Creative Sitting

This past Saturday I spent four hours watching Rhumba read a book. This was the high point of my three-day weekend.

I am attempting to self-publish a couple of juvenile novels that I wrote years ago and did nothing with. I submitted one to Amazon, and they sent me the proof copies last week.The proofs looked good -- at first. But on closer inspection, I found a lot of errors that I thought I'd taken care of. But had not, or not well. Oops.

So I asked Rhumba if she'd read the proof. Rhumba is a professional editor. Back in the '90s when everybody was going to be rich, she made more money editing manuscripts than some guys make running large high schools. She's a technical editor, but she understands the logic of language as well as the grammar. And she's read more children's lit than two librarians.

So on Friday night she said, "Tell you what. Let's go out to the beach real early tomorrow morning, and I'll read straight through it. It shouldn't take long."

"Sounds good."

At face value, it doesn't sound good -- not with the 35-degree mornings we've been having lately. But the idea was to drive down to the warm and cozy harborside coffee house we favor before the regulars showed up and hogged all the tables. So we could hog one.

So we did, and it was dead cold outside and the sun hadn't come up yet. But we did get a table, and coffee, and I plunked the book down in front of Rhumba. She riffled the pages.

"It's bigger than I thought it would be," she said. But she picked it up and started reading. Every 30 seconds or so she wrote a comment in the book and placed a yellow sticky-note next to it. This went on for awhile. I had nothing to do but sit there.

But the dawn was coming on outside the window, and boats began to leave the harbor: big boats with many passengers on missions that were not obvious. Charter fishing? Maybe, but where were the poles? Whale watching? Memorial services? "That guy there does a lot of ash scattering," one of the old salts said, pointing at a vessel crammed with people in somber garb.

Who knows? The dim, pink dawn gave every boat an air of mystery.


Rhumba was still only 15 pages along, so I went outside with the camera and took a few shots. The sun was coming up.


A few minutes later, the sun was still coming up. And some of the gulls lifted off the freezing beaches to catch what warmth they could.


After a bit I couldn't feel my face any longer, so I went back in and sat down in the warm. Rhumba hadn't gotten much farther.

"This is going to take awhile," she said, not looking up. Fine. Rhumba can concentrate on one task for several hours with unwavering attention. Whereas I'm eminently distractable. We make an interesting team: a detail woman of steely logic and a big-picture guy with fuzzy-edged thoughts.

I had not planned to spend the morning here, but once Rhumba gets her hooks in a job it's best to let her roll. I'd have my manuscript in a few hours, and she'd had the rest of the day clear for her own projects.

No matter. There's always something to see at the beach. As the day grew bright, dog owners nipped in for a quick brew and a little yakking. No dogs allowed inside, of course. But the dogs don't mind staying out in the cold. Do they?


One of the old salts had been showing off his new iPad to friends. He showed it to me as well, including a really pretty good color drawing he'd done with a five-dollar graphics application. I told him what Rhumba was doing for me.

"I wish I could write something," he said. "I've got all these old surfing stories I could tell."

"Well, you should try."

"I don't know how to write anything," he said. "I was never any good at that."

"You don't have to be, if the story's good. Writing doesn't have to be that different from conversational language. You just have to get it down in print, and then you can look at it and rearrange it."

"I dunno," he said. "Hey, y'know I could tell about working in air freight in Hawaii, years ago." And he proceeded to tell us hair-raising stories of flying air freight into a leper colony in a decrepit old plane with a pilot who called it a win if they crash-landed in a pineapple field instead of ditching in the ocean.

"You really ought to get some of this down," I said.

"Does your iPad record speech?" Rhumba asked suddenly, looking up from her work.

"I'm not sure," he answered. "Maybe."

"If it does, you can just speak your stories right into the iPad. Then someone can convert the sound files into text for you. "

We left him surveying new vistas of possibility. Well, we didn't leave; he did. But that was okay, the coffee house began to fill up with people holding ukeleles, mandolins, and other stringed instruments. Casually-plunked tunes filled the air. This is normal.

Harbor Beach in Santa Cruz is home to an anarchic musical community known as the Sons of the Beach. Every Saturday morning a heterogenous group of up to 100 people show up dragging drums, guitars, mandolins, keyboards, saxophones--but mainly ukeleles. They arrange themselves in a large, rude circle on the sand and play tunes from a thick chord book of golden oldies.


Because everybody in Santa Cruz wants to be creative and sing and play an instrument and have a good time doing it. And even people with two left hands can handle a uke. If a ukelele wasn't easy to play, the Portuguese (my mother's people) would have never bothered to invent it. Santa Cruz is a huge ukelele town, and there are people who'll teach you for very little.


And a good time is had by all at the weekly SOB conclave, with most of "all" being well over 50. But really, anybody's welcome; and just about anybody shows up. If you're ever in town with an acoustic instrument on a Saturday morning, come on down.


And people do. I ran into the Atomic Grandpa, a member of the men's group I belong to, who'd just come by to hang out. He told me that East End Alf, another men's group member, was out there somewhere with the Sons making music. And I did find Alf and gave him a wave though he was busy plunking and singing. He's in one of the pictures I've posted, and I will leave you to guess which.

And I met a few other people I didn't expect to see there, and passed the time. Then I wandered back inside, where Rhumba said, "Just a few more pages. Can I get a blueberry muffin?"

And, a little while later, muffin-powered, she reached the finish line. And we tooled off in the sunshine to visit bookstores and catch lunch and enjoy the rest of the day.

But I've still got a bit of work to do on that book. Rhumba found a few things. More than a few, actually. Okay, my manuscript looks like it was brutally attacked by marauding bands of rabid yellow sticky notes. Yes, Rhumba is a good editor.


The point of all this, I suppose, is that sitting in one place can be creative, productive, even the high point of a weekend. If you pick your spot well. May you sit with dignity and wisdom.