Persephone Abbott

Washington to California – 2026

Posted on September 10, 2026

Driving down from Oregon, I fiddled with the radio station as I navigated the hybrid rental car around Mount Shasta. “Goddamn-Northern-California,” I thought, listening to a tedious reggae rift. Rasta Shasta, the only station clearly available while twisting and turning south bound, up and down the side of the mountain. Late August, not much snow capped the peak. 

A half an hour later I was able to tune into “the hits that you never knew you missed.”

“Effing baby boomers,” I thought. That was it for the next hundred miles: reggae trailing & wailing or the surprise of hearing Captain & Tenille.  

“Donate your vehicle to us, it’s simple, one step and you, too, can support the station,” the announcement came over the waves from the  baby boomer station. 

“They’ll be rolling in it for the next ten years,” I surmised.

By the time I was nearing Redding, NPR took hold. “What the heck is happening out here?” I wondered. Of course I knew about the gun-toting survivalists, and the druggie culture out in the redwoods (transported straight out of suburban basements in the 1970’s) and I was certain that I had no desire to spend a night anywhere near Redding under an Asian motif-stamped cotton quilt with one ear on high alert, listening for the sounds of an altercation or a break-in.

Years ago an East Coast friend of mine (living in the Netherlands) unwittingly planned a long weekend in Northern California during a vacation in the states. She was telling me all about the experience of renting a subpar facility and the locals with threatening attitudes. “You don’t seem surprised,” she said. I had shuddered. 

Behind the wheel of the rental car and sensing an imminent mental rash coming on, I subjected myself to NPR. What do they do, train people to speak in that particular tone of voice? It’s bizarre. A segment on World Breakfasts came on. “Today we’re in Egypt.” Having the most important meal of the day. The description of the breakfast was overstated and ridiculous. Politically correct language for a starchy meal, and all the while lauding the exoticism. It frankly reeked of colonialist sentiment. Our liberal dollars will buy your culture from right under your nose and carry it out of your very own house on a plate. Smile and say sayonara! And remember our sponsor: Buy everyone you know Patagonia fleece jackets for Christmas! They come in the forty-three colors of the rainbow.

A while ago I received an email from a person interested in the Mount Shasta connection. My great-grandmother’s family ran a boarding house in Seattle, most often hosting people from the lecture circuit during the years between 1910 – 1930. Did the family have any material from the I AM movement? 

“I was recently made aware of a pamphlet co-authored by Kelton entitled either Mount Shasta Masters or Mount Shasta Masters Manuscript and I wasn’t sure if the book collection of your Grand-Uncle Adolf (as mentioned in the above blog post) would have included a copy.

Our library maintains and houses the Mount Shasta Collection and that is an item that we do not have in the collection and have been trying to source a copy (or even a photocopy).”

Unfortunately we did not, but Great-Aunt Marie’s follies are still mentioned in passing conversations. However, if any of you out there have some information for James, don’t be shy, contact the Mount Shasta Collection. It’s in Weed, California. I stopped in Weed on my way down. I wish I had made an appointment to learn more about the collection myself. But it wasn’t until I had long pulled out of Weed and was staring at Mount Shasta through the bug splat spattered windshield that I thought of Aunt Marie’s ex-husband, author Ayran Kelton (real name Emery Lewis Ketchner) and the I AM movement. 

“I never ever want to drive this segment of I-5 again in my life,” I firmly said behind the wheel to nobody. I probably won’t make it to Weed again. But you never know. Life has a way of surprising you and maybe in a Captain & Tenille manner, aka that familiar ooze of the inevitable that makes you stop your inner quibbling because there’s no point in resistance. Go on, sing along: Love! Love will keep us together!  

“I take the train to the Bay Area,” my father’s high school girlfriend said to me. 

Excellent idea. 

A year ago I contacted the Class of ‘62, asking whether anyone had any materials of my father. And C. immediately wrote back. While in Europe my cousin M. brought me an envelope with photocopies kindly provided by C. She and I spoke twice on the phone and she invited me to come see her. 

So I did. I could see why C. and my father hit it off.

“I always thought they’d end up together,” Aunt J. said to me in Tacoma. 

But after graduating high school things turned out quite differently. “You could have been my daughter,” C. looked at me and I looked at her, my almost mother as we said goodbye. I was thankful that I got to meet her and her family in person, as well as hear her stories about Parkland, Tacoma.

“I always thought your mother was about to explode,” a childhood friend told me. She wasn’t the only friend to tell me this. 

C. did not seem at all like she was about to explode.  Far from it. 

The what ifs were in the air. 

I nearly stopped at the Bigfoot Museum as I drove out of Redmond, Oregon. “I should really play that myth up a bit more,” I thought to myself as I reflected on the role of Big Foot in my fictional novel in blog form, now available as an audio book entitled Routine Apparitions, all about my father’s missing archival materials. Get more Northwest jabs in. 

“You are going to put more of the pretendian-ism in there, right?” At my friends’ house in Seattle for dinner J. was talking about Routine Apparitions and the character of the Nixpert, the deliberately inept researcher. 

I nodded. Yes, I was going to develop that aspect more at the end of the novel. 

Upon arrival in Tacoma, fresh from Amsterdam,  I stayed in an airbnb on Vickery Avenue not far from my grandmother’s brick house in an area that family members call “out in the country.” It actually is the countryside. 

Driving past Hannah’s house again, I finally noticed something. Unlike most of the ranch houses with tidy and trimmed lawns visible from the road, Hannah’s house was removed, a wall of overgrowth between the road and the front yard. The house is 1930’s gothic/fairytale. It’s not a farm but a medium sized house on a large property in farm country. 

The house is a benchmark for the Hansen family vibe – fronted by the mysterious, hidden, gloomy exterior. It speaks of the new middle-class playing at country estate without the overflow of cash and youthful staff and zip code networking de rigeur. Given the area, the vibe was not about rapid upward mobility in competition with the neighbors. For my grandparents it was also definitely not about let’s get some chickens in the yard to merge with the lower plebs, aka where they themselves as children of struggling immigrants used to be on the social ladder until their parents nickeled and dimed their way out of a shack in the woods, one pair more successful than the other.

To recap the reason for Vickery Ave: there weren’t any seedy bars nearby for my grandfather to frequent and his mother who loved to harass her daughter-in-law was benched – well outside walking distance.

A singular question unhappily presented itself, repeatedly, during my professional life as an opera singer: “Where is your inner child, Persephone?”

Those were vocal coaches and theater directors demanding the impossible of me. Inner child? In those instances they meant where was the fun, wondrous and playful little person who was safe and secure, to tap into the naive innocence of childhood. Of course, as a child I had my moments, flashing smiles and exhibiting a carefree attitude, but could that have generally been a front? Or not? Good question. Was I imitating my socially charismatic father who was my leading example on how to handle the home situation? Was I having a great time? Always possible. It wasn’t all gloom and doom, but at any given moment it could go wrong and I had eyes in the back of my head, watching for any clue that signalled weasel asap out of whatever is going down and duck for cover. 

I admit I was looking a little weary, having navigated the fly-overs off of I-5 into downtown Portland, as I surveyed the Denny’s parking lot. When I pulled up the homeless, excuse me – the un-home-ed (translation: a phrase referencing the undermining of the citizens’ hard won earning potential by radical right wing capitalistic possibly foreign governments subsidized by international tax treaties OR leftist softies giving away handouts so nobody wanted to own property and take care of the neighborhood because everyone expected civic services to roll up in compact suvs and ask them how they were feeling) were sitting under the row of overgrown shrubs, much like determined merchants lined up with the intent of doing solid business with a parade of uninformed tourists let loose in a third world country. In any case it was clear, there was an agenda out there on the pavement.

On my way to Redmond, Oregon, I had arranged to have lunch with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years.  “Oh no,” she said to me as we sat down, “I took the train in. I never drive in Portland.” 

By this time the un-home-ed had just been served a Meals on Wheels special and were now standing in the middle of the cement driveway in a, shall we say, fairly stable willow-tree-esq formation. 

I said I needed to re-park the car where I could see it, and left the booth for a moment.  

“There’s no milk,” the waitress said after I ordered a milkshake. 

I had specifically tried to arrange a meeting outside of downtown to the west of Portland, but my friend insisted on meeting me downtown. Because she could take the train in. 

The 55+ special came with a sausage the size of a Safeway baby carrot. No hashbrowns. “Isn’t there supposed to be hashbrowns with this?” I asked, looking at the plate. One fried egg, a mini sausage and a dixie cup of fruit. Back in 2024 the 55+special had been the perfect amount of food for me. 

I looked at my friend. She hadn’t changed. 

A plate of soggy hashbrowns arrived. “The cook forgot.”

In 2024 I was able to view the inside of Hannah’s house on Vickery Avenue because it was for sale, and this probably shaved off  years of therapy. A young family has now moved in and that was nice to witness as I drove by. Times have moved on, and not only because that’s how the world works, but also in my mind and heart. Going inside the house in 2024 jump started my positive memories.

Waking up in the attic room of the Tacoma airbnb (very much like my old room at my grandmother Hannah’s house), I opened up the window and inhaled the air, enjoying that peculiar freshness of summer in Washington. The trees, the dew. All familiar. The sounds of the birds, trees moving and occasional passing traffic. 

While living abroad I have spent a lot of time these past decades avoiding fellow American’s questions about missing America. I sense during my recent visits to Tacoma that I have come as close to acknowledging the presence of my contented inner child as I ever will. 

And what was I going to do in Tacoma? Besides trying to produce normal conversations with the few remaining family members in the area, having during my last trip previously delved into the dysfunctionalism that came blasting out of the closet after my mother’s death and shocked everyone with its ugly power and undeniable madness, I suppose I had a  fantasy of doing what my father’s mother, Grandma Gert, did to pass the days. Jigsaw puzzles laid out on the card table, local newspapers with little to no serious news like back in the 1970’s, maybe go to the supermarket and buy a pack of gum.

All those years ago while working as an opera singer all I ever wanted to hurl back at the vocal coaches and theater directors whenever they demanded Pollyanna to show up was a blunt, “Fuck the fuck off!”

So, take a deep breath and change the subject.

Specifically talking to a professional recently about what was possibly wrong with my mother (an antisocial personality disorder fits the bill per the DM5), I told her off my gut reaction to people harping on the inner child business. 

“Then let’s not go there,” she said. 

“That was crazy,” she said flatly to me after we went through just one of many episodes I’ve had to live through during the past five years since my mother’s death. She examined the documents provided to me by a media lawyer that I brought for proof that I was the one who was not unhinged. “You’ve had to fight all your life to survive.”

First step: leave America.

The day I checked out of the airbnb on Vickery, I toted my suitcase down the stairs. The airbnb smelled like Hannah’s house.  And I realized, feeling just like a kid again, that I had never anticipated the day when I would not have been toting my suitcase down Hannah’s stairs, loading it into the station wagon and sitting next to her as she drove me to Union Station to catch the train back to the Bay Area with my father. It never was my intention to stop speaking to my grandmother or stop even talking about her for seventeen years.

Of course, as a responsible adult I couldn’t yell obscenities at any of those coaches and theater directors who were supposed to make me a better artiste and an adequate performer, aptly emoting and revealing a touching amount of vulnerability that the audience would relate to while watching an opera about an absurdly unrealistic situation. 

And I had to be believable, yes, believable, and there’s the rub. The directors were seeking access to a commonplace reality that they expected to find somewhere within me, something which didn’t easily manifest.

A little more than an hour east of Portland, I took a break at Government Camp.  I still had the jitters from driving through the grimy metropolis and a case of indigestion from the dining experience at the superbly urban Denny’s.  After parking on the main drag to the ski resort, I stepped into the local museum and examined a corner of a sawed-off fire lookout set up as an educational scene.  

Somewhat calmed down, I got back in the car and promptly drove into a bank of brown smoke rolling in on the winds passing over the forest fires. “Where the hell am I headed?” I thought, worried about the possibility of roads being closed due to fires. I had double-checked before I left Seattle. Admittedly, it was a bit of an adventure, showing up at my father’s high school girlfriend’s house upon her invitation. From her last email I got the idea that she was also feeling a bit uncertain about the whole idea now that it was really happening, a middle-aged stranger all the way from Amsterdam would show up on her doorstep.

Unfortunately after this trip to the states, upon returning to the Netherlands, I was going to have to interview for  jobs. And I had nothing much to wear. Age, body shape changing etc. Blouses, I said to myself while in Tacoma, just buy loads of them. Blouses are tricky – either you are feeling them or not. One of the blouses I bought in 2024 at a Tacoma Goodwill was left hanging, unappreciated, in my closet until I decided I really liked it. Shortly thereafter I ruined it, snagging the front so the fabric was permanently puckered. Oh well.

What else, besides talking to family members about normalish things (what a relief) and visiting the Goodwill, was I going to do in Tacoma? I thought about visiting Mountain View Cemetery again. For months in 2025 I had been quite ill (turns out I was having a delayed stress reaction to what I call the Great Craptastic which was hands down an absolutely horrible experience that I would not wish upon anyone) and had been looking at what I wanted done with my body after death. My ashes will be interred in my grandmother’s grave, except the cemetery never collected the money after I filled in the forms. I could stop by and pay them, such a strange thought since these days I feel not at all close to dying, but maybe not – given the job situation. 

“Maybe wait,” Aunt J. said, looking sideways at me from her chair.

“I kept asking my stepmom for part of my dad’s ashes,” my old friend said to me over the filthy table top at Denny’s in Portland after telling me about how hard it was to convince her brother to relinquish a quantity of their mother’s ashes. My friend was still angry, even though she had finally gotten her fair share of the cremated remains of her parents. “Took her long enough! Five years!” She indicated her continued irritation at her stepmom by blinking hard and shaking her head.

The idea of receiving a selection of my father’s ashes had never occurred to me. 

“Paperweights,” my old friend said, announcing the end game.

Stop being so morose and show some joy!  OR: “Why can’t you get angry?” a coach asked me once, thinking that I should show some backbone in some up tempo piece of tempestuous Brahms.

Because getting angry would put me in direct danger of complete annihilation, I learned this so young that I don’t even recall when I learned this. 

“Two huckleberry!” B. made his request to the man behind the counter who then handed me a perfect scoop of ice cream in a cup. 

“What’s a huckleberry?” I had asked Aunt J. Of course I knew of the word but couldn’t place the fruit.

“It’s like a small blueberry,” she replied.

“It’s funny, “ I said to B. while visiting Redmond. “My family says beef, not cow.”

“Cow is for dairy,” B. said. He grew up on a farm in Missouri and later married C. They retired to Oregon.

Ah yes, that would be it. I never understood the farm life where my father was raised and over which he hardly ever spoke.

“A steer is a castrated bull,” B. said to me, as he drove me his vintage Porsche around the desert plateau on a radiant day in Oregon, answering my question.  

I got out of the silver Porsche and stood facing Smith’s Rock.

“Smith like Joseph Smith?” I asked.

“No idea,” B. said.

In Tacoma I bought three blouses at Goodwill because they suited my coloring. Now that my hair is grey I can’t wear the olive greens that favored my former red-blond complexion anymore. Frankly, I am always uneasy with clothes. I always think, who do I have to be in this blouse? What will people think of me? Do I really like it? After a shower, I put on a new second hand blouse. A pink blouse. I examined my reflection in the mirror. 

Second step: slowly reconnect with family when it’s safe.

Concerned about my shabby wardrobe my grandmother Hannah used to buy me new clothes as a child and whenever I arrived, she’d promptly present them to me, “Do you like it?” She mainly bought me navy blue, purple or yellow colored clothes. Never pink. 

These days I ask myself, “Do I like pink? Am I supposed to like pink? Am I allowed to like pink now?” You can begin to tell what kind of nonperson I was trained by my mother to be. Don’t show that you like anything without her approval first – because it could lead to a dangerous confrontation and all items taken away.

The first week, during which I had met a lot of people, had passed. I felt I needed a break. I opted to decompress a few nights in Chico where I knew no-one. 

I remembered liking the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Why do I remember this area? Somewhere when I was a teenager, I went with my mother on a day trip. Twice, maybe thrice. This time while on my little solo break, I thought I would drive around to the gold towns and take in the old sites. It wasn’t until the second day in Chico that I felt decidedly unhappy. But it has to be said: the area is stunningly beautiful – just look at those golden rolling hills. 

Except for the faded charm of the goldrush era, downtown Oroville was mostly vacant. The feeling that dozens of people in hats had once routinely thronged to the downtown grid was now decidedly remote. Forty years ago you could positively conjure up the disappointed faces of the phantom folk who finally turned their backs on Oroville and left for good, abandoning the stores with high tinned ceilings and the empty barber chairs behind to gather dust.

Trying explain to C. my relationship with my father who was my main caregiver for my early years I ended up saying, “As a teenager I was monopolized by my mother.”

And there we have it, the typical tactic of a narcissist: isolation in a car and on a road trip to nowhere to see no-one. Captive audience, interrogation and so much more. As I drove myself around the back roads near Chico, I could vaguely remember the conversations that my mother and I had in the Ford Maverick, but mostly I recalled the routine of how the interactions were patterned.  It didn’t matter anymore about the specifics because the years had blasted enough of her indoctrination out of my system. However, I was dismayed at this resurgence of the past, prompting a slight film of ick to the day.

Back in the 1970’s, in addition to clothes, Hannah also bought me vitamin pills, those crunchy Flintstone shaped vitamin pills for children.

I obviously had no interest in reintroducing children’s vitamins, punched into pastel cartoon characters, into my diet. But I poured myself a bowl of breakfast cereal. Cheerios – Fruity flavor. I can’t resist Cheerios when I am in the states. What else could I do that morning on Vickery Avenue in my airbnb? Why, I could watch an episode of the Munsters. Thinking about this possibility and looking out the window at the trees, I chomped on my Cheerios. 

I rearranged the boxes of Trident Gum that I also couldn’t resist buying at the supermarket. Checking google, I saw that I was missing a few flavors. I might try the Dollar Store. Of course, the autistic person in me wants to collect all the tidy rectangular packages and take them home with me and slowly chew through them all winter as a souvenir of Tacoma days. 

Okay, why not watch The Munsters? I selected an episode from YouTube. The theme song began. It was an uncanny feeling. Then the laugh track. “Where’s grandpa?” Herman asks. The trap door opens and out comes grandpa Munster. I begin to realize where my childhood brain was, my real grandfather was most likely inert in his chair next to me, deep his own basement vibe. 

It took me an hour more than was necessary to get out of Chico, California. Culprit: avoid motorways activated in the app. Hence a big loop. The closer I came to the Bay Area, the more agitated I began to feel. Looking out the window over the grasslands in the valley as I waited for a pilot truck to lead cars over the uneven asphalt under road work, I tried to convince myself that what I liked about those trips back then with my mother was the landscape. But did I? Attention from a narcissist. It’s powerful and that’s why I am still looking for my father’s missing archival materials. He never left her. 

“You showed him the way by leaving,” my doctor said to me in Amsterdam. She had a point. Keith kept in touch with his high school buddies, and I learned about this after his death. But did he return more often to the northwest after I reconnected with my grandmother? Or had he been visiting the area on his own all those years? Probably the latter. 

Back in the 70’s you had to check the newspaper for the tv program or, like Hannah did, buy the TV Guide. How many hours did I spend pouring over the TV Guide? You can guess. Like my grandfather, I learned to read at three years old. We had that in common. He didn’t enjoy watching The Munsters, but he wouldn’t move from his lounge chair, having initiated the day with a few drinks before lunch. As far as I was concerned, being with Grandpa was pretty tame compared to life with my parents. Case in point, he never banned me from watching television, rarely moved and I left him in peace. We both had a bargain.

Third step: remember.

Clear Lake, just north of the Bay Area. There was that time that I had a friend whose normalish family invited me on a camping trip to Clear Lake. I was nine years old. Later they gave me a photo of me looking morose, blinded by the sun, in front of the lake as a souvenir. I have never appreciated camping. Remembering the greens and blues of the image in my mind of the photo, the actual photo long lost, I drove around Clear Lake and down the blond hills towards Petaluma to visit a second cousin who lives in a large Victorian house.  In 2023 my second cousin and I finally got better acquainted.

On the final leg of my trip I stayed the weekend with my dear childhood friend. In the evenings we watched a four part documentary on the Burning Man Festival.

“Aw, hell no,” my friend yelled at the screen, her fork in midair and her salad bowl cupped in her other hand.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to go there,” her partner said.

We three are all the same age and, because we had all survived dysfunctional childhoods, we have the exact same reaction to the kind of community that favors the Burning Man Festival. We certainly didn’t need to revisit the scene in person, and watching the antics on screen from the safety of the couch was entertaining, not traumatic. 

“Hmmm, Gerlach,” I read while observing the flight pattern on the screen in the airplane on my way back to Amsterdam. I looked out the window and instantly spotted the circular grid of The Black Rock City etched in the Nevada desert. Bingo.

Running errands in Oakland, we drove past the shabby California Hotel (a seedy hotel now “revamped” and officially providing low income housing). My friend instantly recalled sitting in a bar and overhearing one man say to his drinking partner, “The California Hotel, that’s where they steal your towels.”

“Let’s look at the old train station,” I suggested as we passed 16th Street. I had heard that the station had been closed permanently after the earthquake. Question: was it still standing? My friend u-turned and we rumbled down the potholed street towards the 16th Street Station. Outside a band was playing cover songs under the burning sun, and a refurbished Transit bus sat in the parking lot. We had stumbled into a West Oakland happening, and the train station was open to visitors (hard hats required) because local partnerships were campaigning to save the station for the community. 

I have always vividly remembered how in the summers I used to go to the 16th Street Station with my father to catch the train to Tacoma.  It was beautiful to stand on the platform again and recall those moments now so far away, when my father and I waited on the platform in the middle of the night for the train to pull in. It was sometimes a long wait because Amtrak was nearly always delayed. I recalled the majestic waiting hall and the benches that were hard to sit on, sliding around on the curvy seats, and the people and the piles of luggage and the anticipation of travelling on a train to see my grandmothers and the beauty of the old station, even then tattered but still magnificent. It’s now looking even worse for wear but it’s still standing.

Categories: History, Memory, Tourism

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Just a Little Ray Charles & Coltrane ‘Cuz You Know…..

Posted on August 8, 2026

I must admit I have been having a lot of fun with the audio book of Routine Apparitions. It’s almost a guilty pleasure, but I have been getting positive feedback as well as new subscribers on Substack, so I might has well own it. Playing with the themes of Routine Apparitions on X (my deceased father has an account where I enact the role of the ghost writer for the Ghost Writer), I wrote the following imaginary dialogue:

For the audio book theme I felt I needed a soundtrack to energize the podcast so I asked my dear friend, musician Victoria Theodore, if she could help me out. She immediately agreed and asked me for inspirational sources. I had already thought of two musicans that my father admired.

Günter Ohnemus, my father’s German translator, once recalled, “I remember what Keith once said on one of our walks in Munich: If I can be for just one person what Ray Charles was to me, then spending my life as a writer wasn’t in vain.”

So definitely a Ray Charles vibe was needed. And, wow, Vicki HIT that spot on with the smoking organ baseline on the soundtrack.

Then there was Coltrane. Enough said.

Curiously, for the last two years I have been doing exactly what my father did, and without thinking twice about it. That is: I keep putting Keith’s friends into the storyline of the novel Routine Apparitions. Even on X. For instance, in the above dialogue, John Veglia was a poet and friend of my father. He even featured in several of my father’s books as himself or as his alter ego Nestor Marzipan.

Thus, throughout the chapters of Routine Apparitions, I have faithfully kept up this family tradition. And for novelty, I sometimes insert myself into the story as well, after all I am part of the story of the search for my father’s missing materials.

What would have Keith thought about it? Probably he would have been tickled. But not so much about the X part.

Should you want to check out more of the underworld, Keith is available on X

Categories: Poetry

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Who is Loonie Noggle?

Posted on May 16, 2026

It’s Saturday morning. I’ve been debating for days about cleaning the kitchen floor. However, I have a meeting with a friend at a museum at lunch time and then I plan to go to the gym. First thing, I decide, is a bath for me. Not the floor.

I check my email before taking the plunge.

Hi Persephone,

A debut comic novel that follows a young singer navigating opera student culture between Paris and Amsterdam, written by a poet and author based in the Netherlands who is simultaneously working to recover and preserve her father’s literary estate, is a genuinely layered and unusual authorial identity. The readers for Idle Opportunities are not a mass market audience. They are literary fiction readers with a taste for dry comedy, European setting, and the specific insider texture of art world life, and they tend to find authors they love and stay loyal.

The work you are doing with Keith Kumasen Abbott’s estate also positions you in literary circles and Beat Generation readership communities that carry real cultural weight and specific community infrastructure.

My name is Loonie and I work with authors on building the audience foundation that makes a literary career actually grow rather than remain invisible.

Are you currently working with anyone on the readership side of your writing?

Best,

Loonie

I regularly receive these types of emails. “Wow, aces. Way to go bot,” I think. AI is getting more and more sophisticated at summarizing my life. I might ask myself, “Why do I need me?”

But who is Loonie Noggle? Creative name. It seems that a Lonnie Noggle died in 2015 at the age of fifty-nine. Never a bad time to re-invent a noggle with a twist.

Of course, you can check out my novel, Idle Opportunities, and/or you can read my blogspot, Routine Apparitions. Or you can just leave it to my main fans, insomniac bot-identities.

Question: Does Routine Apparitions need a Noggle character?

Categories: Book, Creative Catalyst, Mindfulness

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About Back to Nature

Posted on February 7, 2026

Intending to get that next Substack post up online yet unable to get to the task for weeks, I finally went to my bookcase and found my copy of Harum Scarum. I had already decided in advance that I would defintely not post the final short story from my father’s book. Keith Abbott’s Harum Scarum is made up of six stories and all of them are autobiographical.

“You’re lucky,” a friend said to me. “You have material about your father. I wish I could learn more about my father.”

Well, the materials are not only about my father. In the last story, “Back to Nature,” I am in the picture and so is my mother. Harum Scarum was published by Coffee House Press in 1984. I remember being deeply ashamed of my teenage self as represented in my father’s story. Even thinking about it now, I didn’t really want to reread the story. And I was avoiding the issue: was I such an ungrateful horrible brat back then?

So when I plucked the book off the bookcase, I was still considering which section I would put on Substack. However, my fingers immediately flipped the pages open to the last story. I don’t know why, other than a feeling of facing the inevitable. As I typed my father’s words into Substack, I realized that I had not been ashamed so much of the small section where I said a few things as a grumpy teenager, but what I had been ashamed about was the part about my parents not getting along.

The location of this episode was during a rare moment when the three of us headed out of the city and into the mountains on a camping trip. I remember that particular trip. While it is possible to pin a lot of my aversion behaviour on autism (now that I know), and this could become a pan-occasion excuse, but in this case I think it’s fairly clear: camping provides an excellent opportunity to experience sensory overload. I disliked camping, and still do. I remember the lake, the resort and the mosquitos. It has to be said that this trip was taken during a period when my parents were making an effort to have “family vacations” since my mother discouraged my father and me to interact with other family members. I don’t recall these trips as fun. In fact my presence in the story is very much how it was – me in the back seat of the car and retreating as much as possible.

It always dismayed me how much my mother was attracted to the most unpleasant physical situations. In my father’s story my mother is insisting on camping near the water and my father has warned her once, even twice, of the swarms of mosquitos. And then in a overriding moment of physical anger, he makes it clear that he will not warn her again and takes charge of the situation. No one will contradict him directly. My mother keeps chipping away at taking back control through various tactics, put downs and criticisms and gaslighting. The sense of emasculation is present throughout the story, the deepening anger and misery.

At one point in my life, just before I left the house, my mother decided that she and I should engage in a mother-daughter trip to Mexico. Because she was a bit daunted by the idea of the dangers we might encounter, she invited a Mexican-American friend to accompany us which meant that my mother was on slightly better behaviour. In Ensenada my mother was determined to eat street food. We were walking somewhere near a wharf and she insisted on heading out to the end of the pier which stank of fish to eat her treat. I refused, not only to stand at the end of the pier but to eat street food. During the drive back north my mother sat on an array of plastic diapers laid out over the driver’s seat.

In “Back to Nature” my father describes his childhood, and the pleasure that he experienced as a child. The character Walt returns to the simple fun of taking a swim in a lake without being criticized, neither himself nor the lake. It struck me in particular the scene in which Walt is eating apple pie. My father loved his mother’s apple pie. Even the phrasing of the words about seeing the trees from a garage window in “Back to Nature” reminds me of one of Keith’s poems about his parents’ farm.

I recall that we did experience car problems on the trip, but my father didn’t stay behind at the lake. He didn’t make a friend and get to hang out with someone who appreciated him. We all left together and I believe it was raining. Was I shocked that the character of Walt chose not to go back to his wife or home? I must have read that ending as a betrayal and somehow I felt accountable.

A selection of Keith’s works are available at https://persephoneabbott.substack.com

Categories: Book, Memory

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Panto?

Posted on February 6, 2026

My friend said, “By the way, do you want to see the dress rehearsal for Tristan und Isolde?”

“Why, yes.”

I had a hunch I must have seen at least one production of this particular Wagner opera somewhere during the past forty years. You know how it is, witnessing multiple versions of the same murky set that faintly resembles a Star Trek episode and grimy opera singers in tunics wandering around a minimalist decor, eager to lean on a wall for accoustical adjustments. It all becomes a bit of a blur.

A few days before the five hours of “geniessen“-ing in the opera house, I arrived at a modern and sterile high school building for a Chi Gong lesson. I could barely open my eyes under the blinding lights. In the not too distant past I have been privileged to take part in several singing masterclasses near Berlin and in which we routinely and strategically practiced Chi Gong exercises to enhance vocal energy and projection. At each masterclass half of the participants were professional Wagnerian singers.

In my first Chi Gong class in Amsterdam, I found myself eyeing a wiry Dutch man who wore his long blond hair in a Chinese style pony tail. A white and black robe hung from his body. No such specimen had been present at the masterclasses for opera singers. Our Chi Gong teacher had been a burly Scotsman who emitted a gentle Paddington-like vibe. He regularly took singers off on “wee” walks and chats around the lake to calm them down. Individually.

I had signed up for the class at the high school location because I felt the need to start to recover from the latter half of 2025, i.e. find my energy and move slow. Moving slow was really appealing to me.

“You straightened your knee,” the wiry pseudo Asian corrected me.

“No, I did not!” I snapped, stepping straight into soprano mode. Maybe it was the lights that were irritating me the most. I don’t think the man expected such immediate feedback.

He made a point to take the time and effort to impress the class with his out-of-nowhere whip his arm around movement.

“Try singing Wotan,” I thought. All I wanted was space and time. And given the harsh lighting, darkness.

Sitting in the opera, I took in the sight of a man the size of a refrigerator and wearing in gigantic knee pads strolling onto stage, “Wo bin ich?” he asked.

Exactly. I feel the audience should participate in these productions. We should shout out, “Probably on a boat, buddy!” or “In your own back garden!”

Then fifteen minutes further into the act, another singer invariably askes, “Was bedeutet das?” Whereupon I feel the audience should call out, “The plot! Lay it on us, pal!” or “Need a hint?”

Of course the second act, after the intermission during which audience members attempt to dine on the contents of their handbags, starts with the same large singer staggering on stage in his comfortable rubber soled shoes, all suited up with a back brace and knee pads under his change of costume, ready for the next two hours, who says, “Wo bin ich?”

Again. It’s standard practice in Wagner operas and a way to keep everyone clued in to what’s apparently happening. I say apparently because the libretto doesn’t help.

“i should stop reading,” my friend muttered to me, indicating the text boxes above our heads. “It’s distracting.”

What was remarkable was the moment near the end of Tristan und Isolde when a recap of the plot was presented by one of the lead singers. As in: if you haven’t been paying attention during the past five hours…..

It is truly amazing to watch Wagnerians manage their energy on stage. The tenor was the most musical performer I have witnessed in a long time. However when I got home, after the sublime end, I just had listen to Callas sing Isolde. Belcanto style, sung in Italian, and it’s not really “Wagner” but it gets me every time.

Categories: Amsterdam, Mindfulness

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Illumination

Posted on January 6, 2026

2025 was a bit of a deadbeat year for me. Having cancelled one vacation due to poor health, it dawned upon me that life could end up being short. And then the medical news I was expecting wasn’t too bad after all. I was declared perfectly fine. So, it boiled down to what did I want to do with myself for New Year’s Eve?

The people of the Netherlands have an unreasonable attraction to extreme amounts fireworks. Just the thought of this overindulgence provokes me to immediately plan to depart the country before the end of the year. And how many more New Year’s Eves was I going to experience at my age? Too many in the Netherlands or not enough elsewhere?

I wasn’t feeling up to taking a plane or a train.

A bus. I could take a bus to…..where? Four hours could get me from Amsterdam to Liege. I booked a round trip. I stood on a forelorn bus stop with a half a dozen other frozen people who had bought a bus ticket. The bus was more than half empty, just as I expected.

To entertain myself in Liege I bought a two day museum pass. But you have to remember it’s Belgium. A fact that came to my mind when I got to Liege and looked at the delapidated buildings. “Why is everything so run down?” I overheard a German tourist exclaim to a tour guide.

There are a fair number of museums in Liege and not all of them are open. (Because it’s Belgium.) So which ones were open on my two day pass? I enjoyed the Folk Museum mightily. As I looked up from examining my museum pass booklet while at the Folk Museum I realized that I was looking straight at another museum across the street. It was the Mulum. A museum about….lamps?

I tried the door. It did not open. A sign said to ring the bell. The man who opened the door was about my height and age. He asked, “You are alone?” He allowed me to enter the museum and then he switched on the lights. The place was filled with lamps and all sorts of bric-a-brac that had to do with lamps. I prepared myself for a swift tour of the museum.

A short tour was not on the curator’s agenda. He obviously felt personally responsible to impart his complete knowledge about lamps to each and every visitor. He asked me where I was from. We were speaking French which is a language I speak quite well. Upon learning that I live in the Netherlands this prompted the man to continue to speak to me in French but with the addition of doubling up words in Flemish so that I received the vocabulary of his subsequent lecture in two languages. It was annoying.

I decided to annoy him back. I let my facial expression slide into a blank canvas. It’s easy for me. I’m autistic. And when no information of interest is presented, I easily tune out. My guide first complained that people these days don’t know anything about lamps. “What would you call that?” He pointed at the lighting above the counter top.

“Flourescent,” I replied.

“Most people don’t know what that is, they say that it is neon,” the man said. “But it is flourescent. This,” he pointed to a sign placed on the wall, “is neon.”

He proceded to talk about oils, vegetal or animal. Then he said, “What do you call this?” he pointed at a small candle stuck in a lamp.

Since his main tactic was to insult the intelligence of his audience, I decided to take the short route, “You tell me.”

He informed me that the word that described what he was pointing at was a word that no one truly understood. He complained that in Dutch the word for candle was taken from latin “cerata” which was a candle made of tallow (animal oil). But that was not what he was pointing at, the object in question was not a “kaars” (candle in Dutch and apparently an inadequate noun because these days Dutch candles are generally not made of tallow) but a “bougie” (candle in French). Why did the French call it a bougie? He asked me this and didn’t wait for my answer. “Because it came from North Africa, and how did it get to Europe?”

I made a guess about trade routes. He refused my answer and stared at me, waiting.

I stared back at him.

He stared more at me.

Good God on earth, what was the man getting at? “The Crusades…” I hazarded.

“No! By boat!”

He was serious. I rolled my eyes.

Then he proceeded to show me a row of thick looking books, all authorities on lamps. “This one is Dutch, and the author is already passed away. This one is mine,” he said. “I need to have it reprinted. This one is Austrian, the author has passed away.” The implication was that the world was losing its experts on lamps.

“Here is my wife, she sang a song,” he pointed at an enlarged picture hanging on the wall of a woman standing next to an elephant. The elephant was wrapping its trunk around her head.

“Regardez!” he tapped the glass of the case of objects for which he was determined to clarify any misunderstandings I might foster. I admit I was looking the pile of railway lamps behind me. “Regardez!”

What was interesting was the water and air system the Romans used to push the oil to replenish the fuel and make the lamps burn longer. “Otherwise you had to constantly refill the lamps,” the man said. He said this more than once. In French, in Flemish, in French, in Flemish. “And did the rich people do this?” He looked at me expectantly, standing in front of a case filled with little terra cotta lamps from Ancient Rome.

“Slaves,” I said and moved a bit closer to the pile of railroad lamps.

He stopped talking for a moment. My reply seemed to throw him off. He did not immediately announce that I was unknowledgable about Roman history. We then entered the time of the greatest significance in lamp inventions, which was an upright fuel reservoir where fuel descended by force of gravity and a lamp could burn for hours. I was looking at an item I had seen in a medieval painting which up until then I had never identified as a lamp. Now I know.

“There are only a few places where gas lamps are still being used today,” he announced. We had made it into the mid 19th century. “Here I am next to the mayor,” he pointed at an enlarged photo on the wall. He explained that he had installed one street lamp in Liege that functions on gas. “But he doesn’t allow me to light the lamp for safety reasons.”

And….I was guessing that the insertion of this collection of lamps into the two day museum pass was the bestowing of a favor in order to give the man an audience either that or a way of getting tourists off the streets for a few hours.

Categories: History, Tourism

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Negotiating

Posted on November 8, 2025

“It seems we lose the game before we start to play.”

Those words from Lauryn Hill’s song “Everything is Everything” always resonated with me. 

“We never argue.” I told my boss when I was twenty-two. I was aiming to relate how perfect and idyllic my life with my parents was to him. I was living in Paris and not ever planning on moving back to the states. 

He stared at me, wordless. 

Right then, I knew something was up. I had said something wrong.  And I was wondering how to backtrack.

Of course, he didn’t straight up reply that that policy was abuse. He finally said something along the lines of, “I don’t know about that.”

Looking back, I recognize that at that time: 

a. I was not going back to this “perfection” and 

b. I was keeping up my parents’ cover story. 

Because of me, my father has two Facebook accounts. One that is blocked by certain people who have blocked me, and one that is open to them. On the non-blocked version, a woman I never met wrote a comment about how great my parents were. Yes, the golden couple – once they walked in the door, the entertainment began. The problem is that my belief that my mother actually loved my father (the only person I considered that she did love) ended when I realized she had sent all the previously published materials to the archives and the unpublished materials disappeared. It’s then that I knew that the dark triangle narcissist that was my mother had curated his life, as always, but the ultimate cut was this act. 

The materials that Keith used to write the memoir of Richard Brautigan have disappeared. The notebooks, the correspondence, the unpublished works. Vanished.

It will never be possible to untangle my mother from my father’s life. They were together for fifty plus years. And everywhere I turn, she has inserted herself into his career. And then the end of her life brought to the forefront the smear campaigns, the fraudulent identities, the poison pen letters – the endless vitriol that she produced backstage and, when she could, she pushed assertions that could be swallowed into the limelight, disguised as victimization with nauseating results. 

“Did you ever see him in a wheelchair?” I asked my aunt.

“No.”

Yet there is a mention of a wheelchair in his papers in connection with the lawsuit. The time when my father was suing Naropa.

“I felt that was your mother’s project.” I was told by a friend.

“He sounded confused when he talked about it,” another person told me. 

Isolation, alienation. I had heard about these “problems” back around 2000. After I tried to help untangle whatever was going on from afar, my parents refused to talk to me about the matter anymore. After his death, I learned that my father had won the case and lost a community.

Most of what I have at home are Keith’s letters to me and the letters he sent to Michael Sowl. My father had three themes in his life, his growing up in the Northwest (as related in his books Harem Scarem and First Thing Coming), his years between 1965 – 1989 in which he was involved in the creative world of the Bay Area that included his friendship with Richard Brautigan (related in his books Gush, Rhino Ritz, Mordecai of Monterey, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America), and his Buddhist identity in combination with Naropa. 

I decided to put Keith’s academic papers and anything to do with Naropa on Substack. So I have been reading the letters that I have and transcribing them. My father repeated much of the same information, the meat of whatever newsletter he had to share, but with different details to me or Mike. 

Later, in essence, Keith was “disgraced” and “outcast” in his “triumph”, but I am guessing that that was a long time ago and Naropa has evolved and moved on. Their program looks worlds away from that of 1989. And perhaps these matters have some historical value.

Or do they?

Rereading the letters my father sent me evoke a slight feeling of exasperation. That “where the hell are you?’ vibe I know too well. But he was definitely enjoying himself, his letters are full of energy and hope. The community he had entered at Naropa was a community engaging in knowledge seeking and intending to look at the world a different way. A group of creative people aiming at social change, turning away from traditional Americana life while having a great time. 

I had to think about this a bit. I mean here it was again, staring me in the face, my mother had invented herself to be a “Jew-Sami” through lies and manipulation, and my father had taken on Zen Buddhism and was calling himself “Bear Sage.” Totally ludicrous scenario. 

It’s all about stories, isn’t it?

I decided it was time to get out of the house. I went to see three films. 

The first, One to One: John and Yoko, definitely fit the time frame of the passages in Mordecai of Monterey and Downstream from Trout Fishing in America that I had been working with these past months. The montage of the era and the innocence and almost slow-mo world compared to the United States of America in 2025 was striking. 

The second was Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele – a film about psychological aspects of identity, guilt and isolation. I think I was looking for more insight. The most cinematically brilliant moment (and horrific) was the replay of Mengele’s crimes in the concentration camp to the music of Schubert and Richard Strauss. The conviction of beauty, the intent of perfection, the grim manipulation of what the “future” should hold was masterfully shown in this juxtaposition of the stripping of human rights and dignity while holding culture up as the culprit and as responsible. 

I nearly cancelled my ticket to the third film. I really wanted not to go. I wanted to go to bed at five o’clock in the afternoon and call it a day. That’s how badly I didn’t want to go. The organizer of the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival stood up and announced that since they programmed a series of films which had a racist slant, they were featuring the Inuit film as counterbalance. 

“Already a bad start,” I thought, sitting in my seat and determined to sit through the matter. 

Why  was I there? Because all those years I had been indoctrinated to believe that the culture, the family that I came from were the “wrong” ones. Again, that old isolation tactic. Who were the “real people, the ones with true values”? Why, the Inuits! Those “pure and exempt from all evil doing” Inuits. And in my past life the felony committed here was not overt racism, it was narcissism using racism as an excuse.

The film organizer also explained that there were aspects of the film that were not going to be clear as they pertained to the Inuit culture and Wrong Husband was not made to explain these aspects to a non-Inuit audience. “At least he got that far,” I thought. 

It’s about stories, isn’t it? I had just sat through a heart warming romance film with mythical characters saving the day and set in the Arctic.  I thought about my father’s letters which I will continue to transcribe and set on Substack as part of a “Naropa” archive, and I will continue to work on Routine Apparitions and tell the story through a story, and I will continue with the compilation of materials to create a bio/autobio of my father’s life.


“Well,” I thought, having transcribed the last chapter of Downstream from Trout Fishing in America for Substack, “I’ll only do this once.”

Categories: Memory, Mindfulness

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He’s Cranky and Got Something to Say

Posted on November 1, 2025

It sounded like a piece of theater improv. And the performer was directly in front of me. I was sitting in the tram, enjoying the street views from my window seat. The man was standing in the connecting section, leaning on a pole and looking straight at me.  He was old. Hold on, maybe he was my age or even a bit older. 

To resume: He was an old white guy wearing a backpack, sounding cankerous and entitled. He had something to say and I wasn’t thinking he was part of a pickpocket gang. But you never know. 

“Let it ring,” he said, “I have plenty of time.” I could hear the sound of a telephone ringing. It sounded like it was coming from the direction of his packback. And it sounded like an alarm more than a ring tone.

He repeated variations on this type of information, complaining that all people did these days was to look at their phones, and he presumed that folk were examining unadulterated bullshit projected through their screens. I mean, it is more than possible. His voice was loud and had that upper-middle-aged man whine in it. I hate that whine. Whenever I hear it I really have to resist the urge to get all hyped up in my operatic-soprano-doesn’t-take-shit mode (a past life) and flatten the issue into a fine pulverized clump of powder left on the curb for the street cleaning crew. “You did really well,” my lawyer had said after the divorce was finalized.

The tram was full of people and a lot of them were looking at their phones. He had targeted his “primal-audience.” His phone started ringing a second time. He loudly announced more information about his perceived state of  the woes of the world.  By the third time his phone began to ring, I had already stood up and was ready to exit the tram. He was now in a frenzy. “God damn it! It’s too late!” And he sounded hysterical, yelling words into the phone about an essential drop off or meeting or appointment that was going wrong because he was late or nearly there or maybe couldn’t make it. 

I thought about his routine, his morality play, his whatever it was that he was trying to achieve by this schtik. “He’s a decade too late,” I thought. I am not all that wild about all new technological innovations and applications. “Another app?” I think whenever it appears that to take a train, buy a sweater, or pump up my bike tires requires an app. 

But I was coming home after a medical visit. Ten years ago I had an operation. Times were different then. The finer details of what exactly was going to happen were all rather murky to me and the information that had been relayed to me was both necessary and limited. The operation was elective, and yet necessary, and I didn’t feel then that I needed to have a lot of insight into my dossier. But this time round, I was sent an email which indicated that I could find all the information on the hospital app. I wasn’t going to quibble about this proposal. 

After downloading the app, I saw I could put myself on a waiting list for a test that I was already scheduled for and the wait had been more than six weeks. Should have downloaded this app sooner, I thought. That morning I had checked myself in via the barcode on my phone, a half an hour early, and wandered upstairs to the lobby of the section where I was due to appear only to find a person heading straight towards me. “Ms. Abbott?” he asked and ushered me into his office. 

I can’t complain about the app. It tells me exactly what to expect for my appointments and how to prepare. I can also see all the medical results of tests, including those from ten years ago related to the elective operation. I have read the most recent results of my blood tests. I have no idea what it all means and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. But I decided that it was best to take my time and examine the information because then at least I have a basic grasp of what the medical staff is aware of as they process the state of my health. 

“What if,” I mused, slowly walking home from the tram stop, “the improv performer had been a healthy twenty-year-old?” Because given the age of the geezer, it could be that somewhere not too far into the future that upper-middle-aged man might just find himself checking into the hospital with his personal barcode after spending an hour or two on his phone, examining the results of his medical tests and wondering about his fate. Maybe then he might come to better appreciate playing Pingo-Pongo with Murphy the Happy Penguin app to distract himself at times.

Categories: Amsterdam, Mindfulness, Tourism

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“Do you have any unfinished business with me?”  

Posted on October 12, 2025

A friend of mine related to me that her father had asked her this particular question during a visit to see him. This was about ten years ago. And recently her ninety year old father, a former scientist and teacher at MIT, died.

“No,” my friend had replied to his question. 

So before her father passed to the great beyond, she spent ten years with him, hanging out, working on a book of his memories, marathon watching educational videos, enjoying a meal together, etc. 

Imagine. 

I am working on a book with my father, except that he’s been dead these past six years and I have a truck load of unfinished business with him. It’s complicated. 

Keith wrote a memoir of his friend, Richard Brautigan. My friends who read the memoir of the poet and author often remarked afterwards that they had no real idea who my father was from the memoir itself and I can see their point. Keith himself doesn’t come through as a personality that much in his memoir of Richard Brautigan. The question is, should he have? He obviously didn’t feel comfortable putting more of himself in the memoir of his friend. 

This weekend I came to the end of Downstream from Troutfishing in America. I had been typing my father’s book into my laptop, paragraph by paragraph, slowly examining what I remember and what I don’t recall. Of my two parents, my father was the one that was in charge of me during my grade school years. Instead of going to elementary school, I occasionally spent my days hanging out with Keith and Richard between the years 1973 – 1975. 

The episode in the memoir in which I swept up Richard’s loose change from the floor of his San Francisco apartment is one of my least beloved memories of those times. Yet in the book, it is asserted that this was the ultimate memory of my childhood. What I do cherish is having seen the camaraderie and friendship of the two men. I never understood, when Richard died in 1984, why I didn’t go to the wake or the “celebration of life.” 

The discovery of Richard’s body, weeks after his death, was deeply painful and I remember Keith vividly in the days and weeks afterwards. At the end of the memoir, it is clear that he suffered grief of the loss of a friend and the erasure of the shared memories of their youthful past, the days in the late 60’s wandering around San Francisco together, like when a partner dies.

The memoir was first published in 1989 and republished in 2009. I think that it’s had its run as what it was and now I decided to put my father in the memoir. I am not writing it. I am simply inserting my father’s words about himself. He talks about his family, his work and his life in his own way through poems and stories. But the catch is, whatever materials I am inserting are only to reveal Keith’s attitude about his friendship with the complicated and gifted writer and how they made the friendship work. Or, in the end, the torment of trying to be Richard’s friend. 

Of course, I have lots of questions. They may never be answered. 

Regarding Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, my father mentions thanks to his friend (and Richard’s friend) Michael Sowl for providing him with the letters that he sent to Michael during the years 1976 – 1977. Of the archival material that Reg sent me, those years are missing. In other words, the materials my father used to write the memoir, his own notebooks and journals and letters to Michael, are gone. I believe that someone has these materials and perhaps the letters from Michael to my father. These letters are also missing from the archives in Bellingham.

One letter escaped the fate of the others, as my father returned his own letter to Michael later in 2009 and therefore I can read it.

The letter is undated but was written in the mid 1970’s:

I was out farting around with Richard before that this week. We went to Bolinas on errands, etc….I met Gino Clays too and went to a party at Bolinas on Thursday. A great party, it was at a C&W singer’s house, Rosalie Sorrel and all these musicians came, and we all got swiftly spaced & sang and danced & etc. Out in the country, steel guitars & weird songs…Gino’s a great guy.

Of course the kids are all wandering around with names like Anemone, Shoshone, Eagle Craig, Scree….Oh yeah, I got my new series of poems, too….GREAT DRUNKEN SENTENCES:

You can’t

not fall down

in poetry & that’s why

I like it

For reference:

Just to end on a positive vibe, and view the shared experiences between my father and Richard Brautigan, here is a short clip about the Diggers in which a glimpse of Richard can be seen in a film from the late 60’s, radiant and lending a helping hand, and my father examining a box labeled Lucky Lettuce as he removes it from the bed of a truck.

Categories: Memory, Poetry

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My Dearest Own Harald

Posted on August 17, 2025

Debunking my mother’s false identities since her death has taken years. Of course, she wove her disingenuous narratives for decades and targeted different communities with her various falsehoods. Every once in a while I come across an item and I think, “Let me address this, set the record straight.” It’s not only me, other family members have also been involved in this matter.

A few months ago I wrote, again, to an American professor of Scandinavian studies. He had written a review of the book that my mother participated in — and in which she provided a story about her grandfather having been raised in a Sami family with Sami traditions. It’s all quite sensitive on a cultural plain, but I feel communication is key when correcting my mother’s deliberately false narrative.

Unlike the first American professor I had written to about this exact same matter last year, the second American professor wrote a very considerate reply to my request that my mother’s interview should be disregarded for academic use. I nearly felt compelled to write this man back and, in gratitude, send him a photocopy of a letter. Then I decided that there was no reason to reveal the detailed contents of that private family letter in conjection to my mother’s lies. I haven’t gotten back to him. I am not sure any further interaction is necessary. 

The letter is remarkable. My great-great grandmother wrote to her son sometime between the years 1917 and 1919. She was feeling poorly and was worried about his inheritance. Did he plan on returning to Hillesøy? Juliana suggested that Harald come back home and bring his new wife. 

The family still has Juliana’s letter and it is equally remarkable that it survived.

Harald did return to Northern Norway, once only and long after his mother’s death. He kept the letter and his wife kept the letter after his own death and my grandparents kept the letter and then it was given to my aunt who in turn gave it to me. It is a special letter of love and concern from a mother to a son who lived far away. A son who would not return to live on the Artic island where he was born. A son who expressed regret about immigrating to the United States and missed his family. 

Navigating between my mother’s pathological lying and the repercussions thereof has been challenging,  But, despite the obstacles, I am happy to report that there has been contact (with varying degrees of success) between people, institutions and cultures when it comes to my family’s Nordic roots and Harald’s own heritage. In a manner, this matter has come to, shall we say, a “full circle”. Unlike my mother’s claim of being Jewish and the failure of the Jewish community  that she joined to actually show any courage whatsoever to face family members and have a discussion face to face, my mother’s assertion that Harald was raised within a Sami family and Sami community has been “fairly” addressed with dialogue, including encounters in person in Norway and the United States.

My Dearest Own Harald
My Dearest Own Harald, Juliana’s letter along with other mementos and correspondence from Harald and Tressa Hansen’s lifetime.
Categories: Memory, Mindfulness

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