I thought I would start featuring one tasty morsel of language per week – like a Hershey’s kiss for the mind. Of course, these will have something to do with me, this being the place where I go on and on about me. But if anyone wants to add their own word that is a favorite, brings back memories, captures a story’s glimmer, or something, feel free.

Today’s word: trek.

I knew the meaning before fourth grade, having come across it in dog stories, I’m sure, but if I’m remembering right, the year I was nine we discovered Star Trek. Uncle Tim visited our home. He was the coolest uncle because, all of fourteen himself, he paid us attention. Uncle Tim urged us to watch this great space show with a neat alien guy who had pointy ears and green blood.

After we became Trek fans, I owned a new reason to feel superior. No one else in fourth grade could say the show’s name. They thought they could. “Beam me up, Scotty, like on Star Track!” they’d call across the playground. I smirked. They were idiots.

If this had been first grade, I would have lorded my correct English over them, as I had in Oklahoma, trying to teach neighborhood boys where we lived not to say “ain’t.” But by now I recognized it was pointless to put yourself out there. People, I was learning, didn’t care in general about using language correctly. They also were likely to call me names. Smarty pants and so on. I had become aware of the crowd, the uneducated masses, and I respected their power.

It would be more than a decade before I decided it might have been nicer growing up to live in a less high and mighty bubble around other kids. Maybe I could have been more friendly, less off in my imagination despising my fellow humans. By then I guessed I hadn’t followed the Star Trek spirit very well. And I struggled, like that alien guy with the pointy ears often did, to try learning to play well with others.

One’s a loaner, the Scientific American issue from 2005 about consciousness. Thanks to my friend Laura I can browse some of science’s surmises on the brain, since I have an idea in my brain to write a piece about decision-making and belief.

Three are brand new. The book I’m holding, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, if you don’t know by the picture, is about Richard Brautigan. It arrived yesterday, and although I’m well into rereading On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, I scanned the first sentence of Fishing and was hooked. My great thanks go to Keith Abbott, good friend of Brautigan’s throughout the late sixties and seventies, for putting into words his knowledge of the man and of the times they shared in Haight-Ashbury and beyond. (Also thanks for updating this biography and including lots of pictures.)

For some time I’ve wanted to read Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. I’ve only begun the introduction, but it looks greatly worthwhile.

And while I’m not a book review person, I will probably post about my friend Linda Clare’s novel, The Fence My Father Built, after I finish it. Linda was one of the frozen writers I visited in December who looked joyful despite her circumstances signing books at the fairgrounds. (Another of them, Dorcas Smucker, had her latest book for sale then, too. I’ve already finished and recommend Downstairs the Queen is Knitting as a great follow-up to her others.)

My treat to myself a few months ago was subscribing to Poets and Writers, and I hope to make time to finish each brimming edition as it arrives.

I haven’t even mentioned that in November I finished Dracula, and I really do recommend it. Not for nothing a classic. You’ll see where much of our vampire lore comes from. I learned that Buffy the Vampire Slayer got it right in her “dusting” method of killing vamps, mostly. The sinister creatures crumble to dust, if they are really old when you stake them (and cut off their heads, by the way, just to be sure).

One more book I’ll bring up, because I’ve dubbed it my favorite for 2009. While tending my dying dog, I plucked from the shelf a book I’d found months ago at Goodwill but never yet started. Stephen King recommended it as his favorite memoir, so I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. But the title, A Three Dog Life, drew me. It’s a wonderful story, not really about the dogs, although they are critical characters. Abigail Thomas, you’re my current creative nonfiction hero.

In those days going around with Brautigan was like traveling inside one of his novels.
~Keith Abbott, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, Astrophil Press, 2009~

A story I wrote has been posted at the online journal called joyful!, in their January issue.

You’ll find “Grandma’s Sermon” on the 2010 fiction archives page, the last story in January’s section. Like I said, a work of fiction. As Wendell Berry wrote on his novel’s copyright page, “Nothing is in it that has not been imagined.”

Morning brought the swift breaths of exercise, then a daughter’s cheerful hug and bright eyes. She arrived just as a husband finished step-ladder moves and motions, hanging bulbs of color – red and green and white and blue – the house in its dress for later, the work done before clouds opened wide.

Under steady downpours a drive – to grandmother’s house without horses or sleighs. In the door to aromas expected, yet as always welcome: the bird, the stuffing, rolls, beans, potatoes. Full plates, the tapping of sterling on china.

New friends met familiar family, and in the glow of growing fullness, stories began to flow.

This is the best part: a tale of horses galloping, another with trout, the time I remember first discovering I could upset Dad – when I was four and released all the minnows he’d bought for bait into the shimmering stream.

This is new: the lines on faces, the heads of hair nearly white, the deep, matured voices of grown children. But the laughter rings, a familiar song.

Dishes and utensils clattered in the sink. Down were taken the tables. Tired smiles and stares and it was time to drive home and see them off and wish them well. I wish to gather the moments like fallen leaves.

Press them close in a book of days, with chapters the night hours, glowing like headlights on the way through the pouring rain.