It was elegant, sweet and clean like sucking a marble, rolling off the tongue with declared ownership by saliva. — unknown

This is what I heard pounding in my head the next morning as I awoke. I needed to make it to the wine convention at McCormick Place. I put on my shoes after taking a shower and getting dressed. I put on a grey tie and strolled out the door and past my wine-cellar staircase and onto the street. It was a lovely day out here among the trees and sunshine. My head pounded like bouncing a ball into the sides of my head and ricocheting around before settling on the top of my spinal column. I must have slept funny.

I took the train into the city from Hyde Park. I disembarked along with another hundred or so hung-over winos. We all stumble in to show our passes and then into the main chamber. It was huge and well lit. Tall ceilings like a cathedral muffled the cacophony of sounds that hung over the wine like an angry cloud.

A panel of judges at ‘The Chicago Wine Expo’ in Chicago sat at the front table of a small neutrally-boring room. The glasses were arrayed nicely on white linen. A man with a cropped, gray beard looked at me. I leaned in, over the table. He had an old cabbie hat on his balding head. His breath smelled clean when he remarked of a disturbance to etiquette. Close at hand a woman oblivious to subtle indications that her perfume bothered this man, passed by to his sneer. This is how I met Renaud.

I walked over to a long table where several bottles were lined up with little pouring tips that both kept the wine aerated and portioned. A formally dressed woman who worked for a distributor made eye contact with me and beckoned me to join her, I jovially asked her if she had tried everything here. She concluded that she had not but there was a Sauternes that she had procured for this event that tasted of nectarines and light rare earth minerals and that I should try it. So I did.

She said the wine was like a rain coat, slippery and effective. It had the minerality of a Perrier and the elegant acidity of a fresh raindrop sliding across a wet leaf. The stone fruit in this wine was bright and ripe.

Renaud suddenly devoid of malice realizing she was speaking about his winery came over from where he has been hovering and tells us, “One afternoon when hiking through the Nevada desert, while presuming it would not rain, we encountered a taste by which this wine was inspired.”

The distributor beckoned to her assistant to take her position. The three of us filled up small flutes and walked across the floor. Yes they were selling but I am never one to turn down a good story.

We passed the cases of bottles for this display. I grabbed three small bottles of the Chateau La Tour Jaune. We sat in a few comfortable chairs laid out for guests near the center of the section devoted to dessert wines.

Renaud continued, It had taken us..., (him and his friend), ...a few days to drive pretty far out into the desert and finally up a small, rocky road, past the cattle guards and the wandering livestock. By foot we struck out and into the canyon. The clouds were non-existent and the air was dry, but cool, flowing through the narrow canyon.

He began telling us the story that inspired this wine.

We hiked in through a narrow opening in the canyon and the day was spent with clean rocks at our feet and just a slit of sun high overhead. It was a beautiful day and we had been taking turns navigating through very tight outcroppings. The floor of the canyon was without a grain of sand. It took us three hours to make it into the first stopping point and we opened our canteens and broke out the trail-mix granola. Our packs were full but light and we had positioned them well on our backs with straps. Comfortable. We talked for a while about the day and how nice it was to be so far from the roads, the people, the pollution, the dogs and the summer sun of the Nevada desert.

We had good maps and enough supplies. The canyon had been ripped in two by millennia of sand and water. There was a log that had apparently wedged itself between the walls with such violence that it would remain undisturbed for another four hundred years before it would rot.

We had counted on water pools that we could purify with a stove but three days in we realized there were none. The ranger said there would likely be water on the second day in, but it never came. We took our last day hiking to a natural bridge and found it dry as well. No water to be collected. The air was still cool. The walls were about 50 feet up. Cliffs on both sides, narrowing and widening so often you couldn’t see the sky. Great caverns were carved where we could rest and air our feet. Our packs were heavy at the end of the day and our backs felt painful, throbbing of fatigue. We made camp in a cavern trusting that the altitude of the rise in the cavern, like a stage, would protect us from flash-flood. It was cold that night. We could feel a breeze through the canyon and heard a whistling where a rock had created an instrument.

We slept in our bags and on pads and were prepared for the aching in the morning and the need to get going to stretch things out. We packed our things and headed back into the canyon.

This was the third day and no water. We got worried and realized that when we packed up the water we had left the cap off and a full day and a half’s worth of water had run out. We headed back immediately. We found our camp and headed past it for a day reserving every drop of water for the return trip.

On that second day we began to feel the lack of water at every step. We were drying out and there was nothing we could do. We thought ourselves screwed. It was cool but we were hiking hard enough to set pace but also minimize our use of water. It took us four hours of pain and deathly dehydration to realize that we were slowly going insane. Our steps were labored and our breathing heavy. Our muscles began to cramp up and our lips were chapped. We trudged on and finally sat down with our map and an hour to go. We looked one last time in our packs, for something. I couldn’t tell you what we were looking for. I don’t remember. Our pain was so great that we were hallucinating wildly at this point. We had been walking sluggishly and seeing pools of water at every turn. Every single vision was of fresh water and then on to the next disappointment. This, however, gave us little missions to get to the next. Torture, with a system for survival.

Finally, we sat down and I remembered a pocket I had forgotten. It was on the side of the packs and it contained something. I looked inside and there, like a gift from the gods, was a nectarine. It was the most beautiful vision I had ever seen. Ripe and soft. I could smell it in my feet. We sat down almost in a ritualistic decree. We cut it in half and set it down looking at it for a second. I picked up half and gave it to my friend. We were zombies. I raised it to my lips and touched its juice with my tongue. The sweetness rippled through my body instantly like a tiny pebble tossed into an icy cave pool. The juice coursed in my eyes and nose and mouth wetting it and relieving a torture so debilitating that I had wanted to die. This nectarine slid down my throat and at every millimeter offered life to a body and mind withering in the sun. I sucked on the pit the remaining hour.

I still have that pit.

The distributor and I agreed he had hit the mark and he had created a beautiful context with the story.

Renaud recommend chilling it to 55, the temperature of the bottom of the canyon.

He remarked of the necessity of always taking a piece of luxury into dangerous situations. It makes our journeys through life a great deal more worthwhile. He handed me the bottle with a handshake.

We headed into the crowd and found more interesting things to try.

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Chapter 1

—————

Not a bad ration for a couple of raisin farmers from Cali.

- His Military Buddies

My old man is dressed in blue jeans and cross-training, leather hiking-shoes. He is wearing a hoodie the color of curry. The sky is filled with long, horizontal specks of clouds and the sun is edging it’s way down the sky and behind the canopy of grape vines. He is an older man with graying white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. The vines are edging close to his face almost as if they are trying to grow towards him. As if shaking his hand because he has been such a studious caretaker all these years.

The trellises are all in line and the sunset now fills the gaps between the leaves and his freckles as he walks past. He strolls along the vineyard rows and studies the growing patterns of the plants and the health of their roots and leaves. The grass is patchy and the shovel he uses as a walking cane darts in front of him and then out again chopping into the dirt with a dull clank. The air is fresh and the sun penetrates into his eyes. He walks into the sunset and looks North to where the sunshine hits the leaves and produces the best grapes. He twists the vines of few to make sure the growths are headed in the right direction. The gnarly vines coil and scraggle up the stakes and the branches grip tightly to the trellis wires stretched out in a horizontal direction about four feet off the ground. The roots go much further at this point. The oldest Zins are 50 years old.

My father Frank has been tending this patch of land of about five-hundred-ninety acres that produced some of the best grapes he has ever known. He knows them like the back of his hand. His father planted them when he was a teenager and they have grown. The rolling hills slope away from him and across the hillside and to a little creek where all the rainwater descends and collects before flowing further on west.

There is a photograph of a man in old-time denim at our house there near the Monterey Coast. He is lifting a shovel full of dirt. My grandfather was planting vines in that photograph. My grandfather oversaw the operation and made sure the shovels were working. He had a turn of luck when his father died he inherited a patch of land inland which he promptly sold and moved to a vineyard closer to the coast. They did rip up the vines a few times since working there to replant with markets in mind. The phylloxera and other models killed off a few. Hail had damaged one crop pretty badly. This year my father Frank was working on a tempranillo. It necessitated a lot of worrying to own a crop that is at the winds of chance. That’s what my father would say.

My grandfather had died in the fall of ‘89 and he left the land to Frank. I was beginning to learn to drive at the time. With my grandfather gone he tended the fruit trees and would take long drives into the mainland before returning to Monterey. Five miles from the bay was pretty close. It is where he would play many of his games. The first time Frank went to the coast alone, just his brother Hanover and him, they had finished the printing of labels. They needed a break so they put their towels in the basket of the bikes and rode five miles to the coast. It was beautiful there. All the pretty girls and the clams where you would swim out and pry them from the piers and your hands and feet would be cut to shreds when you finally swam back in.

That’s when the real fun began when we would sit and watch the water come in and eat ceviche and lay out in the sun and burn so badly that we had to come back home walking our bikes instead of riding them. The gravel roads would cut into our sunburns and cut-up feet. We used to jump off the pier and some would swan dive, showing off for the girls. It was a great time to be young in California, they would say.

My father returned every evening once the chores were done and would sit in the kitchen while his mom would read him the riot act to come back in such bad shape. The funny thing is Frank’s dad would just laugh and say, We were getting up at five tomorrow morning to weed the field. Funny as hell given that his best two hands were barely able to function. Long painful days of more sun and more blisters and sweat. It felt good to be done. I remember him yelling the same thing to me and saying, James and Anna, get yourselves in gear, we are headed to the fields!

There was a girl that he met at the coast who was Japanese and she went by Miroku, my mother. She was one of the Japanese-Americans from the neighborhoods that were out along the bay during that time. He would swim out to the makeshift pier in the bay and practice kendo with them, swinging swords and wearing hot padding. Sometimes he didn’t use padding and my grandmother would again complain thinking he was getting into trouble. He was ok though. You would just sleep it off and be in the vineyard the next day. It was great to be alive.

They used to walk along the beach and collect stones and shells. The girl was small, about five feet tall, very petite and she had the greatest little features. She was dainty and her father hated that my father would even look at her. But he said nothing because they were in love. She would sing to him at night and he would have to swim all the way back to the shore and bike home long after it was dark. His mother would ground him for the next three days but it wouldn’t matter. My grandfather would always allow him to go the next morning by saying, Sure kiddo! Find me a pearl!, after finishing his cigar and cognac before going to bed. I still remember the smell of his cigars all the way to college after he died. He died of a heart attack and some thought it was because of the amount he smoked and drank. I knew it was because he was just ready to die when he did. It had been a good time to check out as he called it.

My father was a nice guy but very grounded and practical. He was the one that did things with us kids. He showed us the same spots he used to swim at the pier and the ice cream shop in the little market that was nearby. He kept us isolated during the week, straying in the evenings only a mile or two but never to the coast. When he died that all changed.

My mother had a hard time keeping track of us and eventually conceded that we were adults and had as much right to freedom as anyone and that was the start of the real mother she became. My mother was a great woman. She had cropped and tied up hair and a pearl necklace she had gotten from Frank’s father.. They had come over from the midwest during the depression. They were one of the success stories, selling the dairy farm and heading out west.

They went by motor carriage and he had owned a farm since his grandfather had come over from Ireland. He went to Ireland once too in search of his granddaughter but never was able to find her. My grandfather wanted to connect with the land he had come from but it was foreign and he came home early. He had learned a lot about the land and traveling across country by train and then by boat to Ireland.

My grandfather returned from Ireland and set up shop in the midwest buying up a bunch of dairy cows and selling their milk and cheese. He often bred them too once he found that they had quality. So when they moved out to Monterey they were delighted to be getting away and knew that their business would sell for a great price and it did. That’s when they found out that the thing they wanted most was children and that if they didn’t have any they would be sad in later life. The little stone house I later made for myself in Michigan was a voyage to get closer to where we originally came from in the MidWest.

The house on Monterey was nice and my father found it peaceful to tend to his grapes and see the splendor of making wine. They really loved the whole thing: the agriculture, the viniculture, the enology.

When their family would visit they would snaz up the joint with some real jazz and some great brandy which they also made. They were lucky though; not all the people trying to make it did and Monterey County was certainly not Napa. They found connections all over the place with other sellers and wineries. They were all competing but the market opened up and all were selling wines out east, Europe and places like that, long after the dairy farm would have produced a great profit.

*​*​*

Our neighbor Hanover, my Uncle, was in line to inherit a seperate vineyard and winery next to my immediate families’ that my grandfather had bought for my aunt’s inheritance. Monterery was an up and coming place and he wanted to stay near the ocean so he bought this new plot which had better inland airflow but also was closer to the ocean where his kids could play. And they did. He had two sons and a daughter each were 18, 20 and 24. They all were living close; both his son Andrew and Sarah were both living on the property. Their house was a replica of the Haut Brion house in France.

Their mother was my mother’s sister and as such Japanese-American as well. We thought their story was one of great courage and wonderment. How their mother had been wronged by the government when Japan hit the coast of Hawaii. We were all afraid because the raid meant not only were her sons to be in the army but that perhaps Japan would hit the actual coast of California and do some major damage to it.

We launched a campaign that fucked them up in the end but many friends and relatives of his were killed in that war. My grandfather’s cousin had actually died in the Pearl Harbor attacks. My grandfather was too old to serve but his sons were the right age to be shipped out and they did even though they could have been granted agricultural exemption. They would bring their friends and they would all stay over and laugh and drink wine and beer and have a great time with everything. Both my father and my uncle flew airplanes over Japan. They stayed together as brothers and flew side by side in combat. Both watching out for each other at all costs. They were very fortunate to be given the chance to fly for their country and had at least ten kills apiece. Not a bad ration for a couple of raisin farmers from Cali, they used to say.

My father lifted his head and began walking again in the direction of the châlet. Their little Monterey farm had grown from about fifty acres to over five hundred since he took over. This would be left for me and my sister Anna. This would be the place in which they would really own their hearts and come to family dinners and eat there as part of the tradition for a long time to come. His grandchildren would be lovely and well fed too.

But things don’t always play out the way parents intend. The traditions live on in the wine, food and family; be it divorced from place.

* * *

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It is well known that words and concepts reside in the brain and nerves. Emotions reside in the brain and nerves as well. Can I suggest that what I call ‘word/emotions’ exist? The brain after all is a nervous tissue, coevolved with language.

Therefore, I am suggesting that words do share tiny hugs with emotions. If I might go a little further, I am suggesting perhaps this is more granular than we think. Perhaps there are emotions hugging almost EVERY word! Most are benign, some are not! If I yell at you, I have just blasted you with word/emotion! If I tell you that you are beautiful, I have just shared positive ones. 

In certain ways we are lost to what other people think or feel. This must be remembered often. 

It is true that sentences carry real power. 

(One thing I found that helps during trauma involving words is compartmentalization. Like disruptive kids, separate the word/emotions. It is smart to begin healing them after they have quieted.)

To this point it is a responsibility of people who use language that they help heal words (word/emotions) with tiny medicines, for themselves and for others. 

It is true that individuals differ in what word might pair with what emotion, what happiness, what anxiety, what degree of each. So I suggest sensitivity. I suggest we heal each other. And though we may not know what words to use, they often are a very good start.

Oil on canvas, 48in

Lyrics, arrangement by SW, ai help by Suno

AI rating [30]

TriDisciplinary

graphite, type on paper / digital, gpt, Suno

AI rating [15]

AI - rating [25]

On this farm lives a nice, old farmer. He keeps everything the way he likes it: in harmony… the kind that farms often have all on their own. He tweaks and nudges so everything is just right. The chickens here, the goat there. Everything arranged just so. So it works.

On a day with a light breeze, a brightly dressed itinerant artist hops the farmer’s gate and sits on the gnarly stump of a giant old apple tree. He smokes his pipe.

The Artist calls to the Farmer, who is feeding the fish in a little pond: “Hey there, fella. Might I do some work? I’d like to ‘pretty up’ this farm and make it dazzle— you know, the way it was meant to be seen. Can I do that for you?”

The Farmer is skeptical, but he agrees. The Artist only wants a night’s board and one square meal for his work.

The Artist wastes no time. He hurries to the pond, where he knits little sweaters for the fish and tailors a suit for the goat. He paints the house a bright blue and gives the chickens their own little flags to wave in tribute to the author. Then he adds brilliant spirals to the wheels of the Farmer’s cart so they spin bright yellow and red. Finally, he places a scarlet hat—embroidered with a mustang—on the Farmer’s head.

The Artist sits back on the stump and lights his pipe.

The Farmer has been watching the flurry of activity with calm. When it is over, he says, “Well… my coattails won’t get caught in my spokes now that the wheels of my cart are so colorful.”

The Artist looks puzzled. “Doesn’t this show dazzle and make you want more? Doesn’t it make you think about why the fish would even need sweaters?!”

The Farmer tells him, “Nope. Frost is why sweaters are necessary.”

The Artist taps his pipe into the wind and says, “Exactly my point!”

“It sounds like you don’t ever really have your hands full,” the Farmer says.

“One would think! … if one only thought of utility like you. But Modernity calls! Idle hands and open minds!” the Artist responds. “The mother of invention—and imagination!”

“I have need of inventions,” the Farmer says.

“You have come around to see that invention, art, and imagination share the same root. Like the author of this story, they are commensurate.”

“And with that, I am on my way.” The Artist hops up from his stump and heads down the path.

The Farmer walks over to his pond, sees the fish struggling to swim in their sweaters, and says, “But not all ideas are good ones,” and chuckles to himself.

SW_2025

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