Truth to Tell

Truth is a record or vision of actuality.  Individuals from various disciplines, not by any means the least of being writers, attempt to define that state with varying degrees of success.  For writers and for philosophers, attempts to define truth are welcomed, the former seeing the attempts as story, the latter as the see-saw of thesis and anti-thesis.

From time to time, in particular when you are composing at top speed, you'll find yourself saying, "Truth to tell..." or "In truth..." or even, "The truth is..."  None of these means your previous words were deliberate untruths or even invented visions but rather as signals that you are about to blow the whistle on yourself for having misread something or having held something back or not having seen a greater actuality that has appeared, seemingly from your fingertips as you type rather than from your brain as it plays its part in the composition.

Many of the actors you've known--especially your mentor, Virginia Gilmore--speak of finding the truth of a particular character, a trope you take to mean that the actor has sought and appears to have found the vision of life and of surrounding individuals and events the character regards as true.

In a way, the actor is attempting to see more truth than the boundaries of the character, including the time, place, and conditions in which the character is placed, and that character's truthful feelings about the other characters in the story.  The actor is, in effect, translating the writer's truth in writing the story.  One actor you know told you only days ago that he regarded the truth of the character Nora Hellmer in Ibsen's play, The Doll's House, as hearing the voices of other characters in her head in the manner of an insane person, hearing voices.  Because this actor was directing that play, his vision of the truth of Nora and, indeed, the entire play, was of vital matter because that truth has an impact on the momentum and emotional release at the end of the play.

Your definition of a story and its basic component, the scene, has its origin in the belief that each is a landscape into which one or more characters enter, each believing he or she is right.  This translates to each character believing in the individual integrity of his truth.  This observation reflects on your earlier vision of story as a clash of characters, each arriving on stage with the insistent assertion of the truth and integrity of his mission.

The actor reads the text of the story, then circles the entire thing, looking for hints that will lead to the assumption of the truth of that character, the amount and degree of it brought forth by the actor, the propellant of that character's behavior, including response and sense of chemistry with other characters.

Over the years, you've read of the dynamic between the actor/dancers in The Westside Story, the Jets and Sharks.  At times, between takes, when the actors were not in character, they nevertheless clashed as an aftereffect of realizing the truth of the enmity between the two fictional gangs.  There were actual off-stage fights, examples of actors seeking and finding a truth.

The actor has to start by finding his or her truth, then a sense of the truth of all other relevant characters with whom there is contact of any sort.

The writer must define not only the truth of each character but work to remove potential obstacles to the reader seeing the potential truth of the story.

In these paragraphs, you see yourself moving from the straightforwardness of declarative sentences into the abstractions arising whenever you attempt to define the truth inherent in the characters and the story.  Words such as apparent, seeming, potential, are all qualifiers, ironic in their injection of ambiguity into the costume worn by the various participants in the composition of a story.

Writers and philosophers arm-wrestle with words, meanings, and actions in their attempts to portray what is so and what is not, trying to portray truth in a venture that is a figment of the imagination.  The story did not happen in reality.  It was invented in a writer's imagination, then honed, turned, and spun until it has the appearance of truth, which is to say a plausible series of actions in response to a plausible series of dramatic displacements, some of which may be arguments.

In the real world, wars have been fought over such destabilizing events and arguments.  One faction revolts against the entrenched order of another.  One word is seen as untrue.  For some considerable time, the Turks have seen a conflict with the Armenians, but have not allowed it to be seen as the same truth the Armenians saw.

The writer has to take all sides, perhaps even to the point of showing greater favor to the antagonistic side, the side against the momentum of the protagonists, because to do so is to give the writer's protagonists a plausible, worthwhile opponent.

In the struggle of writing the story, the writer may well be seized by the greater truth of the antagonist, the worthy opponent, changing his mind.

At times in your life when you have reached this point of trying to make a reduction of story by bringing it to a steady simmer the same way you'd use to make a reduction of some balsamic vinegar, you come away from the exercise more than a little depressed, saddened, cynical over the lack of absolutes.  But you recognize the dialectic within and without yourself and you come away with the self-awareness that you are not by any means alone, your being and imagination are filled with characters yearning to impress you with their truth, the as it were of their splendid, conflicting visions.

Your Inner Stage Manager

A frequent question, often asked of you or by you.  "What's your story?"

With the same measure of frequency, the question is often asked in some degree of pique or, to use a word you admire for its sense of nuance, dudgeon, of which there can even be high dudgeon.  He asked in high dudgeon.  He fucking took offense.

The question is often a response to the aura or vibe cast off by the individual of whom the question is asked.  Why are you, he, she, they, or them so pissed, and at what?

You've seen the questioned asked, have in fact asked it yourself, of another person about whom there is curiosity.  What's her story?  Why is she acting the way she does?  When the question is asked among a group of writers about another person, you feel justified in thinking there is an additional nuance to the question:  "What is her backstory?"  By this trope, the individual's past history is being called into reference as a means of establishing some means of approach to that person.  

Not all answers to the backstory question are complementary.  "He's into martyrdom."  "She's a control freak."  "He's a special needs person--he always needs to hear about himself." 

On the other hand, sometimes the answer to the backstory question is the social effect of a visa:  "She's a good listener."  "He's funny ha-ha (as opposed to funny weird)."

We are all of us story incarnate.  Some among us, you included, talk the way you think and think the way you talk.  Thus, when you are alone or in company, the narrative theme you're aware of is supplied by your Stage Manager, a description you pulled from Thornton Wilder's iconic play, Our Town,  in which a character known only by that name provides the actual narration for the drama to come.  You take note of the place, the time, the persons present, relevant and irrelevant details.  

You interpret what goes on about you and if not on a direct, translation basis, provide some kind of subtitle, even to such seemingly straightforward questions as the one you were asked this morning when ordering your coffee.  "Medium or large?"  "Nonfat or regular?"

Your Stage Manager calls your attention to things of interest, defines them for you, reminds you of tasks you had on the daily agenda, stopping at the bank, for instance, to deposit a royalty check, deciding whether to do the banking before or after your one o'clock meeting and, thus, which branch of the bank.  Logistic stuff as, indeed, narrative in story is logistics.

Your Stage Manager also deals with elapsed time.  This is taking too long.  Or perhaps losing track of time as some remarkable narrative in stories, say in John Cheever's remarkable short story, "The Swimmer" compresses and deals with elapsed time.

You are your story incarnate, striving to become in general story incarnate, a working plan that will have you as aware of the stories of others as possible without giving up on your own narrative.  At the same time, you will not be so exclusively immersed in your own story that you will be insensitive to the needs, ideas, and boundaries of others.

There is a certainty that you will be attracted to stories quite like your own and equal in your curiosity of discovering similarities between individuals with whom you have no apparent connection.

In a discussion you had this morning, you said, to your surprise and ultimate delight that the thing you hope to bring to story is surprise.  This hope is based on your belief that there are not all that many basic stories, two or three, perhaps four, but not many more, thus the need to bring yourself into the stories you compose and the great likelihood of you bringing your interpretation fanny pack with you into the reading of the stories of others.

Saturday, in a discussion with a student who works days as a psychiatrist, and who is workshopping an interesting novel of suspense, you noted the falling off of tension toward the final chapters.  You were struck with the notion that a possible solution would be to kill off a major character.  The psychiatrist blinked, took in the information, then nodded.  "That could make a great deal of sense, dramatically speaking."

You were, in a sense, asking for and getting permission to enter his story, therein to make some radical suggestions.

In similar fashions, you have influences on the stories of those about you, and they on you.  Your favorite stories are mysteries, thrillers, speculative fiction, and alternate universe.

Until earlier this evening, in a conference with your Stage Manager, you hadn't realized how much you favored ghost stories, until it came to you how, at this stage of your life, you are haunted by individuals fictional and real who appear before you, causing you to imagine conversations, adventures, and to recall past conversations and adventures.

Tickle

"The world is too much with us, late and soon,"  says the fussy English poet, William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who did have an eye for such things as man-made conditions causing existential constipation.  This forlorn sonnet is one of the things that drew you to his works, caused you to visit with him to "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey" and a few others before tiring of his heavy, controlling seriousness.

Like so many tastes and preferences, this is a matter of choice.  Even some of your instructors' insistence that he was major and of incalculable importance did not fan your enthusiasm for him the way it had been ignited by a presence who seemed to you as un-fussy and more insightful.  You refer, of course, to Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), who in his way saw every bit as much as Wordsworth did, nearly four hundred years later, and who, within the confines of "The Miller's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales, spoke of his world as "a world full tickel."

In some ways, he meant in that observation what Wordsworth meant in his sonnet.  So many other nuances of The Canterbury Tales, its composition begun in the 1380's  and never completed, resonated with you to the point where it is one of a handful of works you think about in some detail and revisit with regularity.  

The matter of greatest significance to you is his seeming ability to reflect through dramatic action that sense of "full tickel," meaning to take on the contemporary languages of the time, their cultural clash, their social effects, and the important ways in which meanings needed to be inferred.

"The Miller's Tale" strikes you as the most generous approach of vision that the absurd was in as much conflict then with tradition and social stratification as it is now.  Humor runs through all the tales, both in dramatic action, such as the knight from the opening "Knight's Tale" being more a soldier-of-fortune like the civilian contractors employed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq than a loyal servant of the king (See Richard II or Henry IV).

Not to forget "The Pardoner's Tale" and the straightforward description of that lugubrious fellow, "Ek (I) trow he were a gelding or a mare."

Of equal mirth, the tale of Sir Thopas, thought by many to be Chaucer, putting himself into the poem, being shut down after a line or two by the host, Harry Bailley, who tells him, "Na more, for Goddes worde, thy drasty rhyming is not worth a toord."

Much has changed since, say, 1385, but much in a behavioral and social sense remain recognizable, accurate to recognizable type, and thus a useful metric by which to assess the forward tide of evolutionary progress.

Seeing the world as absurd is often presented to you as evidence of your cynical nature, your wish and your willingness to see things as dark, suspect, rife with self-interest and gluttony.  Such things exist; they are by-products of human behavior.  In many cases, human institutions of power appear to be supportive of such behavior, all the while speaking of global and collegial harmony.  The by-product is not harmony, it is a lively debate among type and class.  You frequently feel caught between colliding cultures and collisions of self-interest, roaming about like bumper cars at amusement zones.  

You also see about you persons of genuine inspiration, thanks to their ability to project an inherent manifest goodness and goodwill to which you aspire and which you attempt to define as a writer, a teacher, a person.  Perhaps you have the wrong order.  In order to be the sort of writer or teacher or, for that matter, editor you wish to be, the top tier of achievement should be a person of manifest goodness and goodwill.

There are numerous possibilities to be a writer, editor, or teacher without having attained the goodness and goodwill plateaus.  Being at that stage does not imply an immediate ability to write, teach, or edit; such things, in part a product of talent, must be perfected as much as goodness and goodwill must be practiced and taken into muscle memory.

"A world full tickel" is the landscape; you share it with all about you, relish its complexities and in particular its large spectrum of irony.

You often catch yourself in odd moments asking your inner self, What new mischief have you concocted or get yourself into this fine day?  Truth to tell, you are every bit as able to generate mischief and "tickel" as you are to be caught up in it, perhaps even seduced by it.

In recent times, you've been drawn to an attractive distraction, which is the concept coming from story just before and certainly during Shakespeare's time, moving well into the Victorian era in 
England.  Comedic ending was a term with a different meaning back in those days.  Look at the stories ending where everyone got married, sometimes across racial and social lines.  "And they all lived happily ever after."

Long before the Victorian era, you might call it the Age of Chaucer, there was "The Wife of Bath" to contend with.  Even though married, either her fourth or fifth, she was no example of comedic endings. Nor, later, was Mary Ann Evans, also known as George Eliot, nor was Thomas Hardy.  For a certainty, Virginia Wolff did not drink that particular Kool-Aid.

You suspect a project coming on, which in its way makes sense.  There are a number of deadlines waving to get your attention.  And someone has lit a fuse to the Summer.

You hear it,sizzling away.

Laughter: What's So Funny?

If you spend any time at all as a sharecropper in the fields of writing, the prospect increases that someone in a position beyond peer will think to mention two works to you as a means of shutting you up or down.  One of these is the relevant sections of Aristotle's Poetics, the other E.M. Forester's Aspects of the Novel.

Over the years of your attempts at farming the fields of story, you've read, re-read, and returned to both, the first run through as a means of plonking your patronizers, as in, "I was a bit disappointed that Aristotle never quite got around to defining catharsis in a way that made the term anything but a bit of pedantry."  And of Forester, you could, and did, say, "Pity he didn't pay more attention to his own observations in his fiction."

Subsequent returns to each brought you a greater sense of admiration for each work to the point where, now, they are, so far as your abilities to absorb things go, part of your composition muscle memory and you are left to venture ahead with your own questions and definitions, extending your personal awareness from the last century into this one.

Thus your own sense of catharsis tacks on to Aristotle and his suggestions of tragedy as a splendid means of providing the reader/viewer relief from pity, fear, and sorrow.  Thus you drag laughter on stage as a pal, a Costello, if you will, to tragedy's Abbott.

Things we think are funny bear investigation.  You like the notion that some forms of laughter arrive as a sense of relief that the victim, the one who slips on the banana peel, is not you, that the buffoon, embarrassed or humiliated, is not you.  

You do not so much wish other fools and buffoons ill as you rejoice in their pratfalls not being yours, this in uncomfortable memory of your own pratfalls, foolishness, and embarrassments of the real world.

Is there, you wonder, a similar sense of relief (or catharsis) when you see a pretentious or supercilious peer or someone who has some control over your destiny being brought to a comeuppance?  Is this why you are so in admiration of the satirical skills of Steven Colbert?  

Laughter is the purging of fear, dread, and personal identification, brought to a full, explosive release; it is your passport into the landscape of the unthinkable come to pass.  If the Cosmos were animate, laughter would be its music, the music of missed trains, opportunities, signals, appointments.

The Cosmos does not have to be animate because it has the mischievous play of event from humans, animals, and all other things animate and inanimate.  The Cosmos itself is humor in action, events, pratfalls, injustices, successes, earned victories, and last-minute snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory.

Humor, and its by-product, laughter, are our awareness of sad, irreconcilable truths related to the fall of the dice, the play of the Cosmos.  Humor is more than the simplistic vision of the inmates running the asylum; it is in fact the vision of all of us as the inmates, each of us acute to the visions of our own delusion.

In its wry, slightly acerbic way, humor is living proof of evolution at work, each of us, you for a certainty included, able to grow away from being governed by absurdity in direct proportion to laugh at the self.  The act of recognizing absurdity gives us the freedom to accept the dignity we seek in ways that are playful.  When someone is hurt, we laugh with relief that this time, it is not us, then we rush to help that injured person join the laughter.

Some of the great causes for laughter are to be found in the earlier, evolving visions of the Cosmos at play, and the renewed attempts we make to systematize and control what is before us.

Complications

Whenever you see the word "complication," a world of intricate images appears in the empty lots of your imagination, sudden, spontaneous constructions, where every detail is ornate, woven, mosaic.

These associations arrive, hidden like guests at a surprise party.  Their origins come from your associations over the years with the basic constructs of story.  When you began arriving closer at the target of publication, sometimes a handwritten note on a rejection slip informed you your story in general or some of your characters were lacking complications or its first cousin, complexity.

Then came what you like to think of as the transition years, when you'd put your efforts to devising complexities for your characters and your stories, watching closely for signs of real life complexity when you were away from composition.  

The probable cause for these years was your own ironic complexity in which you could not see beyond the surface in real life.  In spite of omnivorous readings in pulp magazines, Victorian literature, mysteries, and the works of American socially driven writers such as William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck, you seemed stuck in direct, deterministic interpretations of the reality about you.

At the present state of awareness, enhanced by ventures involving your participation in the landscape known as love, you are more able to see the ironic chemistry between small things and complexity. You write in the spirit of discovery.  Story and the non-story of essay are two parallel lines, rushing toward the same goal, bringing you closer to an understanding of something as the story or essay leads you to some moment of dramatic discharge.

 Small things are hiding places where you often see story, crouched down in the shadows, waiting to be discovered.  First you have to get its attention, offer it the kind of boost you associate with your youth when you helped boost friends to the top of a wall or fence or they clasped fingers together to provide for you a foothold from which you could continue some upward movement.  The goal, then, in story, and now, is to extend the horizon.  The more you extend it, the more you can see.  Perhaps then you can make greater sense of what you see.

Of all the possible human relationships, those involving love provide the equivalent of a smorgasbord in a Petri dish.  Love complicates the ways in which we see our self and the object or individuals of our focus.

You once saw a feature about wristwatches in which a designer spoke of complications, the added dials that show such things as moon phases, elapsed time, time in another time zone, dates, and even compass points.

Love has many forms and aspects, depending on whether it is love for parents, siblings, friends, books, musical compositions, paintings, drawings, photographs.  There are other such complex things to love, say a culture or a cuisine or the pucker of a splendid wine or the immediate quench of a pale ale.  There is love for a series of table-like buttes in the Arizona desert and a bowl of potsherds from a time you were told on a Mesa in Arizona not to walk down a particular path and not to turn to your right under any circumstances because were you to do so you would find an enormous scattering of broken pottery which you were not under any circumstances to take.

You have saved for these separate paragraphs the love called romance for another, the most complex of all the loves, the one with the most dials, compasses, and devices registering elapsed time as well as a button to control the device regulating elapsed time.  In that kind of relationship, you are elevating yourself to a personal landscape you have sought much of your life, through such traumas as puberty, middle school, the incredible storehouses of libraries, and all the splendid ambitions you ever aspired to.  You are the person you wish to be, a state that is reachable, even maintainable.  

It is a difficult state to maintain, not only for you but most humans.  If you are fortunate, you will be in a relationship with another who understands this difficulty, understanding it when she has taken leave of it as well as when you have, patient for the times of its return, seeking in her own ways, approaches to get the state back for herself.  Thus there will be the complexity of love between you when you are both in the stage, both out of it, or when you are out-of-sync, with one in, the other out.

Some years ago, a Hindu nun gave you a book, The Aspects of Brahman, which helped you understand how such personages as Durga, Shiva, Krishna, Ganesha, and your own special favorite, Kali, are all dials or complications on the face of The One.  With a push of the button of devotion, they suspend the workings of time, space, and causation.

Perhaps that best of all description of love is to consider it as this formless self, this charged awareness and energy that has aspects, smaller dials, smaller parts to be examined and understood.

Who's on, first?

Some years ago, you made an important discovery that had implications for your writing, your editing of fiction, and your teaching courses related to the writing of fiction.

Scenes with one character on stage alone tend to become fragile to the point of falling apart, losing their energy, running the risk of becoming boring.  Why?  Because the character has no where to go except into internal monologue or, if we're talking a play, a soliloquy.  To be or not, right?  With a few notable exceptions, characters alone are unlikely to be caught doing something they shouldn't, being somewhere they shouldn't be, or not doing what they'd set out to do.

Thus your calculus of dramatic energy was formed.  One or more characters, if properly directed, will produce at the least tension, perhaps actual and active suspense.  In some cases, one character, swarmed by a crowd or mob, is a significant dramatic moment.

This awareness caused a few adjunct observations to snap into place, notable among them the so-called buddy system, which, nearly as you are able to determine, had its start with the god, Dionysus, the principal character in Aristophanes' The Frogs, along with his slave, Xanthias. 

How the contemporary audiences must have enjoyed the near-heretical banter and dynamic between the two, with the slave having the upper hand, most of the way.  A modern casting of the roles that amuses you would be Anthony Hopkins or Peter O'Toole as Dionysus, and either Will Smith or Mos' Def as the slave.

Notable buddy pairs between The Frogs and now would include John Watson, M.D. and Sherlock Holmes, the comics, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the Smothers Brothers, and by way of demonstrating the pairing is by no means gender specific, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mary Livingston and Jack Benny, and that almost quintessential demonstration of how effective the buddy system is, Felix Unger and Oscar Madison.  

There is a wonderful chemistry in all these pairs, to the point where you suspect that had Sherlock Holmes been the chosen narrator for his adventures and exploits, the series would have died an early death rather than moving forward to immortality.  Watson was the perfect choice.  But Neil Simon nails the possibilities with an Odd Couple note left for Oscar on the refrigerator door by Felix, who signs the note with his initials, F. U.

This is the type of chemistry that informs all memorable dialogue, which is, after all, essential exchanges of information and misinformation between characters.  These exchanges are class-structured in The Frogs, where the audience is led to see how in many areas the slave has greater wit than his master, who is a god.  And look what Abbott and Costello did with the simple device in their famed baseball player names caused such memorable mischief. 

The following introduces the mischief in all its glory:


Costello: Look Abbott, if you're the coach, you must know all the players.

Abbott: I certainly do.

Costello: Well you know I've never met the guys. So you'll have to tell me their names, and then I'll know who's playing on the team.

Abbott: Oh, I'll tell you their names, but you know it seems to me they give these ball players now-a-days very peculiar names.

Costello: You mean funny names?

Abbott: Strange names, pet names...like Dizzy Dean...

Costello: His brother Daffy.

Abbott: Daffy Dean...

Costello: And their French cousin.

Abbott: French?

Costello: Goofè.

Abbott: Goofè Dean. Well, let's see, we have on the bags, Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third...

Costello: That's what I want to find out.

Abbott: I say Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know's on third.

Costello: Are you the manager?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: You gonna be the coach too?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: And you don't know the fellows' names?

Abbott: Well I should.

Costello: Well then who's on first?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow's name.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy on first.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The first baseman.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy playing...

Abbott: Who is on first!

Costello: I'm asking YOU who's on first.

Abbott: That's the man's name.

Costello: That's who's name?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.

Abbott: That's it.

Costello: That's who?

Abbott: Yes.

This sample is classic instruction for the nature of much if not all dialogue in fiction because of the way it advances the premise of misunderstanding between two or more characters, its inherent frustration levels accelerating with every exchange to the point of combustion and closure.  The audience sees the dynamic as soon as the brief setup is in place, then becomes a part of the conspiracy against Costello, the more voluble and reactive partner, as Abbott dead-pans his way through the entire skit.

Story is accelerated frustration, sometimes enhanced by misunderstanding, other times abetted by the audience having reason to conclude that the vector of the story has two or more characters in seeming agreement, each convinced of his or her own understanding.

Thus this bit of closure for this time at bat:  Story is two or more characters entering a landscape with a purpose, each character convinced of the validity and necessity of his or her purpose.

You're not listening to me.

Of course I'm listening to you, and I agree with everything you said.

You agree that you're not listening to me.

That's not what I said.

You said you're not listening to me.

No, you said that.  I was agreeing with you.

You don't get the picture.

No, you're the one who doesn't get the picture.

Then how can you agree with me?










XANTHIAS, _his slave_ 

Sascha, Mischa, Gus

 In these summer months, when there is still some semblance of light until nearly nine, your evening walk has a good potential for reminding you of two projects you began back in the early days when you first came by a digital camera.

You began photographing the sidewalk logos of the pavers who, over the years, have paved the sidewalks of your present city and such cities as you'd been visiting.  Of all these sidewalk signatures, your favorite is not far from the sidewalk on Sola Street, directly adjacent the driveway that leads northward to your modest studio.  The contractor's name was Pike.  Here is his logo:

If you can believe the inscription above it, the impression was placed in 1903, which makes it one hundred twenty years old.  You've found a few other of his signatures here and there's a W.W. Bradbury, a J. Wiley, and an Ira Hodson, as well as a Bonilla and a Jonathan Edwards, and, of course, Sam Hunter, the new kid on the block, as it were, a mere eighty-five.

Looking down as you walk has, accordingly, provided some rewards, leading you to yet another "project," which is photographing flowers that persist in the cracks, interstices, and designs of sidewalks.  You come from a flower culture where there are roses, camellias, snapdragons, your favored Gerberas (or African Daises), gladioli, bachelor buttons, stock, Agapanthus, and another favored flower, the Dutch or Japanese iris.  In this same culture, the definition for any flower or "blooming thing" you hadn't planned on is "weed."

These persistent sidewalk blooms often seem to you to be yellow, with spiky-but-not-thorny stems, and serrate leaves.  How they got to where they are and how they survived to bloom is a part of the beautiful mystery of their existence.  You regard them as family, determined survivors.  As such, they take on a special kind of beauty that touches you on some instinctive level, as though they were family, however distant the relationship.  They often cause you to recall distant cousins, presented to you when your family was in its traveling mode that wrenched you from the Santa Monica and Los Angeles of your birth to the strange exotica of the East, the Northeast, and to that strangest, most exotic place of all, Miami Beach, Florida.

You were presented with Marshalls, Murrays, Estelle's, Roses, Joyces, a Ronald, a Charles, a Phillip, and a Max, their exact placement in the Bayeux Tapestry of your family mere hints.  Esther's son from her first marriage.  Mary's oldest boy.  Your grandmother's oldest sister's third daughter's son from that schlemozzle Ernest, before she married Uncle Izzy.  There was even a cousin with the same name as you, but for different reasons, which you were never able to determine.

With a few exceptions, notably a Murray, who was experiencing a painful separation from his wife, coming to California to think things over and, apparently to make it clear to you that there was no future for you in ping pong, you never saw these relatives again, but continued to feel more firmly rooted at having seen them with your own eyes, having them a step or two beyond their lore and legend as expressed by your parents.

Sidewalk flowers are small, strong, and resilient, like the best and worst  of memories and fantasies.  They seem to you like family for this reason alone, but also because surviving in unexpected places is a part of your racial heritage, your cultural heritage and, you like to think, your intellectual heritage, such as that may be.

How easy it is, on your walks in the balmy summer evenings, or sometimes when winter rains force your head downward, to see and rejoice at the mere existence of these flowers.  How easy then to identify with them, to hope for a story or a novel that will find a perch and cling to it for a time with its play of event and its way of coping with survival.

You are not a gardener or you might try transplanting, forging your own patch of survivors in the copious pots and bowls within your patio.  You barely manage your two pots of succulents, and the cymbidium that has stayed with you through three blooming cycles, exhibiting a kind of loyalty you did not know to expect from plants.  You are having a mild form of success with the pits of three avocados, even to the point of giving them names, Sascha, Mischa, and Gus, which, if spoken rapidly and with emphasis, sounds quite like a Yiddish expression meaning "Such craziness," or "Such madness."

On the other hand, you do admire tenacity.  A more respectful term for sidewalk flowers is "volunteer," meaning the flower or plant was not placed by a human, except by accident.  Seeds are often borne on the winds and breezes of whim, transported in the bellies of animals who later leave them with sufficient fertilizer to give them a start.  Seeds are perhaps moved along by sudden appearances of puddles after rain storms.  A number of men and women still wear trousers with cuffs, which can transport seeds, and so can the tread-like soles of the hiking shoes you wear for your evening outings.

There is comfort in comparing the volunteer aspects of plants and flowers to the ideas that transport through the air and thought, later to take root in some fragment of story, that sends forth a tentative root somewhere before beginning to take hold.