two whiskey barrels in great condition, with a little bit of whiskey in each.

And there is the little VW diesel rabbit truck with only a bit of rust. I don't want to sell it, but Chris says we should. The clincher is that Chris says he doesn't want to fix it any more. I'm not quite convinced, but if you think you have a buyer, send that person my way.

Chris absolutely wants to sell the old lawn tractor. He even put an ad on craigs list. Here it is:



Wheelhorse/Toro 212-5 Riding Mower- red like Satan! - $350 (Kalamazoo) 12 HP, 5 speed gear drive. Cuts up stuff good. Just the thing for dispersing that possum carcass on your lawn. Perfect for spraying gravel against the side of your meth-making neighbor's doublewide at 4 a.m. Kept inside under a chandelier when not being used to terrorize feral cats. Lights work for night-time zombie mowing. Can be used to drag lifeless objects deep, deep into the dark and silent woods. Never used on sanctified ground. Never abused by the clergy. May consider trades, but not for anything that needs to be fed. Blades could benefit from a good honing. Made of shiny, pitiless metal. Does not leak or squeal. Less trouble than a grass-eating goat, but not as delicious. Glistens wetly in the moonlight. Runs well. Slow to anger.

Bringing in the Hay

Last summer our family hay field produced 230 bales of grass hay; this is an amount of hay that can be stacked on trucks and put away in the barn in one evening by whatever gang of people my brother George wrangles up. This year George produced numerous children and assorted (current and former) boyfriends of his daughters to help load the hay. There were six of us lugging bales and one kid driving, George's youngest, Matt. My Ford 350 with the stake bed holds 65 bales easily, and the other Ford pick up holds about 45 without showing stress.

However, we did not take into account what it meant that Susanna had fertilized the field this spring, for the first time in thirty-five years. Instead of 230 bales of hay, there were 500. We got the baling underway by about 7 p.m., and everybody was worn out by 11 p.m., and we were only half done.

So after 11 p.m., I came home and grilled Christopher a chicken and cheese sandwich (he gets home at 11:35 p.m.), but then could not sleep for worrying about the forecast, 30% chance of rain, turning to 50% chance later in the morning. At four o'clock I got up and looked at the weather radar and saw blue specks all over the place. At 4:30, I headed back out to the hayfield with some big tarps. At least I could get some of the hay under cover.

A few hours of dragging bales across the lower field into two long pyramidal stacks nearly killed me. By the time the sun rose, the twine had battered my hands through my work gloves; my arms ached, my neck and wrists were scratched. My legs were also scratched from the previous night, when wore long shorts rather than pants. I was so tired. And I had gotten maybe 140 bales under cover. There were still almost that many in the field.

The thing with hay is that, quality-wise, it is a delicate commodity. This hay got rained on the night it was cut, and so it was already very much compromised. It would never be beautiful and green and soft like the best grass hay. But if the finished bales got rained on, in addition, the hay would have been awful and it might have rotted in the barn, or worse, if it really was wet when we put it up, a fire hazard.

Anyway, I got finished tarping the hay, brought one small load into the barn, then came home and looked at the radar. Storm centers were rolling toward us across Benton Harbor, sixty miles to the west. So I grabbed my neighbor Jim Coe and his son, Evan, and paid them to come out and help me load two trucks up. We got those bales under cover, though not stacked in their permanent locations. The barn is cluttered and crowded.

After George got home from work, he cleared the last 22 bales from the field, and all the hay is under cover for now. Susanna is off in West Virginia at a music festival, but she can't really move hay any more anyhow.

There's still plenty more to do. We need to sell the 140 bales that are still in the field, under the tarps, or else stack it in another barn, but disaster was averted. Oh, I don't know where this is going, but I am just feeling overwhelmed by it, by the fertility of the field, by the work to be done in this life, heavy lifting and otherwise. Everything seems overwhelming these days. Though I do less than a lot of other people (say, those with young kids), I feel the strain of projects needing to be done. For years I have meant to repaint the bathroom. Six years ago, I tiled 2/3 of the hallway, and haven't gotten to the rest of it. The donkey pasture needs to be re-fenced. I've never trained my donkeys to do anything significant, though I've meant to. I've always thought I'd find a way to spend a few months walking around Michigan with one or both of my donkeys, just wander town to town, sleep on the ground. It's likely I'll never do it. I wanted to spend a year learning to breathe the right away. I've wanted to build an excellent tree fort. I thought I'd write a lot of books, dozens of them, and send them out into the world. The weight of all the things I'm not getting done is dragging on me.

I had invited Amy Newday, poet and former dairy farmer, to come help with the hay, but she couldn't. She wrote me afterward:

"I was actually feeling regretful last night that I had to get up & teach this morning so I couldn't volunteer to help you. I do miss haying--the intensity of it (we were always squeezing it in between milkings) and especially that moment when you finally get your tired body into bed afterwards and the exquisiteness of not having to move any part of you and the bed is just so deliciously soft."

She's right. It feels good to have tired muscles, and to have finished a job, to have gotten the hay out of the rain's way. Maybe that's the thing, and a good night's sleep will ready me for the next job.



The top photo is Chris's favorite photo of Susanna, with our big truck; lower photo is Rick Campbell's, featuring horse being trimmed by Drew Anderson. Children are Sheila & Tom Campbell, plus Danny Wickman.

Twice-Baked Pie

This weekend a bunch of us got together on the island in the St. Joseph River to celebrate the 100th year of Frank Herlihy, but we didn't end up talking much about FWH (or "Herlihy, you old stink," as Bob Ardrey called him in a letter I brought along, but did not read.) Instead the formal portion of the event was made up of Sam Lipson, Mimi Lipson, and Sonia Lipson (respectively) leading praise of (Uncle) Terry Herlihy, Susanna, and Joanna Herlihy. Those three children of FWH seemed to be just fine with this.

We then attended 12 minutes of fireworks in St. Joseph, and were dumbfounded by the hour-long traffic jam getting out of town. We found that the police had closed off one lane of highway 63, for apparently no reason. Perhaps they needed the overtime. Afterward we spent many hours talking around a campfire. Twenty of us stayed the night in the two river cottages.

We celebrated Kellee's birthday on Sunday, with a twice-baked pie. Or perhaps we'll call it a pie casserole. Here's the recipe. One person accidentally baked a sour cherry pie without sugar. So we took that pie, tipped it upside down in a pan and broke it up until the (delicious homemade butter-based) crust was broken into bite sized pieces. Added some sugar, some sour cherry juice, and some very soft cream cheese and swirled it around a bit. Then we baked the mess until it was good and hot, until some crustiness formed on the crust-bits that were on the top. We cooled it, and then we striped it generously with an icing made of cream cheese, butter, half and half and confectioners sugar. It was a hit all around, especially with vanilla ice cream.

As I write this, many Lipsons & assorted others are traveling across the eastern U.S. on an Amtrak train that will go from Chicago (where Sonia, Felix & Lucy board the train) to South Bend, Indiana (where Mimi, Sam, Luc, Joanna and Ava get on), to Albany (where Mimi and Luc get off), and switching to Boston, final destination. Imagine it, a train full of Lipsons!

The above photo features Ben, Susanna and Terry; the picture below is Kellee & self with twice-baked pie.

Farm Auction

Thousands and thousands of items. Nine by fourteen foot fiberglass pre-formed greenhouse, cider press, brush hog to pull behind the Ford 8N tractor are all things we could use. The auctioneer at the back was selling tap extractors, trouble lights, a meat scale, machine gauges, mostly to men in baseball caps and flannel shirts. Piles of C-clamps, rooms full of well oiled machines that weigh tons, little wooden boxes of drill bits and taps, box of army gloves, cigar boxes full of screws. The auctioneer said, “Tube bender and tube cutter, who will give me five?” He said, “The knives and the traps together. Who will give me three?” He holds up some rusty old leg traps. Yow. Two compasses, who will give him two? He asked. He held up some sort of metal bits in metal boxes, and says, “Call ‘em what you want when you get ‘em home, when they belong to you.” I asked a guy in a Nascar cap, what was that tool you just bought for three dollars that looks like the capital letter F with a few extra horizontals? He said it was a “tool for breaking flat chains on elevators.” Another man wore a cap that said “Global warming is Bull Crap,” and he bought some odd lengths of tow chain. Over in the tent, the other auctioneer asked for bids for “anything in the box under the table.” An Amish man bought all the pickle crocks and twenty-seven five-gallon glass bottles. The auctioneer was pushing a thousand fishing lures. “Shakespeare Mouse, and another one that wants to be a Shakespeare mouse,” he said. The “tiger” variety of the Shakespeare Mouse went for eight dollars; everything else went for less. All the while, one black-haired woman was standing there knitting a Christmas baby blanket in red and green and white, watching the auctioneer intently, maybe waiting for the cider press to come up. I waited a long time to go use the Porta-potty, and then when I finally went in, it wasn't so bad, except that the door didn't shut and the toilet lid kept closing on my back. Forty eight fishing poles, piles of timing gears, ball peen hammers, metal files, a book "The Machinist’s Practical Book." Box of snap rings. “Ain’t no friends at an auction,” the auctioneer said. Chris bid to sixty dollars on the cider press; the Amish man wanted us to sell him the brass sausage stuffing attachment inside, but we figured we’d better keep our options open; maybe one day we will want to stuff sausage skins with our cider press. The greenhouse went for $290, too rich for our blood, seeing how hard it was going to be to get the thing home. A woman set up a tent and sold brats and chips and soda pop. The man in charge was a grandson of the owner of the stuff; the grandmother was still alive, he said, but she didn't want to come. The atmosphere was not festive, exactly, but it was not so dreary either. The grandson was about forty years old and chatty. He told us stories. He said, "Lord, we just want to get rid of this stuff."

Would You Take Fashion Advice from These Folks?

I know what to wear at the dojo: my gi with black belt and no shoes. In the garden and barnyard I wear jeans, T-shirt and cheap canvas tennies or workboots. I have difficulty dressing for any other environment. Teaching is a great challenge, because I have to try not to wear the same outfit every class. I'm trying to get some shoes or sandals to wear for teaching in June; I thought I'd found a pair: black, rubbery, comfy. I put them on after kobudo class and Kristina (who has just returned from France) said, "no." Josh, who has a special room in his house just for his shoes said, "are they comfortable?" Eric says, "They can't decide what kind of shoes they want to be. Sporty or elegant or summery. But I like them," he said. I will return the shoes to Meijers and try to formulate a new plan.

At the bar after working out, I pitched around the table for general fashion advice. Kristina advises wearing "anything leopard print." She was wearing a knee-length tight-bodice sleeveless leopard-print dress, leopard-print earrings and barrettes, and a pair of medium-heel, pointy-toed leopard-print pumps. Her sister Tori Grace said, "Filipinas are shoe whores." (The sisters have that in common with Imelda Marcos.) Jamie Blake suggested, "Short people should wear pointy-toed shoes." Tori Grace suggests that bandanas are always a good fashion accessory, but you need to research gang signs before you get too creative. Most days, Tori says she wears a long tank top, a short tank top and two belts. Eric, who is talking about buying knee-high converse tennis shoes, says, "T-shirts and jeans work for every occasion. For formal wear, add a denim jacket." Phil, who is holding hands with Kristina says, "Black. Everything goes with black, especially black." Shihan Wayne Kroll says he just tries to remember to put on his pants.

Meet My Brother George

I recall from my youth a cartoon in which Bugs Bunny was was playing the piano, and he turns to face the "camera" and says, "I wish my brother George were here." Christopher says this is a reference to Liberace, who had a brother George, and who wished that brother was there. To me it had seemed profound, because I, in fact, had a little brother George, six years younger than me. I used to make him pancakes in the shapes of rabbits, snakes, and other animals. Recently George, nicknamed Geo, needed me to write a biography for him to put on the Geek Group website (http://www.thegeekgroup.org/). It was fun; this (below) is what I came up with, though George didn't want to mention his middle name, which is Timothy. The rumor is that Timothy Leary came to Kalamazoo and gave my dad acid, and hence the middle name. Pasted in is an old photo of Geo.



George (T.) Campbell

George Campbell was born in 1968, and grew up on a small farm in Comstock, Michigan, where he learned to fix machines, find lost objects, load trucks with hay or anything, herd critters back into their pens and generally work hard. At a young age he was able to look at a machine or a system and figure out how it worked. He is resourceful and quite famous among his family and friends for being able to fix anything with baling wire and duct tape.

George is the person to call if there is water spurting from burst pipes in the ceiling or if a furnace seems to have exploded, or if your horses and donkeys have gotten loose and are running through the neighborhood. George can set posts and fence a pasture with the best of them. He is always generous with his time and talents, though his wife wishes he would spend more time fixing up things around the house, maybe remodeling the bathroom. In a difficult situation, George never loses his cool; he looks at every situation calmly and with a sense of humor.

On George’s sixth birthday, he received his first tool, a small adjustable crescent wrench, and he has been collecting tools ever since, retrieving them from the weeds sometimes when his brother got mad and threw them. When George was twelve he rebuilt the power take off clutch on the family’s farm tractor. When he was sixteen, George got tired of listening to his siblings fight and so lived in his van for a while. Later, he lived with his friend Ed in a house with three snakes (two pythons and a boa constrictor) that roamed around loose and preferred George’s waterbed to any other sleeping spot.

George worked for eighteen years for Comstock Public Schools, until the school system recently privatized their custodial and maintenance staff. He had worked his way up from general cleaning to building and grounds maintenance. He currently is employed as “the outside guy” at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo, taking care of the sports fields and lawns. His previous jobs included roofing, brick tending and greenhouse work.

George’s background is mechanical rather than scientific, and his knowledge base is practical rather than theoretical. He passed he G.E.D. with scores than put him in the top 3% of high school graduates. George is also known as a person who can get along well with all sorts of different people and can make good use of the skills of others to get work done.

George regularly operates a forklift, a Case 731 diesel tractor with Rotovator, and a Ford 8-N with a Wagner Loader. He and his wife Darcy have three wild children (Krystal, Kayla, and Matthew) and one grandchild, Julianna. When he has spare time, he fishes for blue gills at Three Lakes, and he plays World of Warcraft.