Memo to Mr. Zuckerberg: why isn’t there a Facebook emoji for, “I appreciate this delicate ripple passing through my heart?”
Dear Shonto Begay, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly and Tony Norris, I am cured of highway numbness when my smart phone tosses a two by three inch pebble of you into the blurry pond of my road fatigue. It is a long reach to enter Uptown Pubhouse from a rest area somewhere in America, but your faces cause me to feel how a wood chair might scrape to widen the circle around a table to include me. My nose detects the sparkle when beer foams; I lean toward laughter as smooth as caramel whiskey. Your eyes make me whole again. Or maybe it is something about Shonto’s hat.
Could be we are like the opening of a joke: a fiber artist, a musician, a Fulbright-honored educator, a professor, a painter and a fire lookout walk into a bar…We tease that we are “the Homers,’’ we writers who have provided writing and art to page four of Flagstaff Live for almost eight years.
Are we reclusive, inclusive, exclusive, elusive? All of the above, being brooding artists, I suppose. And unlike the legendary NYC columnists and poets who lunched daily at a round table in the Algonquin Hotel, we Homers meet infrequently, perhaps because we so often scatter to adventures away from our beloved base-camp of Flagstaff. Laura’s year abroad in Kyrgyzstan, Tony’s pilgrimages to a bright bay in Baja, Darcy’s explorations along a dirt road in Utah, and my peering east from a fire lookout outside of town mixes the elixir of distance into our tender embrace of local life. When we do get around to tapping glasses together, there’s little gossip, and not much politics. We laugh and trade nuggets of sights seen, voices remembered.
And then I feel a kind of tender conversation continuing as we write sincerely and read each other through the year. My dispatch from Maine (Oct 15) murmurs to Peter’s rumbling diesels and corn stalks crunching. “The sound fills the backyard, drowning out the birds and whine of cars and occasional sirens down on Route 66,” he writes. (Oct 22) Darcy’s musings on artist Agnes Martin (Mar 5) echo through my reading of Laura’s descriptions of Mama-San in Japan (Mar 26).
Blending years and faces, we use words to mix our deepest heart’s questions into local whimsy. “The hunger of new places, people and experiences is too powerful a drive to let pass,” says Shonto. (Dec. 17) The hat he is wearing in today’s photo is different, I think, than the hat in “Rites of Seasons,” a painting he chose to illustrate a column about entering a new year. (Nov. 12) If I squint I can make the hats come together and turn him into a boy moving a sheep camp who says, “My burro loaded with goat pelts, two miles of wagon trail is a gate to another season.”
We Homers take turns rubbing the present against compelling past. “Time stood still as a master storyteller held forth,” says Tony (Sept 24) and though that is my impression of him, he is actually writing about the late Dr. Henry Poore. Tony gives us Henry, and Laura gives us her old friends Kevin and Joe. “They both seemed to be living ferociously, and I got to be near that and part of that.” (Oct. 21) Darcy helps an old friend sort through a departed husband’s clothes, her hands tender with “the relics of a well-lived life.” She concludes, “The minute we’re born, we begin to die.” (July 9) We note the arc each life makes, and why wouldn’t that cause us to peer into our drinks a moment, silent with our separate experiences of falling stars.
We are writers who have cartoon bubbles over our heads filled with paintings and fiber collages and photos, because with our words we share art. There was Shonto’s painting, “Sagebrush of high desert” (Dec. 1) And light on the cliffs of Marble Canyon from Peter. (Nov. 26) And what a curious voyage made by a portrait of Utah Phillips in and out of Tony’s musings. (May 7) Dainty cumulus clouds against blue were stitched into a textile called “The Truth of this Place” by Darcy. (Sept. 17) Kate Watters gave us a poem fresh out of a typewriter on a street in Santa Cruz. (Dec. 10) A white cloud bank of children filled an old car in a vintage photo plucked from Laura’s family history. (Nov. 5) And wasn’t that a treat of a 3.a.m. vision of the Frances Short Pond with the first winter snow given to us by guest writer Molly Wood. (Nov. 19)
“Better than 100 years ago Flagstaff, my rough and tumble town, had more saloons than churches,” wrote Tony. “I’ll drink to that,” says I and wink at La Llorona in Tony’s column of October 29. If I could buy her a Bushmill’s whiskey maybe she’d wail a bit less and stop frightening children. She should be here with us puzzling through life and meaning and maybe taking Peter’s advice as he examines skunk tracks in the snow. “…when I get tired of what is too often our human media, it is welcome relief to head outside, no matter how deep the cold, to brush up on another, older vocabulary.” (Dec. 31)
Every Thursday we Homers nod to each other over our beers in newsprint. It is a gentle conversation that ripples through readers near and far, a widening circle, a gift that creates a glow at this table in my head where the Homers sit and lean to each other in a world generous with its stories, so very pleasing with its smiles and wisdoms.
