Notes from the Point

The Importance of Being Perfect Online

The Wild Writing Women are giving a workshop on travel writing at a writing conference in San Francisco this weekend. Last year, at this same conference, my fifteen-minute presentation was on the topic of blogs - what they are and why new writers need one. About five minutes into the presentation a woman raised her hand and asked me to further clarify what a blog was. I clarified. Then another person asked me to re-clarify: Was a blog on the Internet or was the Internet on a Blog, and did you need an email account to use one? At that point I  turned the topic to online writing, self-publishing, and the importance of quality, then I sat down and shut up while Cathy lectured on the Art of the Essay. She got more applause than I did.

I'm going to dare to bring up the topic of blogs again this year, because I hope against hope that by now they've heard of facebook and maybe I can somehow relate it to that. They will know and use these online tools sooner or later, whether they know it or not, and I want to let them know that writers are not like other bloggers or facebook members in that they cannot afford to make spelling and grammatical errors in their casual comments. Every comment, recommendation, review, what-are-you-doing-now entry must be carefully crafted, as if a hiring editor is basing your competence on that one view of your online personality.

That's my whole point, really.

So if you find a spelling or grammatical error in my blog or facebook what-am-I-doing blurb, please let me know so I can go back and correct it.

Seeking Difference Part 1: My Grandparents, West Africa, and My Brother

My grandfather used to deliver coffee and english muffins to my grandmother in bed each morning at about nine o'clock. By then he had already been up for three hours, two spent talking on his ham radio to friends in places like Australia, Denmark, Japan, Hawaii. My grandparents were great travelers before they retired on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Born in the era of transportation, they experienced the transition from horse and carriage to the automobile to the train and the plane and the jet and the first man on the moon. My grandfather, a radio engineer and then, later, a higher executive at Western Electric, witnessed a manned rocket launch to the moon. He said that when it took off it went up so fast he nearly snapped his neck trying to keep it in sight.
    I have a photograph of my grandparents embarking on a trip. Ruth and Roy Tyack stand on a runway in front of a prop-plane. It looks like a cartoon plane, with curves, not edges. Bubbly, balloon-y. My grandmother wears a tweed traveling ensemble; a skirt and jacket, hat with a fringe of netting around the top and her dark hair clipped short and curled around her face. She clutches a neat little rectangular purse in front of her and smiles delightedly at the photographer. My grandfather stands casually by her side, a good ten inches taller than her, one hand around her shoulder and the other in the pocket of his billowy pressed trousers that would be fashionable today. His jacket, unbuttoned, flaps in a gentle breeze. He, also, is grinning. He is an experienced man of science, business, and adventure. She is his lovely companion.
    I am in possession of their travel journals, a set of small, black notebooks bound in leather. My grandfather's journals record distances, times traveled, conversions and costs. My grandmother's journals describe landscapes, restaurants, and people. He is fascinated by road building, levies, architecture. She with menus, paintings, languages, fashion. As I browsed through these journals recently, it called to mind my bicycle trip through West Africa with my brother Jeffrey.
  I was thirty-two and he, twenty-one. I had lived in Europe for quite some time, and was bored, having realized once that I learned French that they were no more exotic than any American I'd ever met. I wanted to experience a different culture, language, race. Some place and people as opposite from me as I could imagine.
    In my building lived a Senegalese man. He was lovely, tall, with an angular face and almond eyes and dark black skin verging on purple. He had impeccable manners, and when he realized that I was a foreigner like him, made sure to talk with me in the elevator and accompany me down the street. I liked his French. It was slow and clear, with an accent much like mine. We didn't become real friends, but he gave me an idea. I would travel to West Africa, a French colony of mostly black Muslim-Animists. There, I would find my experience with people as different as they could be.
    I decided to travel by bicycle. I lived in Nice to research a book on mountain-bike touring. It occurred to me to motorcycle, but when I found out how difficult it would be to find gasoline, my decision to bicycle was confirmed. But even though I was an experienced solo traveler, I wasn't sure if it would be smart to travel through West Africa alone. So I asked my brother, Jeff.
    Jeff had never traveled if you didn't count Mexico, which seems so integral a part of the California psyche it almost doesn't count. He was facing the transition from college to career and wanted an exotic travel adventure to separate the two. Also, he and his longtime girlfriend Lauren had just broken up. Their relationship had been exhausting. They were incredibly attracted to each other but outside of sex they were usually fighting. When I invited him to bicycle West Africa with me he jumped at the chance. He put himself and his bicycle onto a plane and arrived in Nice. From there we hopped a plane to Rome, and arrived in Senegal.
    It was a grand adventure. One of those "adventures of a lifetime" that people are always talking about, and Jeff and I talk about it often. He talks about distances, building materials, machinery, vehicles. I talk about people, fashion, cooking methods, landscape. I have a photograph of him in a jungle near Liberia. He has a machete, and is holding up a tiny, green hand of bananas. He's laughing because he'd just scaled a banana tree, couldn't find a ripe bunch but succumbed to an overwhelming desire to harvest something with his newly-purchased machete. I'm happy he's laughing, because he's been obsessing about Lauren for days. There had been fights, infidelities.
    He was tortured, he was twenty-one. I was thirty-two. I don't remember having any good advice to give him.

-- to be continued --

NOTE: This was a free-writing exercise. I need to finish my book on China, but for some reason all I could write was this story. Now, hopefully, I've cleared a path...

The Storm

A dull white sun sinks over the Mount Tam foothills, putting the storm to bed. Earlier I was looking out from my cottage in Point Richmond toward Belvedere at the oil tanker anchored at the Chevron Pier. It looked weirdly solid in the middle of a raging bay. The wind whipped the trees in my yard into a frenetic dance with the power lines. The power remained on but sirens blared in the distance.  A heavy, iron-legged lawn table flipped over, the glass tabletop flattening the sodden grass. A garbage can inched its way down the street past the bay-facing houses where silvery spindrift flew up over their roofs. Some dedicated athlete calmly jogged by in full rain gear and orange dish gloves. Now, in the time it took to write this, the sky is lavender and blue above the soft humps of Belvedere, Tiberon, and Angel Island. The wind has been downgraded to a soft breeze and the winter air is warmer than the cold summer nights we're so used to here. There goes my neighbor, dragging her garbage can back up the street. She sees me laughing, and laughs back. We exchange waves. Tomorrow we'll pick up the roof shingles and straighten the bent hedges, but now . . . sunset.