Sign here ...

Waiting at a Delta gate last week to board a return flight from Salt Lake City to Philadelphia, I saw a middle-aged passenger with an interesting approach to words as tattoos. Both of his forearms were covered with autographs in tattoo form. I couldn’t make out any of the signatures – they were the typical scrawls and clumps of cursive letters that people use to sign their name. The effect was powerful and striking. Although that autograph book of the flesh was not what I have in mind for myself, it still got me to thinking. What if the passenger in the bowler hat was a writer and all of the signatures were of authors he admired? I saw a different sort of signature today on a tour of the Pearl S. Buck house, courtesy of Linda Wisniewski, a friend and writer who recently became a docent there. Buck’s signature was in Chinese – Chinese was her first language – and displayed in golden stained glass lit by a fall afternoon’s sun. It was hard to miss, just like the passenger’s armful of names.

The Ants Go Marching …

I love tattoos, at least, the creative, artful ones: I’m not a fan of the skull-with-the-eyeballs-popping-out motif. If I were twenty-something again, I’d probably get a sleeve – or two – of a jungle scene, full of tigers and pythons and macaws. But given how far from 20 I am, I’m content with the shoulder and upper arm ink I have. Or am I? After each tattoo, I’ve sworn I’ve had the last. But a year or two ticks by, and I see another intriguing design - and there I go again. Ever since the last one – a line of ants marching around my ankle – I’ve been pondering a tattoo of just words, a significant phrase, a meaningful sentence. But what? At a recent writers retreat, I met Jess Cooper, who has a striking tat in Middle Earth script: Not all who wander are lost. It was exactly the kind of tattoo I had in mind. Short and pithy, and from a literary classic. But Jess already has it. My mission then is to find some other phrase that resonates with me. Thus I reactivate my blog after several years on hiatus, and I explore tattoos and words until I’ve settled on just the right maxim. If you’ve got words in a tattoo, what are they?

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

I’m in mid-river and the only sounds are a cupping and a splash as my paddles scoop the dark water and lift, the slight creak of my life vest and the evening bird calls along the wooded banks. My paddle mates are much closer to land, mostly silent with their own thoughts or conversing quietly. Ahead, the blunt end of an island cuts the current in two. The night mist is rising off the water surface. The air smells of fish and an unknown flower in fragrant bloom. I am alone and loving it, just me and my kayak and the night, the shortest of the year.

I haven’t paddled my Loon since last summer, but in the past week, I have already been in a kayak twice. This evening, in a solstice celebration, marks my third time on the water. I never tire of watching the play of light and shadow, or the swirls and eddies that punctuate each journey. Two days before, I watched the sun come up while skirting the edge of Trout Lake, a spring-fed gem in upstate New York, in a borrowed Otter. Now I’m watching the sun set over the west bank of the Delaware River.

No real otters here or there, but up north a loon warbled his call several evenings in a row. Tonight, I settle for the raspy cry of the Fowler’s toads and pull my boat up the bank at the take-out.

Goth(ic) horror

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897, and reading it more than a century later, I wish I could step back in time to experience the story fresh and unique, as it was then. I struggle to keep an objective reader’s eye when images of Bela Lugosi or the Count from Sesame Street pop into my head.

Vampires existed in legend before Stoker brought them to life in his book, but the details today no longer have quite the power to impress: driving a stake through the vampire’s heart to “kill” it; holding a crucifix as a protective shield; watching a bat transform into a human form. All these things are part of everyday knowledge in a culture that has made Buffy a household name.

I am fascinated by the way that Stoker chose to tell his tale, in diaries and letters. I just finished the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a much lighter and more contemporary story, also told in letters. Writing in the epistolary form gives you the ability to shift POV without having to set the scene for your readers – the salutation or the diary entry is enough to clue readers to the switch. But it also requires careful consideration of how much each character should reveal in order to move the plot forward. Whatever happens must be told after the fact, so the drawback is a certain distancing from the action. But perhaps that was Stoker’s intent. The circumstances of the vampire story in the 1890s were so diabolical and gruesome that they needed the perspective of distance.

It's evident where J.K. Rowling drew some of the inspiration for her series. Dracula De Ville reminds me an awful lot of Harry Potter's arch nemesis, Voldemort, with his red eyes and soul of evil. His ability to shape-shift into animals – a bat, a dog – is similar to the Animagus transformations that some of Rowling’s wizards can effect. And Mina’s link to Dracula – that she can, under hypnosis, sense what the vampire is hearing or seeing – is quite like Potter’s uncanny link to the One Who Must Not Be Named. Not to mention, Voldemort hung out in the woods of Romania for a while after the Sorcerer's Stone (can you tell I've read Rowling's books a few times?).

Next up, I hope to reread Interview with a Vampire, a book I haven’t touched in 20 years. I’m curious to see how much vampire lore in that tale is linked to Stoker’s story and how much Anne Rice created.

(The image this with post is courtesy of Harry Boardman and his blog, 365 Monsters. Thanks, Harry!)

Carried away

War, sang Edwin Starr all those years ago, what is it good for? The song's answer: Absolutely nothing. And Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried makes that absolutely clear. How I missed O'Brien's book for so long – he wrote it in 1990 – I don't know, but it is astonishing.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. ...
Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't,
because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe
the truly incredible craziness.

The crystal clear images continue to reverberate days after I finished the last page. The young VC he killed. The pieces of a fellow soldier he had to remove from a tree after a land mine exploded. The death of his best buddy in a field of human waste. Chapter after chapter, incident after incident, O'Brien drew me – a person who has never been closer to battle than riding on a training flight with a KC-135 refueling plane – into the paddies and jungle paths of Vietnam. I was there with him as he tried to stay calm on a pitch-black patrol shift or waited impatiently for the medic to treat him after he was shot in the buttocks. Today's soldiers are all volunteers, people who choose to enlist. O'Brien almost left for Canada when he got his draft notice – he fled north to within a canoe ride from the border – but ultimately he obeyed the summons from Uncle Sam, then spent the next 20 years trying to exorcise the painful memories by writing about them.

Purely by chance, two days after I finished O'Brien's book I saw the film The Beautiful Country, which begins in Vietnam. It is a postwar tale about a young Vietnamese man's quest to find his father, who had been an American soldier stationed there. I marveled at the contrast between the grim reality of the war depicted in O'Brien's book and the serene beauty of the land itself. Binh's mixed-race background makes him a pariah in his home country, but the journey he sets out on seems one he can't possibly complete.

Skin deep

No pain, no gain. Philosophically, I guess that's true. You hold dear what you've had to work for, struggle for. Things that are given to you without effort (or money) are easy come, easy go. I spent a total of four hours – two hours each session – enduring an odd discomfort verging on pain so that I could gain a gorgeous, full-color feather wrapped around my right arm. The buzzy whine of the ink applicator morphed from background noise to grating annoyance by the end, and my arm burned, as though branded. One wall of Sink the Ink studio is covered with a giant National Geographic map of the world; after spending all that time staring at the South Pacific – the area of the globe nearest where I was seated - I think I have memorized the name of every island in Polynesia. Rikitea? Suwarrow? Serendipity led me to gentle Ben Harris, the ink artist who loves nature. He liked the challenge of creating a peacock feather armband even though his true passion is insects: He has a centipede crawling around one shoulder and a black widow spider on one arm, plus a gnarly raven and a kneecap skull, among other, visible tattoos. When I was vocal about the discomfort, Ben was amused. Yes, he acknowledged, the inner arm is a tender place, but the chest, he said, "hurts like hell." I can think of other body parts that would also make me wince when the needles dig in. For my next bit of ink, I just might go with an insect. How about a scarab beetle? I'm thinking of the bug in the Poe tale, the golden beetle that looked remarkably like a human skull...

Something to crow about

The faux rooster caught my eye – a bantam with coppery feathers and a tail that curved in a long arc toward his head. But he was the lure not the merchandise; he was NFS outside the Tinicum Arts Festival's White Elephant tent. I wasn't the only one smitten with him. Adults and kids alike stopped to stare at this lifelike bird before sauntering past tables laden with used curling irons, out-of-season ornaments, glass candle holders – and my favorite in tackiness, a 16x24 cross stitch of a paint-by-number rural landscape. Framed, even! But that rooster ... I wanted to take him home. I don't have any chickens, not even fake ones, although for about a year, I contemplated getting a flock of Rhode Island Reds for the back yard. Fresh eggs, I promised my husband. Too much work, he countered, adding that the red tail hawks and foxes would help themselves to chicken dinners and we would be out of eggs. During that year of fowl arguments, I met a Nockamixon woman who kept chickens and was also a talented nature photographer. A close-up Natalie took of a fuzzy-feathered hen won a ribbon at the arts festival this year. I don't have her eye for form and color and composition; my photographs are snapshots. But if I'd brought my camera to the festival I could have taken home that rooster – the NFS rooster – in pixels even if I couldn’t have him to hold.