Hannam Tenor Uke Sound Check

The Perfect Student; the Instant Master; the Rookie of the Year ...

There is a cliche in martial arts, that of the perfect student. Been done forever, and here's the basic version: A young person, boy or girl, from out in the hinterlands, shows up at the martial arts Master's place. Generally not accepted as a student right away, eventually the kid gets in, and s/he is the perfect student. In a matter of months, maybe a year, the student sweats blood, breaks blisters and bones, and learns the system so well that s/he kicks the other long-time students asses regularly, and fights the Master to (at least) a draw. 

Is this possible? In a perfect storm kind of way, yes, one has to allow that it is possible. I can't recall ever seeing or hearing about it in the real world, but maybe I'll win the lottery, too. It could happen.

How likely is it? Probably on a par with winning two lotteries at the same time. That ten-thousand-hour rule doesn't always apply to every thing, all the time, but the logic is solid. If there is a guy who is relatively adept studying and practicing a thing every day for ten years. somebody who walks in the door and can do that thing better in a few months is either some kind of physical genius ... or a fantasy. 

People who like to think it is more likely often point to the Rookie of the Year. Some kid point guard gets drafted into the NBA, he kicks ass and takes names, and outscores a slew of other point guards who have been doing it a long time. Happens every season, doesn't it? and there you go.

Not so much, no.

The newbie in the NBA almost certainly has twelve or fifteen years of practice at basketball. He shot hoops in the driveway or at the gym every day, was on his primary, middle, and high school teams, maybe did a year or four of college basketball, summer camps, and now he's stepped up to the big league. It's a whole other level of skill, top of the pyramid, but he's not some guy on the street who doesn't know a basketball from a bong. Yeah, he has to up his game, but nobody who steps into the NBA and gets to be rookie of the year comes from total inexperience with the sport. Doesn't happen. Or at least it hasn't happened that I can find it. 

More likely is, somebody who has been training for two or three years and who has a lot of talent, can stay with players who have ten or fifteen years of practice, but less natural ability. 
Michael Jordan was a world-class basketball player, some say in the top three or four ever, but he was a lousy baseball player. How we know this is that he quit basketball for a while and tried to play baseball in the minor leagues. He was smart enough to give that up when it was obvious it wasn't his game. Lot of minor league baseball players were way better than Michael.

Because it has been done so often, and because most people involved in MA know this Perfect Student scenario is primarily hogwash, writers have come up with ways to explain how somebody who doesn't know anything about a thing can get better than somebody who knows a whole lot about that thing in a short time. 

Couple quick examples: Tom Cruise, in The Last Samurai. And Bob the Nailer (Bob Lee Swagger), in The 47th Samurai.

In the former, Cruise, an ex-calvary officer from the U.S. is captured while training troops "modern" combat in 19th Century Japan, and over the course of his captivity, learns kendo/iaido well enough to stay with the village's master. 

The set-up is that Cruise is a warrior, turned into a drunk by his experiences in battle, but a hero when he was in the saddle and sober. He's quick, and a natural. Able to handle a sword pretty well, albeit a different kind, so learning a new system,  he has a good general idea of how to move and not get killed. He has to work at it, but after most of a year, he's there.

Iffy, but still, an attempt to explain something that is a stretch. In writing, this is sometimes called "hanging a lantern on it." If a thing is unlikely or even impossible, but you need it to happen, you do it, point it out, and you let it go. 

"Hey! That solid state screen blew up! That's impossible!"

"Yeah, but, dude, look at all that fire and smoke!" 

This is the writer telling readers, I know this can't happen, but I did it anyway, and because I did it like this? You can't bitch about it. 

In Stephen Hunter's 47 Ronin novel, he knows better than to have his old fart hero, who is retirement age and patched together with pins and plates, learn enough in a few hours to beat a bad ass ninja-type sword-on-sword, so he had a cheat. I won't tell you what it is, in case you want to read the book, but it is very clever, and while it probably wouldn't work, I was willing to suspend my disbelief enough to grin and nod when I saw it.

Supposed to be a movie in the works. I sure hope they don't screw it up. 

Mostly, the Perfect Student/Instant Master/Rookie of the Year is not gonna happen, and if s/he does? Better the writer has some clever reason to get away with it than not ...

Marylhurst Instrument Show

Sunday Concert Schedule

Went to the show at Marylhurst as we usually do, and if you were local and you skipped it, you missed a great time. Lots of handmade instruments, guitars, fiddles, basses, charangas, flutes, harps, lutes, banjos, and ukuleles. Great mini-concerts, fifteen minutes each of excellent players showcasing instruments. We saw half a dozen of these, including Travis Stine on ukulele, doing his version of Jake's arrangement of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," on a tenor uke by Mark Roberts.

Three bucks apiece for admission. Can't beat that with a stick ...

Some ukulele-related images:

Woodley White, above

Pat Megowan tenor, above

Mark Roberts ukuleles, above

Kerry Char ukuleles, above

Howard Replogle, Ebi Ukkuleles, above

 

Mark Roberts, above, with the side-port tenor uke

 

Travis Stine, above, below, 

 

Lap Steel Guitar

Hey, check out Mike Byers' new toy, a homemade lap-steel guitar:

Sound sample here.

Way cool ...

New Urban Fantasy Novel: Stemwinder

So, I am about to finish the copy-edit on the current book-in-progress, Stemwinder: An Urban Fantasy in 4/4 Time. Probably the subtitle and the cover image are enough clues to tell a potential reader there is music involved.

Bear with me and I'll spin you a tale connected to this biz, and a decision to which I have come regarding this particular book ...

So I am past the Geez-what-a-pile-of-crap-this-is! and to the transient stage where It-doesn't-seem-absolutely-awful, and still a ways from the Hey-this-is-better-than-I-remember-it! phase, which usually comes a few years down the line.

(When I look back at some of my early stuff, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised. I wrote that? Wow. That's not bad ...)

Um. Now the decision comes as to what road I should take to get the new novel into the hands of readers. The choices I see are two, and hereunder, a comparison and a conclusion.

Traditionally, I have gone traditional, i.e., I cleaned the ms up, printed out a copy (and later, emailed a copy) to my agent, and went on about my business while she shopped it around and looked for a New York City publisher to buy it. 

Sometimes, I offered up three-chapters-and-an-outline, which sped the process up a bit on the front end. 

When things went well, my agent would make a sale within a couple of months, the publisher would put it into their schedule, and a year or so later, plus-or-minus, the book would hit the racks.

Part of that process involved me getting some kind of advance against future royalties, and this stipend ranged from so-so, to not-bad, to whoa! depending on the project and publisher, and how well I had been selling other books. If the new title sold well, I got more money. If not, I still got to keep the advance.

Um. Anyway, when things didn't go as well in traditional publishing, the book took a long time to peddle, the pub date stretched out to a year-and-a-half or longer, and they divided the advance up into bits that came in three chunks: on-sign; on delivery/acceptance of the manuscript; on-publication. 

When they really didn't go well, the book came home to live on a shelf in Steve's garage. Some times I'd go back and rewrite 'em and try it again; others abide on the shelf still. Few of us bat a thousand.

When the book market crashed for many of us mid-listers in the nasty recession of 2008, I started poking around in early ebookery, and now have a goodly portion of my backlist up in a couple of places, most lucrative one being Amazon.com, where I get a small monthly check for titles long out of print. It's free money, they never go out of print, and I don't have to do anything past the initial listing.

There were a couple of novels my agent didn't find thrilling, so those I also put up as original ebooks, and they sell a few copies, too. Since my publisher no longer wants any of my Matador titles, any more of those I write will go straight to epub, too. 

Now, the either/or:

The good thing about traditional publishing is the advance. The bad things include the process of submission, waiting, wrangling with agent and editor, and elapsed time before the book sees the light of day, plus a short shelf-life.

With ebooks, these are reversed: No waiting, no wrangling, publication the next day, but also, no upfront money. Yes, the royalty rate is much, much better than traditional, unless you are George R.R. Martin or Stephen King, but in my case, the copies sold this way will be smaller in number and spread out over a longer time. At the end of a couple of years, I might make just about as much money in dribs and drabs as I would have in an advance.

Or not. No way to tell.

One of the things about this particular book is that it is skewed toward readers who are musicians. There are things in it that I hope will make singers and players smile, including some lyrics for songs, and gearhead stuff about guitars and ukuleles and amps and such.  I hope that I'm good enough so the gist comes through in context, but it might be that a publisher will worry that non-musician readers won't get it. And if they don't, it therefore might not sell a lot of copies.

I dunno, there are a lot of musicians out there. If 10% of them bought the book, I'd make millions, and the publisher would make tens of millions ...

Thing is, I don't want to take all that material out. I find it interesting, and I can't help but believe that enough readers will also find it interesting so there will be some market for the novel. Again, no way to tell. 

This is where ebooks shine. They allow a me to produce a work that, even if it does have a limited audience, I can still write it like I want without having to worry that I make a traditional publisher sufficient profit to justify their outlay. I don't begrudge them that notion, if you don't make money, it's harder to stay in business, but I am at a stage in my career that writing what I want and saying it how I want to say it is more important than making a lot of money. Who knew I'd ever get there?

So, yes, this will be an ebook, unless a print-publisher comes calling, and agrees to do it as I wrote it, and I won't be holding my breath waiting on that ...

Onward and upward ...

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Smooth Operator ...

Let's get this out of the way right up front: You are going to die. Not a matter of "if," but "when," and maybe you don't like that notion, I don't care for it myself, but there it is.

How do I know it is true? Look around. See anybody here who was here a hundred and fifty years ago? Show me. Even if Methuselah lived to be 969–and I would want to see the birth and death certificates, thank you–he's not here any more, either.

The Taoist master back in China? Sure. Him and Bigfoot and the Yeti are roomies, right?

Now, what happens after you shuffle off this mortal coil is open for discussion: You might go to Heaven, you might be reincarnated, you might go out like a candle, but the flesh you wear is going to break down, and whosoever is paying rent is going to move out. 

Period, full-stop, end of the organic road. If you can't see this or don't believe it? Have your meds adjusted. 

Are there things you can do to add years to your natural genetic tendency? Probably, though the jury is still out on most of them. 

Choosing your parents wisely seems to be of some benefit.

Conversely, are there things you can do to shorten your stay here? 

You know there are. Smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much, sleep with the wrong people, engage in risky behavior, your number could be up quicker. The Reaper is coming to your party sooner or later, but ... why hold the door open for him?

So diet and exercise and pills made from goat gonads and meditation and prayer and intermittent fasting notwithstanding, eventually Death will feast upon you.

He's gonna get me, too, which I still don't like, but there it is.

All that is more or less beyond the scope of this discussion. What I would offer is that there are some things that will affect the quality of life you have, and those things are there if you want them. Can't change the destination, but you might be able to make the ride more fun.

Diet, exercise, mediation, prayer, intermittent fasting those are candidates. I dunno about the goat gonad capsules ...

"Quality of life" here goes to to how you feel and move and your capabilities to go through life and do the things you need and want to do. Might have medical maladies or physical problems you can't fix, but some of these can be improved. 

Which exercises? What foods, or spiritual practices? You have to figure those out for yourself. If something makes you feel better, more alive? Probably a good start. And yes, some of you will say that bacon-wrapped Triple Whopper with cheese and a side order of Monstro Fries and thirty-two ounce Coke make you feel better, and I suppose that is possible, but I don't believe it. You might love the taste, I surely do, but feeling like a beached whale after you eat something is not feeling better. It's the price you pay for overindulging, and you and I both know it. No wool is being pulled over eyes here. 

All that sugar, all that fat, all those calories? You can choose to go there and that's your choice, but there are consequences.

Of course, you could eat healthy, work out like a body Nazi, free your life of stress, Om yourself to bliss each day, and you could still fall over dead of a stroke or heart attack tomorrow. Shit happens. But some of it is the ride and not the destination, and getting up and feeling great is, in my opinion, better than getting up and feeling like crap. Don't think so? How about how you feel on a great spring day with all cylinders working smoothly as opposed to how you feel when you are abed with the flu? That's when you appreciate how "good" feels, isn't it? 

Being fit, on a good diet, they won't keep you alive forever. But they might make the time you have so much more enjoyable.

iPhone 5 Camera Problems

Got an iPhone–not the very latest one–and it's the cat's pajamas, except that after a few days, the camera stopped working. Black screen, neither front nor back cam working, zipola.

So, I went onto the net, saw this wasn't uncommon, and looked at the list of fixes.

Tried them all. Some of them seemed to fix it, but that was temporary. Next time I opened the camera app, I got ye olde black screen and controls that didn't do anything useful ...

There were a bunch of things suggested: soft reset, hard reset, (force-closing the app, powering off and on), resetting the phone's preferences to factory, toggling, trying third party cameraware, erasing third party applications, yadda, yadda.

If none of those worked, as I understood it, chances were it was a hardware problem, and best I get it replaced. So I sent a note to my carrier and said, "Hey, camera ain't working, here's what I did, now what?"

But while I was waiting for an answer, I scoured the boards, and came across this:

Miso117Jun 9, 2014 7:04 PM 
Re: iPhone 5 rear camera is not workingin response to Gibox

*WORKAROUND FOUND* - I know there are a bunch of tricks that don't work. My wife had this same exact problem on her 5, which I took to the Genius Bar today and they told me I had to shell out $250 for a new phone. I went home and started playing. *FYI My wife's quicklaunch screen had the Flashlight dimmed out and that would not work either... This fixed them both!

1. Go into Settings

2. General

3. Restrictions

4. Select "Enable Restrictions" - Put in a passcode of your choice / 0000

5. *When the restrictions become available, de-select Camera and Facetime

6. Back out to home screen (Camera should be gone)

7. Reboot phone (hold power and home until phone shuts off)

8. Turn phone back on and go back into Settings > General > Restrictions

9. Enable Camera and Facetime

10. Disable Restrictions

11. Back out to home screen (Camera should be available)

12. Swipe up to quick launch - Flashlight should be available

13. Check Camera, rear facing camera should be functional

If this works for you please spread the word, this is NOT a hardware issue, but a software one, the people @ the Genius Bar should be doing this for customers instead of recommending they buy a new phone

Now, I dunno if this will do you any good if you are having the same problem. And to be honest, I dunno if it will still work come the morning, but at least for the moment, it did fix things. If you are desperate, it would be worth a shot ...

EDITOR'S NOTE: Nope, didn't do the trick. Stopped working again. A last-ditch effort involved wiping all the phone data and reloading the software from iTunes back-up. That didn't fix it, either, so new hardware is coming ...

Leonard Nimoy 1931-2015

Crap. Another one gone ...

I met Nimoy once, worked with him on a book project. Here's the link to that post:

Ukulele in Progress - Bling

I am pleased and privileged to own three handmade ukuleles, from luthiers with high-level skill and artistry. Two of them were made for other folks and I bought them, one used, one because the sale fell through. The third was custom-built with my input. The luthers are, in order of acquisition: Woodley White, Alan Carruth, and Michael Zuch.

Above, top to bottom: White, Zuch, Carruth

Above, top to bottom, White, Zuch Carruth.

They are all, insofar I can tell, outstanding instruments. All tenors. All strung low-G. Quality woods and tuners, and they all sound different, but great, to my ears.

As you can see in the photos, all of of them are made with minimal bling; by that, I mean little in the way of decorative inlay. They are all bound and purfled. The White has an abalone shell rosette and a stylized heart inset into the headstock, with small abalone fret marker dots. The Zuch has a solid wood rosette and a script-Z inlaid into the slotted headstock, along with MOP fret dots. The Carruth has a classical-guitar style rosette, but no other inlay, not even fret markers.

With the White and Carruth, that’s how they came, and I allowed when talking to Michael Zuch that plain was fine with me: Inlay and custom decoration add to the cost of an instrument, because they take a lot of time and effort from the builder.

One of them now lives at my daughter’s, and I play the other two about equally. They are way better gear than I am a player.

When I started talking to Beau Hannam about another instrument, I didn’t intend to have any more bling on it than on the others. I did want it to have a couple of accents, one of which was snakewood, and Beau allowed as how this wasn’t a problem.

Pretty much I told him the same thing I told Michael: Build something you like; that if somebody asked you to hold up a uke that represented your best? Make that. 

As the build went on, Beau would ask, when he came to different places, if I wanted to add something. Sound port? 

Wasn’t in my original plan, but Michael had also asked about this on his build, and I liked the results, so that seemed okay to me. 

So, Beau said:

How about some bits of snakewood in that Michi-style rosette? And to bind the sound hole? 

Yeah, go for it. 

You’re a science fiction and fantasy writer. How about some elements that might bring that out? I have some agate that kind of looks like the surface of Jupiter I could put in the headstock, does that sound interesting?  

It does. Go right ahead.

Hey, I’ve got some walnut burl, want to see that on the headstock?

Absolutely.

On the butt, around the pick-up jack, more snakewood?

Oh, yeah.

The heel cap? Got some more snakewood.

By all means.

Tuners? Here are some choices. And you know, with the high-end Robson’s, you can get those with snakewood buttons.

Then we should certainly do that.

Now, about the fret markers, I have some Tahitian Black MOP we can use next to some snakewood …

Well, why not?

So what we have is a nearly-complete instrument that, from the photos I have seen, is absolutely gorgeous, and with more accoutrements than I had considered when we got started. With any luck, I'll have my hands on it in a few weeks.

Couple others recently arrived:

They say that you eat with your eyes first, and I believe it. While the bling might not make a difference in sound or playability, it does add a visual wow-factor element I much enjoy. Nothing wrong with that from where I sit …

Battery Blues

Came out of silat class on a chilly evening this week and when I turned the key in the ignition of my automobile, I got that little solenoid clicking and naught else. Enough juice to light the dome light, not enough to crank the engine. 

Well, crap!

Got somebody to jump it off without electrocuting either of us, made it home, and next day, same deal. Battery was nearly dead.

There are several things that can cause this: Alternator, voltage regulator, a short in the electrical system, or a bad battery. Given that the car is nine years old and still wearing the original factory-installed battery, that was my first thought. Generally, after five or six years, the batteries give up the ghost, usually on a cold day.

My mechanical abilities are slim, but I can pull a battery out where it is accessible. Never seem to have exactly the right tools, but that's why God made Crescent wrenches and pliers, and I managed to get the old one out, drive in the wife's car to Les Schwab's and swap the dead one for a new one. 

Cannot believe what those suckers cost these days, but it's been like fourteen years since I bought one, and this was the top-of-the-line Extremo Mondo Whatevero model, good for seven years, yadda, yadda. Came home installed it, car cranked right up, and, I hope, problem solved ...

Play that Funky Music, White Boy ...

Photo by Chuck Gilman

So, I have mentioned that I go to the local pub, The Lehrer, for an acoustic jam. This is great fun, the group varies from a handful, to as many as eighteen, and there are some talented instrumentalists and singers who show up. 

Most recent session, there were two harmonica players, two percussionists, a flutist, an acoustic bass, eight or nine guitars, and one ukulele. None of us amped save the bass player, and we asked her to do that because we couldn't hear her.

I used to go to the blues jam, but everybody there is amped, and I wanted to retain what little hearing I have left.

On that subject, here's something I learned: At the blues jam, the volume starts out fine but quickly ratchets up. Every time one of the guitarists does a solo, the knob gets cranked, because with eight or ten other guitars playing rhythm, you can't hear the lead. And heaven forbid that any of the guitarists should, you know, turn it down so that could happen.

By the end of the session, the volume on the amps is at eleven, and how loud that is? My amp, which is a small, but decent thirty watts, turned up full, isn't able to deliver sound I can hear, with it by my feet and pointed right at me.

Contrast that with the acoustic folks, who, when somebody takes a solo, somebody else says, "Bring it down!" and everybody plays quieter, so you can actually hear the one guitar across from you doing the lead. And I can, the whole session, hear my unamplified uke just fine. Doesn't matter if anybody else can, but it helps me if I can ...

Sometimes Chuck brings a little amp and a vox and instrument mike so the song leader doesn't have to work too hard, but even that isn't necessary. 

Reminds me of a bunch of folks sitting on a porch somewhere, drinking beer and playing and singing, with a fine time being had by all. And when it is over, nobody is wandering around saying, "HUH? WHAT? SAY AGAIN ... ?"
                         

Accidental Pro

So, most recent jam session at The Lehrer, it was pouring rain and Saturday holiday shopping madness. Had a handful of players show up, some regulars, couple I hadn't seen before, and Chuck, who runs the show, had to leave early for a gig. Didn't have the white board for the chords, so we fumbled our way along, trying to keep up. Mostly did simple stuff. A few guitars, a baritone uke, beat-box and high hat, and me on the tenor.

We played and sang for a couple hours, had ourselves a fine old time.

There is usually a little beer-bucket on the table, for contributions to defray the cost of the web-presence on Meet Up, I think, and if we remember, we plunk a couple dollars into it for that purpose.

Usually not many patrons that time on a Saturday, a few drift in and out, and I tend to forget that they are there and can hear us. 

At least a couple of times, we got a decent groove going, some okay harmonies and leads, and now and then, the combinations didn't sound too bad.

Toward the end of the session, a couple of customers finished their beer and headed out, and as they did, they dropped a few dollars into the beer bucket as they left.

Whoa! Did we just get paid?

Holy crap! Money? Wow ...

Not that we kept it, it stayed in the bucket, but hey ...

Once Again ...

Still Too Early, But ...

... that's the point of the song ... Finally got around to doing this on the ukulele. A little  rough still, but I'll get it done better eventually. Maybe by next Christmas ...

The Tejano Conflict - Audio Book Cover

Memory's Noose

Come the cold and rain in the fall, I sometimes get reflective about old memories, and here's one that burbled up ...

Aeons ago, we had a close friend who met the man she thought was The One. They courted, then moved in together, and bliss was in the air. Happily-ever-after bloomed, and hurray! she deserved it.

Fast forward just under two years, and to abridge the story, the man was NOT The One. There came a terrible row and a break-up. 

Emotionally wrought, our friend came to stay with us. I cleared out my office and made it into a bedroom. For the next few weeks, she was submerged in the greatest depths of depression and grief. We tried to help, but in such circumstances, there was little we could do. The death of a relationship needs the same stages as a real death, and it can be a slow process. 

We offered support, quiet, and hoped for recovery.

(In an odd happening, early on, our friend dismantled the door knob and latch to the office-gone-to-bedroom and swapped it with the one from the hall bathroom, which could be locked. Nobody would have gone into her room without knocking, but there you go; grief does strange things to people.)

Time dragged on. Recovery did not seem to be in the offing. Our wounded friend would spend all morning planning a trip to the store to buy a single orange. An hour at the store to make the selection. The rest of the afternoon recovering from the trip. The air here was too thick with traffic fumes. The tiniest bit of something unusual in her food would cause her stomach to roil for days. Misery was a heavy blanket, and it covered not only her, but the whole house.

Every red door needed to be painted black.

We saw this, and after a time, also saw that it was beyond our ability to heal. See somebody, we said. Get professional help from somebody who knows how.

No. 

We kept trying. Talked for hours. Was a solicitous as we could be. 

She got to the stage where she began rewriting the conflict with Not-The-One. It was all his fault, she decided, she had done nothing wrong, nothing, save to be kind, loving and open, and he was an oafish, blind loser who couldn’t appreciate what she had to offer!

Okay. We didn’t completely agree with that, given some of what we had seen and heard, but we mostly went along. (Any deviation from this absolute was met with instant rage: No! No! It was him! Him! In no way me!)

Fine. We’ll shut up now. You are suffering. Whatever you need to get by.

Eventually, we shrugged and moved along with our lives, and eventually, she packed up and moved away, unhappy that we weren’t more help. How could we not see? Her grief was as powerful as if they had been married fifty years and he had suddenly died. She was bereft. Suck it up and get over it? Not the way to look at it.

Then came a series of phone calls from afar. We needed to see how badly she had been treated. How we had been mistaken in our thinking that she was in any way responsible for the situation, either with Not-The-One or our interaction with her while she was under our roof. We had fallen short in the friends department. She was putting her ducks in a row, and we needed to move to our proper place.

Okay, I said, let’s put it all behind us and move on. I certainly could have been mistaken in how I had seen things, and if so, I hereso apologize.

No, not “could be,” you WERE mistaken! No question! And how you spoke to it? You didn’t really feel that way …

Wait, wait. What? I didn’t feel that way?

That’s right. You didn’t see it correctly, so you couldn’t have really been in that mind-set, and you need to re-think it and see that I am right. You need to see that you were wrong about it.

Whoa. Hold up. I will admit I could have been wrong. I don’t think I was, but we all know memory is a faulty machine, and I am sorry  if I missed shit, but at the time all this went down, I surely know how I felt about it. My facts might have been askew, but my own feelings were what they were. It is what I thought I saw at the time. 

Over the course of a conversation lasting several hours, then several more conversations,, it became apparent that, for our friend to deal with this how she wanted, I had to revise my memory so that it agreed with hers 100%.

Not just acceptance; I had to love Big Brother …

I could go a ways down the road, but for me to say what she apparently wanted to hear, I had to say something that simply wasn’t true. I couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t, which made the effect the same. 

It became the crux of every subsequent conversation, and these were many and long. 

Impasse.

Finally, I said, Okay, listen: We have danced around this fifty-seven times, and unless you have something new to bring to the discussion, it isn’t going to be resolved. Neither of us is apt to have a come-to-Jesus moment that I can see. If you can find a new line, then we can revisit it, but otherwise, I’m not going there any more. We can move on or not.

Not ...

And that was the end of our long friendship. Because I wouldn’t substitute her beliefs for mine, we got to the end of the road. 

Such are the throes of major depression, that reason fails utterly and there is no way out. 

I think about it sometimes. Should I have just agreed with her? It would have fixed it for her, though I believed it would have broken it for me. It wouldn’t have been a white lie, about her hair, or how those jeans made her look. It would have been a repudiation of what I believed to be true, and ever so much worse. 

I am sorry to have lost my friend, but I can’t say I have regrets about my stance. Sometimes standing where you must leaves you there by yourself, but hey, there it is. Fall reflection of the day …

The Luthier - A Short Short Story

The smell of burning vegetation wasn’t so bad, but when the flow crossed the road? The stink of melting asphalt was acrid, it made your eyes water, and it was hard to draw a breath without coughing. Fortunately, the trades were blowing, so most of the smoke and stench moved away from the village. For now.

A news helicopter flew overhead, noisy and intrusive, a man seated in the back doorway, camera trained on the front of the flow, which was already past Les.

Where Les stood, the lava’s heat was not so bad, and the shell was dark, almost black, with only the small windows here and there to reveal the glowing red-orange underneath. The reports said it was moving at twelve yards an hour, and he guessed it would be no more than half a day before it reached his house, maybe a bit less. 

He became aware that somebody had joined him on the hillock. He turned to look.

A young, very tanned woman stood there, maybe twenty-two or three years old, dressed in cut-off jeans and a red T-shirt, black rubber slippahs. She had long, jet hair, and was obviously a native, not a haole like Les, who was old enough to be her father, at least. Maybe her grandfather …

Not local though, he didn’t know her.

“Aloha,” she said. 

He nodded. “Aloha.”

“You live in the village.”

“Yep. That house, over there.”

“The big one?”

“No, behind it, to the left, the little one with the metal roof.”

“Ah. Are you sad?”

He glanced away from her at the lava. Looked like it was inflating a little. 

“Sure, a little. But Madame Pele claims her own when she wishes. I knew that when I set up shop.”

The young woman smiled. “Yes, Madame Pele does that. You have been here for some time?”

“Fifteen years. Not so long, though I got used to it. Home.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a luthier. I build ukuleles.”

“Ah.”

“That big house there? That’s Donny Halle’s house. He is a musician, very famous. He plays ukulele.”

“I have heard his music. It is beautiful.”

“It is. He is an artist.”

“If he is rich, he can buy another house,” she said.

“He can probably buy three or four houses.” He smiled.

“You are not rich.”

“Not in money.” He grinned wider.

“In other ways?”

“Halle plays one of my instruments. Every time he goes onto a stage to make his beautiful music, I am there with him, in a small way. I am happy to be able to do that.”

“You build your instruments in your home?”

“Yep.”

“What will you do if Madam Pele takes it?”

“I have my tools and wood packed up. When it gets close, I’ll go find another house. My skills will work anywhere I go.”

“Will not Halle’s skills do the same?”

“Sure.”

“If you could talk to Madame Pele and ask her a favor, what would you say?”

He shrugged. “That maybe she might consider sparing Halle’s house.”

“His, but not yours?”

He shrugged again. “My house is not much.”

“I see your friend has built a levee to turn the flow.”

Yes. Halle had rented some heavy-duty earth-moving equipment, back-hoe,  skip-loaders, whatever, and had men out digging and piling dirt up for a couple weeks, since the topographical maps pretty much showed where the lava was going to go. 

There was a wall of semi-packed dirt in front of his house, angled to the northwest, fourteen, fifteen feet high. Halle was hoping it would be enough of a barrier to turn the lava away from his house.

Of course, if it did, it would direct the flow right into Les’s front yard …

“I hope it works,” he said.

“Really? If it does, the lava will take your home, will it not?”

“Be my guess. But Halle brings joy to so many people. He deserves to live well, and he loves that house.”

The young woman smiled. “Without the instrument that you made him, would Halle’s music be as beautiful?”

“He can play a throwaway tourist uke and make it sound good, but I’d like to think it wouldn’t be quite as good as my ukulele.”

She nodded. “I must go. You said you have your things packed?”

“I do.”

“You can unpack them. And tell your rich friend he can stop piling dirt up. The lava is going to stop shortly.”

“You think so?”

She gave him a broad smile. “I do.” Then she flashed him a shaka sign and vanished, like a soap bubble popping in the hot sunshine.

Holy shit! There’s something you didn’t see every day …

Maybe he was having a flashback, or going crazy. People didn’t just disappear like that!

It took him a few minutes to get himself back together.

By the time Les had gotten down the little hill, the lava flow had slowed by half. 

By the time he got home, it had stopped.

It would make a great story, but, he decided, maybe it was better if he didn’t tell it.

-30-