Rising with the Day

 

Bread is such an amazing food, isn’t it? Take a handful of ingredients—salt, sugar, flour, water, yeast—maybe some olive oil and rosemary—combine it, then watch as it does its magic.

I woke to snowfall on Thursday. We’ve been expecting this storm, here in Calimesa, hoping for snow because we rarely get real snow. When I opened the door to take the dogs out at 4:00a.m., big, fluffy flakes were falling. Did the dogs mind? Not a wit. They had to pee! Out into the yard they raced, returning to me on the patio ten minutes later, their coats dusted with flakes that were already melting.

It rained and snowed on and off all day—a good day to hunker down and produce some good work.

So after breakfast, I started some bread rising. The night before, in anticipation of the storm, I’d plucked some sprigs of rosemary from my back yard shrub, washed it, and minced the leaves. (The entire house smelled like fresh rosemary, and I remember catching a whiff of the scent as I went to bed.) I added salt, sugar, water, flour, yeast, and some olive oil, stirred, mixed, and kneaded until a dough was formed. (When people ask if I have a bread maker, I always answer in the affirmative as I hold up my two hands. I’ve been making bread this way for 50 years. No reason to change it up now.)

With the dough in the bowl, rising nicely, I opened my laptop. I know I don’t talk about it much—I consider it bad form to do so—but since I retired, I’ve been working on a series of children’s books. (Not a Young Adult novel, as I’ve done before, but a Middle-Grade series, for kids 10-12.) The idea came to me years ago, when I lived in Mt Baldy. I intended to write one fun book. Then I heard a fellow writer talk about the advantage of writing a series—in order to sell more books.

Huh, I thought. I could make it a trilogy. (Which is how it started, but well into the second book, I knew there had to be four, as it follows the seasons.)

But finding the time to write it was nearly impossible while I was still working. (Though I did write the first 30 pages and hand them off to one of my favorite brilliant ten-year-olds, Matthew Confer, who read it and gave me the best feedback I’ve ever gotten from a first reader. Matthew is 19 and in his second year of college now.)

One week before our rainy snowstorm, I finished the last chapter of the fourth book. All that was left to write was a short epilogue. But some things happened… some good, some bad… and I didn’t get back to it until Wednesday night. After I chopped up all that aromatic rosemary, I wrote the first half of the epilogue.

On Thursday, while the bread was rising, the house now filling with the scent of yeasty dough, I put some soft music on for the fur kids, then, as I mentioned, opened the laptop. And cried. And wrote the final words of the book. And cried some more.

It may seem like a tired trope of egocentric writers, so forgive me if that’s the case, but I absolutely love my characters. Writing fiction is damn hard—you have to create lives and back stories and scenarios out of thin air—truly like pulling a rabbit out of a hat where none existed previously. But a decade ago, when I had the idea, one snowy, wintry night in Baldy while I lay in bed in the loft with my tiny cat, Sugar Plum, curled beside me, I began to tell her a story. A story about a cat… and a dragon. And in the years that passed, the story took shape in my head. And I knew exactly how it would end. Ten years and four books later, that story ended exactly as I had envisioned it.

To celebrate, I took a long nap. When I got up, I shaped my lovely mound of dough into four smaller mounds, let them rise one more time, and then put them in the oven.

Imagine the joy in my house: The quiet snow falling… the scent of fresh baked bread… the satisfaction of seeing a vision come to fruition….

Storytelling is much like making bread. You only need a handful of ingredients—a few characters, a setting, a bit of conflict to get the story churning—and, with patience, you can produce something wonderful. Something magical.

Now the hardest part of all begins: Finding just the right publisher to get these books out into the world for kids just like me who love to read books with cats, dogs, dragons, and a wee bit of fantasy.

While we wait, here's a tiny sample from Book One, just to give you a taste: (FYI: I have this section printed and thumbtacked to my writing board.)

"Little one." The dragon stopped, turned, and spread her enormous wings to embrace the small girl who had halted in the middle of the path. Softly, she continued. "Here is my blessing of peace to your heart. It matters not whether this person at this time chooses or does not choose you. Let that be the furthest from your mind. It has been asked of you to sing. This is a sacred gift. You honor us all--your ancestry and yourself--when you do so. At the time given, let go of 'what if' and celebrate what is."

The DirecTV Guy

 

Okay, I’m going to palaver on about my hellacious weekend, but really, all that mess is just backstory to what I really want to say about the DirecTV guy. Please be patient….

In the middle of the night on Thursday night, I was heading for the back yard with Thomas when I walked through a large pool of water on the floor. It was coming from under the refrigerator.

But that’s not what this post is about.

The next morning, I called an appliance repair place, and they scheduled someone to come out and fix the fridge the same day. Booyah!

So I’m thinking, I’m on a roll. Might as well get this over with and call DirecTV. My receiver had essentially quit working days before. I was so done with DirecTV. But wait! The lovely young woman I spoke with made it all okay, said she’d send someone out the next day to install a new receiver, and we did a fancy-dance work-around on the cost. Boom!

Fridge repair guy, Ruben, comes out, pulls the fridge out, clears the defrost drain tube of all the accumulated ice, charges me a fair price and heads out, mentioning as he does that “there may be some residual condensation there on the floor.” Huh. So I just keep putting down dry towels, rinsing the wet ones, drying them, repeating the process.

At 3:00a.m. the next morning, taking Thomas out, I step into nearly-a-lake on the kitchen floor. Many, many towels are removed from the dryer and thrown on the floor to try to sop it all up. I do not go back to bed.

At 6:45a.m. I call the appliance repair place and am surprised when someone actually answers. I explain that I still have “huge amounts of water” on my floor, and I’m told the technician “will call” me. And, eventually, he does. When he comes back out and pulls the fridge out again, he discovers that the water is not coming from the refrigerator. It’s seeping in under the wall. What’s on the other side of the wall? My water heater.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Ruben takes some pictures, tells me his company can replace the water heater (which is what I should have done last summer, due to age, and I knew it), and they’ll call me with an estimate.

So now I’m sopping up water in and around my water heater. And there’s no shut-off valve for the incoming cold water on the thing, so to stop it would mean turning my water off at the main. No. Hard stop.

Overwhelmed, I call my next-door neighbor, the very cool and heroic Gustavo, who hurries over, assesses the situation, hurries back to his place, returns with channel locks, a pipe wrench, some plumbers tape and a pipe cap. Fifteen minutes later—I kid you not—he’s shut down my water heater. Finally, the water stops seeping under the wall. I don’t have hot water, but I can deal with that. I have water. I have pans. I have a stove. I once went two weeks without hot water while living in Mt. Baldy. What I don’t have is water accumulating along the baseboard and pooling on the floor. Bravo!

Just as Gus is picking up his tools, the DirecTV guy shows up. Whew.

That’s what this post is about. It’s about the DirecTV technician, Luis.

He introduced himself, showed me his badge, then trudged in, carrying a new receiver. As he went to work doing the install, I went in the kitchen and started getting organized for who-knows-how-many days without hot water.

When I finished, Luis was sitting idly on the living room floor, scrolling through his phone, waiting for the system set-up on the receiver to do its thing. I asked him if he was having a good day.

“I’m not,” I said, “so I hope your day is going well.”

He shrugged. “Saturday is always easy.” Then he looked back at this phone.

Hmm. Definitely not a chatty guy.

I persisted. “Because less traffic?”

He shrugged again. “Yeah, I guess.” Then he pointed to my typewriter. “I used to have one. In school. For homework.” His accent was heavy, his English imperfect. I wondered if he found it easier not to engage in conversation with people who weren’t likely to understand him.

I told him I was a writer, and it’s like this quiet gentleman just came to life. “You do art, then,” he said. “I am artist, too. I paint.” He picked up his phone again, excited now, poking it a couple of times to bring up Instagram. He started to show me his pictures, but I told him to wait while I got my phone so I could follow him on the platform. As I scrolled through his beautiful beach and forest scenes, I told him how much I loved the mountains, how I used to live in Mt. Baldy. He told me he drives up to Idyllwild as often as he can just to be up in the mountains and look for scenes to paint. He told me how he was bored during the pandemic so he watched some YouTube videos and picked up a brush and started painting with acrylics. His wife took one look at what he was doing, he said, and she charged off to Hobby Lobby, buying him more paint and canvasses. He started posting pictures of his work on Instagram, and people commented. So he set up an Etsy account, and now he sells them. His wife, he said, likes to go to bed early and get up when the world is quiet. (Sounds familiar.) After she goes to bed, he paints. For two or three or five hours. He showed me a picture of his wife and son, talked a bit about his wife going through some health problems in recent years. She didn’t want him to sell any paintings—because she loves all of them.

Finally, he asked if he could see a copy of one of my books. I grabbed one and showed him. He asked where he could buy a copy. I took that one back, signed it, and gave it to him.

“I will read it,” he said. “I promise.”

And I believe he will.

Given the “Salvi Pride” tag on his Instagram profile, I’m guessing Luis is from El Salvador. I don’t know how long he’s been in the U.S. or what he had to go through to get here or what it felt like to leave his homeland, hoping, as he came to this strange new country, that he would somehow make a better life for himself and his family.

But… consider this: His Instagram handle is @luis_vichez_art. What if, like, a whole lot of people read this post and decide to follow Luis on Instagram? And maybe even some people buy a painting from him? Wouldn’t that be amazing? I’m telling you right now, it would make all the insanity of the past couple of days worth it.

And oh—the appliance repair business called while I was talking to Luis. They gave me a reasonable estimate on replacing the water heater—on Monday, so I would only have to be hot waterless through Sunday. Which is when I’m writing this. And guess what? They called back this morning to ask if they could please do the job today. A day early. And yeah, it gets even better. They did the whole job in an hour and a half. Done, cleaned up, water heating as I wrote the check.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about Luis, the painter. @luis_vichez_art