At the heart of it, a need to finish up
I am sitting in our gazebo pondering diagonals of sunlight that slice through openings in the branches of the oak trees.
It is an enchanting kind of day, almost magical, past the heat of an Indian summer and into a more autumnal mode. The morning light is soft and beguiling.
Sunbeams reach down
with fingers of fire and illuminate those blossoms selected from the many that adorn
Cinelli’s garden. The chosen ones gleam with an inner
spirit, grateful for their time of nobility.
I have begun early today to finish up a few things around the yard, but as I sit here staring out at the massed vegetation of the garden, the colors and the shapes, I can’t recall what it is I started out to do.
A drunken freelance writer from Oakland who tutored me at the start of my own magazine career offered the most important advice he could think of, which was to finish everything I started. It was about all he had to say.
He meant it in terms of writing, to finish up every project you began in order to discipline yourself into completing the job you thought important in the first place. He understood the tendency of a writer to drift away from one story and on to another before the first one was completed.
Years later when he sobered up he was still saying the same words, “Finish what you’ve
begun,” to students at a city
college where he ended up teaching at night. I didn’t learn a lot from him, but the advice he left me with still helps shape my time.
Right now, for instance, I have a need to finish up projects other than writing that are beginning to loom large in the days before I enter the hospital for heart surgery. The filter in my pond needs cleaning, the green and white leafy things in the dog’s yard need trimming and the batteries in the Malibu light need replacing.
They aren’t exactly what you might call creative projects, but life does not always consist of odes and essays. Sometimes the roof needs fixin’ and the weeds need pullin’.
“Are you working?” Cinelli calls from across the driveway, where she’s caring for her plants. They are a wondrous grouping of many shapes and sizes on both sides of a bridge that spans our creek. Autumn colors grace her presence. I had the local wood troll build the bridge for her as an anniversary present.
“Up and at ‘em, Elmer,” she calls again.
She’s worried about me. I can tell by her voice. She’s always felt that I needed physical exercise of some sort and has urged me for years to putter in the yard or walk the dog. “Do something aerobic,” she said. I bought a treadmill. Six months later, I gave it away. I think I used it twice. It bored the hell out of me.
My lack of interest in exercise has brought me to where I am now. On Dec. 5, I will march into Tarzana Hospital, stretch out on a table and allow them to replace my aortic valve with what they call a “tissue valve.” A pig valve. They will open me like a holiday turkey, do their work and then sew me up again.
“Will I oink?” I asked. “Not likely,” the surgeon said. OK. Then let’s do it.
I suppose that’s why I feel the need to finish up. All these things left undone have bothered me for years. Once, in a fit of energy, I dug a hole in the backyard, the purpose of which was to install a fishpond. That’s as far as it got. Seasons passed and the hole filled with dirt until you couldn’t tell there had ever been a hole there, the way that oceans exist and then are gone.
That bothered me for years until I finally hired someone to redig the hole in exactly the same place. Then I bought a pond made of heavy plastic, had it lowered into the hole and filled it with water. I bought plants and had them situated around the pond by two workers we hire occasionally. They’re both named Jose. Jose One and Jose Two.
The pond lives without me, but soon I will clean its filter. Sitting in the gazebo, I keep thinking of the freelance magazine writer. His name was John Wesley Noble. I envied both his name and his success. With a name like John Wesley Noble, you are meant to win. He would study stories in the magazine he wanted to write for, break them down into components of anecdotes, information and what he called “gee whiz” paragraphs, and copy that style exactly. He wrote two books the same way. Then he died.
Death doesn’t care what your name is or what you’ve done or how you’ve done it. It ticks away your hours like a grandfather clock and when it bongs your time, off you go, singing a little song, humming a little tune.
I’ll be back in about six weeks. Maybe sooner. I have work to get done. Words to write. Ideas to consider. Yard work to complete. I have to return. I’m not finished yet.
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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.
