Bay-Abi, Sheila Varian’s foundation stallion, was a Ronteza foal.

“When is your next book coming out?”

There’s nothing that can dry you up to turn you into a human prune as fast as that question. It doesn’t help that your writing dries up, too, as it has, for me, for several months. Self-pity is no damned good either, but it’s easy for small-potatoes writers like me: Writers don’t make a lot of money, and when the water heater or the washing machine go out, your royalties go away. Pouting uses up a lot of energy.

And then, since I’ve no talent for fiction, history writing demands that you do the research, the heavy lifting, which takes weeks and then months in places you’re not always welcome and then, when you are allowed in, it means furious note-taking in #2 pencil—the librarian strips you of everything else: no backpack, no pens, no paper, no camera—or delicate care, wearing cloth gloves, to turn the fragile pages of old newspapers or family histories that smell faintly of mildew.

It takes a lot of computer time, too, where increasing amounts of historical research are to be found, and that makes the internet a blessing.  For the Aviators book, it meant everything from B-17 training manuals to MACR (Missing Air Craft Reports) filed online, from tracking down B-24 Liberator serial numbers to identifying tropical diseases suffered by American fliers in the Southwest Pacific, from 1944 fighter group yearbooks to Eighth Air Force Mission reports from Big Week, in 1944, when masses of American bombers were sent up over Berlin.

The objective of Big Week, you find out, wasn’t bombing targets. Those missions were  instead intended to use the bombers as sacrificial bait to draw up German fighters so they could be shot down by American P-38s and P-51s.

The worst part of that job was finding, and reading, the Deceased Personnel Files of local fliers who didn’t survive Big Week, which include details you don’t want to know, including the way their bodies were identified after falling 25,000 feet or the list of personal effects  they left behind in their footlockers in Norfolk or Cambridge.

The German fighter pilots were twenty or twenty-one years old. The average age of a B-17 pilot was twenty-two. Some of their gunners were liars and so were only sixteen or seventeen when they fell 25,000 feet to earth.

So when faced with work like this, I fall back on old tactics, honed in childhood: I hide under the pillows until whatever that scary thing is out there decides to go away.

But hiding didn’t work then and it doesn’t work much better sixty years later, no matter how much and cheerfully I admit to being a coward.

The only thing that works in these cases, with this business of writer’s block, is to guarantee a piece against deadline. Then you either do the work or you implode.

Not being willing to become pruny or to implode, I tried to begin again today. For no earthly reason, except for the inspiration of the lives of two horses and two human beings (the latter two, women, one of them a gifted popular historian), and all four marked by remarkable courage.

I managed 1200 words.

If you can’t write about horses, baseball, battle or falling in love, you need to become an engineer or a police officer, and in so doing you’ll be much more useful to society, and much less neurotic.

Finishing the piece, of course, is another mountain to be climbed. But here’s the beginning. Sheila Varian’s grandparents were from Ireland, so I hope there’s a bit of Irish here. The purpose, though, has less to do with Ireland and more to do with what I want to with my writing: To link the place I love so much—Arroyo Grande—with places and events that seem so distant yet are much closer than any of us, including me, ever realized. Here, it will be a stud farm in Poland and a ranch in Corbett Canyon.

Here’s an excerpt.

 *  *  *

The Polish-born Arabian stallion’s name was Witez—“Chieftain” or “Hero” in translation, and he was at sea, bound for a new home in post-World War II America. But as his ship entered the Bay of Biscay, it was hit by an intense storm that produced monstrous waves. Its cargo—Witez and 150 other prized European horses—began to make noise below decks: the terrified animals screamed, kicked at the bulkheads and began struggling among each other, and wounding each other, in confusion and panic.

A U.S. Army officer, Capt. William Quinlan, was in charge of the Liberty Ship Austin’s precious cargo. Quinlan and his soldiers worked frantically to separate and calm the horses—Arabians, like Witez, Thoroughbreds and Lipizzaner bred for the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.

Quinlan lurched toward Witez and found him quiet and unafraid, focused fiercely on maintaining his balance as the ship straddled another wave. Letts describes the moment:

Quinlan stroked the horse’s nose for a moment, whispering a quiet word of thanks. Witez, the chieftain, had been bred to maintain his composure in the fury of battle—and here on the Stephen F. Austin, he had won his warrior’s stripes.

Sixteen years later, another horse would demonstrate the same composure and focus that Witez did that day in the Bay of Biscay. She, too, was an Arabian. She, too, was a warrior. The smallish, hard-muscled mare, named Ronteza, was Witez’s daughter. Her home was Corbett Canyon, near Arroyo Grande, and in 1961 she would prove herself to be her father’s daughter in front of 20,000 spectators who watched, momentarily hushed, as the little horse stumbled and fell in competition.

Her rider was Sheila Varian.

Ronteza falls at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, 1961.

My brother-in-law’s funeral was awkward and wonderful. “Awkward” because Gregorys are both tightly-bond and distant–we don’t get together often– given childhoods marked by confusion, by alcohol and an unerring moral compass, by violence and inspired moments of love, by the imperative of survival and the depth of our pride in our parents, who remain the most singular and brilliant human beings I’ve ever known.

But we come together when we need to. We don’t talk much about what we feel for each other because proximity alone is so powerful. The pride we had in our parents is now manifest in the way we feel about each other: We are alive. We made it.

We didn’t know most of the people at Billy’s ceremony well, but the ones we remembered—sons and grandsons, soft-voiced and boulder-strong, beautiful daughters and granddaughters, blondes—came up to us without hesitating and embraced us.

These were the children my sister, Roberta, helped to raise as if they were her own.

All of them, boys and girls, children and grandchildren, no matter how hard the lives they’ve lived, are marked by a kind of bedrock integrity that Billy left for them, as if it were as genetic as brown eyes.

You can’t help but love them.

The ones we didn’t remember weren’t relatives at all: they were cowboys Billy had hired –as skilled with a welding torch (the water-pipes on the ranch freeze in cold Bakersfield winters) as they are with gentling horses–or homeless veterans he’d taken in and so saved their lives.  There were at least sixty stories like his, one of the veterans told me.

As is always the case, the humans weren’t the only ones present. Several dogs trotted up to the planting with the humans and looked for solace there, too, rubbing up against the friendly guests and nuzzling the ones who needed comfort. A pony whinnied in the distance without Billy there to see if he might be colicky. No fewer than four vintage Ford garden tractors, in various stages of repair or mortality, were a reminder of the briefness of life.

Bill’s girls talked about Dad and Grandpa (he was plain-spoken and cranky, soft-hearted and fiercely protective) the boys talked a little too, some of them in elongated Ozark Plateau vowels that I recognize almost instantly, once the warmth of my heart has relayed the sound to my brain, and then they took up shovels and mixed Billy’s ashes in the roots of a sycamore they were planting in a riverbank along the Kern, which straddles the ranch.

Given the now-giant sycamore planted nearby for Billy’s son, killed years ago in a tule-fog car wreck, this tree will be strong, like that boy was, and it’s on a little rise where Billy can look over the 250 horses he cared for so much.

My big sister put a little packet in the roots and I didn’t for a minute think of asking what that was about. My big sister was always so big to me and in the funeral’s aftermath I realized how small she is (so was my mother, another giant and powerful influence on my life.)

My big sister is in the plaid shirt.

What her daughters and granddaughters did for my sister was perfect, too.

Roberta has a little girl, a border collie puppy not yet weaned from her own mother, coming to her late Christmas, and that’s is just what she wanted: Someone to take care of, the way she took care of us when our Mom died, the way she took care of Billy, the way Billy will always take care of her.

Once the boys had the tree seated and upright, secure and settled, they planed a pretty little well around it with the flats of their shovel blades and the soles of their boots. My brother-in-law’s funeral was awkward and wonderful, and in every way it was perfect.

Okay, I went back to Aldi.

I found a shopping cart with the quarter wedged in the slot and used it for my shopping. I just got a few things this time, but Aldi’s starting to grow on me.

A nice lady showed me how to get my quarter back, and this one from an abandoned cart belonging to a complete stranger, so we’re all square, Aldi.

One of the items I bought was a really nice Dutch beer called “Holland 1839,” which was yummy. So was the white Dutch cheese I sprinkled liberally, melted, over the French bread I served with pasta tonight.

My students will recall how much I love Holland, thanks, in no small part, to Jan Vermeer. Here is his famous “Girl in a Pearl Earring on a KLM Flight Reading an Annual Report with Champagne.”

When Ms. Derbidge and I took students to Holland, I fell crazy in love. I stood in front of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” for about two days.

I said “Hallo” to Rabobank in downtown Amsterdam, which is where ours came from. And I’m not bitter, even though it was my Dad who came up with the name “Mid-State Bank.”

I marveled at the density of the bicycles, was nearly killed by two or more, including mothers on what are called “cargo bikes,” with up to four children bouncing happily in the bucket out front.

“Laten we de toeristen overvallen, kinderen!”
(“Let’s run over the tourists, kids!”)

I whispered to Freddy Rolland, our tour guide: “Is it just me, or are Dutch women really, really pretty?” Freddy laughed knowingly. Be careful. They’re on bicycles and could kill you in a heartbeat.

I loved the richness of Amsterdam’s Jewish heritage, and its heartbreak. Anne Frank’s movie-magazine cutout of the actress Myrna Loy–I loved her in The Thin Man with William Powell–is preserved under Plexiglas in the Upstairs Annex.

I gained a new and much deeper appreciation for Cheese. It is capitalized in Holland. As is the word “Cow.” They are the happiest Cows I have ever seen, and I know Cows, having been on a first-name basis with Daisy, my big brother’s 4-H heifer.

If there’s any city I would go back to in an instant, it’s probably in Italy. Amsterdam is the grand exception. So any grocery store that reminds me of that place is going to get my business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBkiBbO4_4

I made a severe mistake, a few hours ago, in bringing up Girl Groups in an otherwise splendid Facebook post on chili beans and cornbread.

I then compounded that mistake by frittering away some perfectly good weeding and/or cleaning time looking at old videos of The Ronettes, The Crystals, The Shirelles and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Sigh!

The undisputed queens of the genre, of course, were the Supremes. If the Supremes (or the Beatles or Petula Clark) were on The Ed Sullivan Show Sunday nights in 1964 or 1965, all activity in our home, with the exception of minimal breathing activity, ceased.

My Mom adored Diana Ross (and Ringo, by the way). I concurred on Diana, of course. But the most frankly sexy of the three, in my fervid thirteen-year-old imagination, was Flo, the Supreme on the left. She had the most captivating smile and when she looked directly into the camera I turned into a pile of goo. Flo was fictionalized as the tragic member of the group in Dreamgirls; she left the Supremes in 1967 because real life is tragic, too.

It happened, I guess, in part because Diana Ross’s eyelashes were so long and her ego was so big.

But none of that mattered when they were on Sullivan. That shimmy at the start of this performance, for example, was devastating, and Diana was enchanting.

Only The Supremes could transmute a song about infidelity into something so…well, I guess ‘joyful’ is the word. And, yes, it mattered that they were black and from Detroit. They were so beautiful and, thanks to the magic of our Zenith color television, they were singing to us and they were in our living room with us. The barrier between us, between their lives and ours, was seemingly dissolved.

We welcomed, then, the illusion that we knew the Supremes; of course, I went a bit beyond that and fell in love with them.

You couldn’t take your eyes off Diana Ross.

And when a song like this came on the radio, you couldn’t stop the acceleration of your pulse the instant you recognized the opening notes. You missed it the instant it was done.

One of the most wonderful discoveries I made while researching the “Aviators” book was learning how much young American fliers loved their dogs—in the records of the American Air Museum in Britain, the best resource for the American Eighth Air Force, lovingly and meticulously kept by our historian friends across the sea, a dog’s nationality is officially listed as “British.”

I was reminded, too, of how young these men were–the average age of a B-17 or B-24 pilot was twenty-two. There were waist gunners as young as sixteen.

When you are that young, you have reason to live.

You want to get home. After twelve or fourteen hours in the air, where breathing and urinating and speaking, in unpressurized cabins at 25,000 feet where the temperature is twenty degrees below zero, are all encumbered. The discomfort is broken up by moments of unimaginable terror when you watch your friends’ airplanes break up in the air or you stop breathing to listen to anti-aircraft shrapnel—called “flak,” from a German word too serpentine to pronounce—hit your own plane. Flak sounds like dense hail on a tin roof. Some of it will sever throttle cables or hydraulic lines, or, far worse, some of it will kill friends even closer than the ones you watch falling so slowly to earth. There is nothing you can do about flak.

You want it to be over. You want to get home to the one friend who will still be there for you.

The historian for one B-17 group, the 92nd, provided me with my favorite find: She told me that the ground crews remembered that an airman’s dog would become excited and happy at a mission’s end at the moment when the animal recognized the distinctive pitch of his or her master’s B-17 engines.

No greater love.

My grandmother, Dora Gregory, about 1910, and I made tonight’s dinner—oven-fried chicken and mashed potatoes—thinking of her. Her fried chicken, although I only had it a few times, was divine. It was what I’d call Border State Fried rather than Southern Fried—no batter, but the pieces sprinkled with top-secret seasonings and then coated in flour.

I remember that there would be a bunch of salads–macaroni and fruit, I think, and one made with hominy, and vegetable casseroles, with green beans a favorite, liberally flavored with bacon, sweet potatoes laced with butter and brown sugar—it’s a wonder I’m not dead yet.

(There would also have been, irrelevant as it may seem, sliced ham. Her ham deserves a whole separate post. Her husband, my grandfather John, raised hogs; slaughtering, curing and smoking happened in winter and whole families would participate, moving from one neighbor’s Ozark Plateau farm to another until all the hams were hung. It would’ve been a dreadful time of year to be a hog.)

Of course, Grandmother’s crowning glory, and even the chicken took a little bit of a back seat, was her mashed potatoes, fluffy as clouds. The chicken cracklings and their lubricant would be turned, through some kind of sorcery, into flour gravy ladled over the potatoes, with a little crater in their midst. But I thought that since her mashed potatoes were so good, the gravy was better used over biscuits.

(I like to think that my grandmother would love my mashed taters. Here they are.)

This was in Taft, so it must have been insufferably hot to cook.

The older men ate with linen napkins tucked into their shirt collars; finger-licking was forgiven. All that food would be washed down with iced tea and then the men would take naps while the women kept working.

Many of the men, of course, would someday die of coronary arrest. So it goes.

Then there was dessert. Some of those men, in their last moments, dreamed of lemon meringue pie. That may have been the vision that got them over to the Other Side.