BUMMER! I GOT AN EMAIL ON TUESDAY that our community paper editor, Marc Ethier, is moving on. Bummer again! Marc was a bright breeze that I met once or twice after he emailed me six and 3/4ths years ago, just before Christmas 2008, to offer me this column. I apparently had so many letters to the editor stacked in the files that I either sounded promising or was a real jabber mouth who might entertain and inform both readers of The Herald and the local ducks of the waterfront.

We negotiated: He wanted prose, but I could backfill with my poems. I asked, “On what subjects?” He pretty much left it open, provided it was suitable for a “family newspaper.” Never before had I been solicited for a job or position. I always had to go pound on doors, knock on windows, submit résumés, and more résumés, and more résumés. And then fill out applications with detailed work history and sit through interviews. And then secondary interviews. But here was this offer.

Me write? Yeah, I could write. I’d had four years of English in high school at Las Lomas in Walnut Creek from 1956 to 1960. I’d also satisfied whatever the English requirements were at Diablo Valley College and UC-Berkeley. God only knows how many job evaluations and memos I’d written for others in Corporateville and 30 years of poetry and poetry books, etc., and my own “Taproot & Aniseweed” for a bazillion years — but now a column?

“How many words?” was my next question. “800,” was Marc’s response, and “It’ll come out on Thursdays.” I had no idea how many words would pile up to be 800 but my Pages software on my Mac laptop had a counter on the bottom toolbar, so I’d soon figure that one out. No problem. I remember thinking at the time, “What the hell am I gonna write prose about? How PO’d am I at the former Bush & Cheney administration?” No, that was hardly entertaining. I thought hard in a local news and adventure-writing vein and figured I’d write about our first coming into Benicia from the south, across the Carquinez Strait from Martinez on the car ferry. BEFORE there was a bridge. Before there were TWO bridges. My maternal grandparents had bought their dream 35-acre dairy farm in Orland, California in 1948, and by the 1950s we were headed to the farm on weekends to do farm chores, learn how to drive a John Deere tractor and go swimming and fishing in nearby Stony Creek. And living in Walnut Creek, driving to Martinez in the series of family Buicks, up on the rickety wooden gangway approach and then high on foot to the upper deck of the car ferry! Throwing bread to the seagulls! Learning to walk on the slightly sloped upper deck. Looking into the mechanical engine bowels of the ferry, seeing those large engine arms rotating slowly as we got parked, the ferry workers in their black sea caps chocking our tires with blocks. This would be reliving a childhood adventure in text!

A few weeks passed and I got another email from Marc: If I wanted to and was on a roll, I could take my word count up to 1,000 and he was moving me from Thursdays to Fridays. “Why?” I asked. “More readers on Fridays.” Woo-Hoo! I was on a roll! I expanded my storyline to include our house cats, backyard squirrels, growing up in Walnut Creek’s orchards and suburbs, the rigor and disappointments of corporate life, and occasionally a piece of ripping fiction like “Hot Night at the Naked Oyster,” about First Mate Pedro Los Dos of the sea-weary Valparaiso coming into Benicia for some R&R and heading to the notorious waterfront hangout, The Naked Oyster, for some evening’s entertainment. Raw, raw fiction, churning and tumbling and written on drink-stained napkins and map’s edges while at sea.

A few years into the column and I noticed while in Martinez that the Martinez paper was owned by the same owner as The Herald. Sure that I could become another smart-mouthed Mark Twain or Ambrose Bearce, I asked Marc if I could also write for the Martinez paper if they approved. “Sure, no problem.” Soon I was writing for both! Fridays in The Herald and every Tuesday morning crossing the bridge and buying the Tuesday paper at a little liquor store in Martinez to see how it looked in print. This lasted for a few months until my post-corporate attitude (See my “Laid Off American Man” song performance on YouTube) probably ticked off some Shell moguls in town and I was dropped around the holidays. They were expanding their holiday recipe pages, they said, and I wished them well on their Goose Gravy!

It’s now 6.75 years later, which is about 350 columns, or 350 Fridays! Yikes, has it NOT been a Hoot, Marc? The other writers and I wish you well, and if you land somewhere and need a columnist or two, Google us, we’ll be around! (For the record, about 835 words, which leaves some space for poems!)

From the September “Taproot & Aniseweed,” just going out today by email:

Shows on the Road
An invitation came from John Rowe
to be in Berkeley on Euclid Avenue,
one block up from campus.
It was cool.
Stephanie Manning saw us there,
she invited us to San Francisco.
It too was cool.
Cathy Dana invited us to Alameda.
We’re going there in two days.
Sept. 27th we’ll be a part
of a Ben Lit event
at The Rellik in Benicia.
Woo-Ha! All August
we were a part of a poetry
and painting exhibit
at the O’Rourke Art Gallery
at the Benicia City Library.
Ace Hardware has my poem,
“Small Hardware Store,”
on their front wall.
This is all just way too cool!

Peter Bray lives, works and writes in Benicia.

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