Dave Carty's Blog

So by golly, I’ve written a novel. I’ve talked a bit about it in previous blogs. A common question I get is from folks who want to know where the idea for it came from, and more generally, where writers writ large get their ideas. As if there’s a central depository where ideas are stored, and selecting one is simply a matter of withdrawing an idea you like, as you might withdraw money from a savings account at a bank. 

Not exactly how it works.

Not for me, anyway. Hell, maybe there is an idea depository someplace. I wouldn’t mind having access to it. The long and the short of it is that I don’t know where my ideas come from, and they usually take a long time to flesh out. But I have a theory: ideas are floating around in the sky like flocks of lazily circling pigeons. When I’m receptive to them, a few decide to fly within reach, and if I’m quick about it, I can grab one. 

Before I wrote Leaves On Frozen Ground, I wanted to set a book around Lake Superior, where I spend a couple weeks every October. One day – I don’t remember where I was – a pigeon flew by and I nabbed the little sucker. That gave me an idea for a semi-feral boy and his two dogs, who finds solace in the woods while his parent’s marriage slowly disintegrates. 

And that was about all I had when I began writing. I had a few pages of notes I’d scribbled on a yellow legal pad; the story took form as I wrote it. 

The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that the process of writing invariably generates more ideas. And sure enough, about halfway through Leaves I hit on another idea, which became a book I completed a year ago. That one I’ll be shopping to publishers soon. 

For me, there are no tricks, no secret formula that gains access to the kingdom. Ideas are out there for anybody who wants them. It’s all about letting it happen.  

In the mid sixties my family was living on five acres that had once been a farm in southern Iowa. We had all kinds of buildings on the place: a commercial egg processing facility, a horse barn with stables and a loft, a hog barn, a lighted riding arena, and a 1920’s era, three-story frame farmhouse.

The house was a wonderful place to live and I can appreciate now, in a way I didn’t then, why my parents loved it. My mother loved antiques, and our house certainly qualified as such. Within that house, an antique she prized nearly as much was a grandfather clock that, if I recall correctly, had belonged to her father many years before. I remember her winding it with a key she kept stored behind the glass door. 

When my mother died, I inherited her clock. Neither of my sisters had a place for it. With a bit of research, I discovered the clock was made by the Waterbury Clock Company in Waterbury, Connecticut. A photo from an 1891 catalogue lists my clock as the company’s Surrey model, available in oak or walnut. Mine is oak. How it got from Connecticut to my mother’s father, and then to her, I don’t know; she never told me. 

And perhaps it didn’t. Mom collected all kinds of antiques; the grandfather clock she wound every day in our home in Iowa might have been a different clock altogether. I have a very dim memory of that clock being a full length, stand-alone model, rather than the three quarter length clock I currently own.

But my memory has never been good, and lacking hard evidence one way or the other, I’m going to remember what I want to believe. So thanks, mom. Among your many gifts to me, this was one of the best.

Like what you just read? Read my debut novel Leaves on Frozen Ground! Available now at Barnes and Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/leav...

I currently own two dogs: Suki and Skylark. Skylark is fat. 

These aren’t dogs that the adjective “fat” typically modifies. They’re English Pointers, hard core, hard running, bird-hunting machines.  Labs are fat, Welsh Corgis are fat, cocker spaniels are fat. But not pointers; you can ask anybody. So I was somewhat taken aback when, upon gazing at the formerly svelte and muscular Skylark, I saw that she had indeed become matronly. She was only four; a fat pointer at that age is the equivalent of a high school distance runner with a beer gut. 

How could she possibly have got that way? Hmmm.

I decided to run her portly little butt into the ground. That would burn up some calories! Last summer, at least twice a week, I took both dogs to a farm outside town, slapped a roading harness on them, and let them drag logging chains up and down hills for a half hour. Chain dragging for canines is like weight lifting for humans, and every dog I’ve owned, bar none, has loved it. Both Suki and Skylark stand on my tailgate while I fit them into their harnesses, shivering with anticipation. 

By the time hunting season rolled around, I was heading into the mountains with two superbly conditioned canine athletes. But Skylark was still fat. 

This was getting embarrassing. I mean, I wrote magazine columns about dog training for years. Surely I could figure this out. And then it dawned on me: could I be over feeding her? Hmmm.

I feed my dogs high quality food, and the instructions on the package give a recommended amount of food that correlates to the size of the animal. After a lifetime of owning dogs, I’ve found these recommendations are largely accurate. The package recommendations showed that Skylark was getting about the right amount of food, but with a 45 pound dog, even a few ounces of food one way or another can make a difference. I cut her daily food intake by half a cup, and two months later she was back to 40 pounds, her fighting weight.  

And then it occurred to me: me. Hmmm.

When I’m asked if I’m retired, the question always throws me. Retire from what? It’s not like I spent forty years in a nine to five office; I was a freelance writer, for heaven’s sake. I was lucky to dredge up twenty five hours of work a week. 

In fact, though, I loved what I did. But after somewhere north of thirty years cranking out magazine articles, ad copy, spice bottle labels, catalog boilerplate, and every other conceivable writing gig I could scrape up to keep the wolf from the door, it was time for a change. 

Like every writer I’ve ever met, I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember. I loved everything about books – the way they smelled, the anticipation of beginning a new story by an unknown writer. Some books, like Moby Dick, had woodcut illustrations at the start of each chapter. I loved those. Other writers finessed their words like cellists finesse their music. 

I’d been writing fiction, on and off, for years. I’d write a novel, send it to every publisher in the known universe, have it rejected by same, and then, licking my wounds, try again a few years later. Finally, a couple of years ago, I published my first novel, Leaves On Frozen Ground. (Guernica Editions, Amazon) I’ve got another one on deck and a third building momentum in my head. 

So when people ask me if I’m retired, I have to think about how I want to answer. Switching from magazine work to fiction is a lateral move in every respect but one: I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. 

And that beats the old nine to five any day.

My debut novel Leaves on Frozen Ground is now available at Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/leav...

The one thing I’ve noticed about growing older is that I am, in fact, growing older. Before I go any further, however, I’d like to thank those of you who, over the years, have lied through your teeth by insisting I look good for my age. Let’s face it, I didn’t look all that good when I was fifteen. Add another fifty years to that, and, well, you get the picture. 

But the hell with all that. What concerns me are a couple other things, the first of which is my eyesight. I’ve always had exceptional vision – the only member of my family not to wear glasses – but now that claim is a distant memory. About a decade ago I found I was having to hold books a few inches farther from my face in order to read the print. A trip to the eye doctor confirmed what I already knew: I needed reading glasses. I now have reading glasses all over my house, because I can’t remember where I put the last pair I used and can’t see them when I get there.

For a long time I took solace in knowing I could still read the fine print on restaurant menus if I had sufficient lighting. And then one day that ended, too. I could install klieg lights over both shoulders and still it wouldn’t be enough. So it was back to Costco for a package of higher-amp reading glasses.

That problem was easily solved. Another? Not so much.

I’ve been an even six feet tall – to the millimeter – since I was sixteen years old. One day in my late fifties, on a routine annual physical, the nurse pegged my height at five feet, eleven inches. Surely, she was mistaken. I asked her to remeasure my height, and she did, and to no one’s surprise but my own, I was still five feet, eleven inches tall. I was shrinking. And that, my friends, was depressing news. They don’t sell elevator shoes at Costco. 

This year I dropped another half inch. At the rate I’m getting short, I’ll have to stand on the bar stool to order a drink. I’ll have to use a step ladder to get into my car. And I drive a Prius.  Thank god I still look good for my age.

My debut novel Leaves On Frozen Ground is now available at Barnes and Noble! https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/leav...

An anonymous poem that I love goes like this: 

Spring has sprung

The grass has riz

I wonder where the flowers is.

This spring, after years of sporadic failures to start a garden, I decided to throw it all overboard and plant flowers instead.

I should love vegetable gardening. I’m an organic vegetable kind of guy. I eat buckets of vegetables every week. I live on free-range chicken, venison and wild fowl. I put dandelions in my hair.

Okay, I’m kidding about the dandelions. But you get the idea.

I decided to go with roses as my major focus because through every season, the girlfriend has a bouquet of fresh roses on her kitchen table and that spot of color, even when snow is raging against the windows and ice covers the road to her house, is a tonic against all that is dark in the world. 

But first you have to plant them. So in early May I bought 10 bareroot rosebush plants, two climbing creepers and a purple clematis and carefully placed them in the ground. With exquisite timing that I still marvel at, the temperature bottomed out that night and killed the creepers and clematis as if they’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen. What followed then was a more or less daily inspection of my dormant rosebushes to see if they’d been frozen, too. It was like looking for signs of life in a graveyard.

Every other day or so I’d walk to my garden and carefully examine the bare – and slowly browning – branches. Then, two weeks later, the temperature cratered again. I awoke to four inches of snow in mid May that lingered for the next several days. I could almost feel my rosebushes shivering. Another week went by and still I could find no sign of life, nothing that would indicate my rose garden would amount to anything other than a collection of dead plants.

But you know what? Even in Montana spring arrives. One day, on my rounds, I spotted a tiny spot of reddish brown on the thorny limb of one of my rosebushes. I bent over for a closer look. It was warm, and had been for several days. There, reaching for the sun, was a bud! And the next day there were more! My rosebushes had made it through. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but maybe I’m a gardener after all.

Like what you just read? Read my debut novel Leaves on Frozen Ground - out now! https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/leav...

You’ll want to read this, it’s important. A few days ago I took my clothes out of the clothes dryer and hung them on the shower curtain rod prior to hanging them in my closet. It’s a three stage process:  stage 1) hang them on the shower curtain rod; and stage 3) hang them in the closet. Stage 2 is where everything went to hell.

            Stage 2 is where I take a spray bottle filled with water and mist my shirts. Since in a full day of doing basically nothing I’m much too busy to iron my shirts, misting them with a spray bottle is a good option. I mist my shirt, let it hang for a half hour, and most of the wrinkles, magically, are gone. No ironing. Then I can return to my regularly scheduled programming of doing basically nothing.

            But that’s not what happened a few days ago. When I grabbed my spray bottle and tried to mist my shirts, I got an anemic, intermittent stream of water drops instead, like what babies do when they spit up on your shoulder.

            This isn’t the first time this has happened. I’ve probably gone through two dozen spray bottles in an equal number of years. We can invent electric cars that drive themselves and no one can invent a spray bottle that lasts more than a year? You’re not trying, people.

            It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t an accident. No one else I know has defective spray bottles. I buy them from the same place every time, my local hardware store. They know me there. Is it too much to believe that a cabal of bathroom terrorists has infiltrated the spray bottle department? Some of the spray bottles have green caps and some have red. I always buy the red ones.

            So let’s put the pieces together: The same people sell me my spray bottles every time. I buy them from the same store. I buy the same spray bottles every time. And they never work. Sound like a coincidence to you?

            Think about it.  

The utter irrationality of it still confounds me. Perhaps 15 years ago I had a good friend who was a vastly accomplished pilot, and at the time he owned a stunt plane. He took me on several trips in his plane during which, as far as I knew, he wrung it out: barrel rolls, loops, inverted flight, stalls, you name it. I loved it, in the same way some people love horror movies or roller coasters that scare them. 

And then, one day, in the back of a commercial airliner enroute to someplace I don’t remember, the plane began to chatter and chop. We’d hit a mild patch of turbulence, and as I anxiously watched the rest of the passengers -- all of whom seemed unconcerned -- my fear instead grew into a full-blown phobia. My absolute worst flight ever was a couple years later on a trip to Los Angeles, where a patch of severe turbulence almost had me ready to open the emergency exit and jump out. That’s an exaggeration, but not much. I was terrified beyond anything I can ever recall feeling. 

I didn’t understand a single thing about any of this. For god’s sake, I’d flown in aerobatic stunt planes. Why was this suddenly happening to me? But what I learned is that why it was happening wasn’t as important as figuring a way out. 

I read everything I could find on phobias, particularly fear of flight. And eventually I hatched a plan. The first line of defense was a vial of tranquilizers from my doctor. The second was learning a series of calm, deliberate breathing exercises, something I already knew how to do through the meditation I was practicing. And slowly, over time, it worked. Today I haven’t taken the tranquilizers in a couple years, although I wouldn’t hesitate to use them again if I needed them. And slow, deliberate breathing really does work, just like all those weird-looking yogis say it does. 

More important, perhaps, is that I gained a new understanding of the endless permutations of human phobias. Terrified of mice? Spiders? Grizzly bears? Okay, now I get it. 

Like what you just read? Check out my novel Leaves on Frozen Ground now available at Barnes & Noble.

Once, long ago, I was given a gift of trees by an old friend, a woman who remains a friend to this day. She’d received a free packet of trees from a mail-order club for tree freaks. Mail order was what we used to do before we did the internet; some of you may remember that. 

They were a spindly lot, a packet of blue spruce trees packed in wet saw dust and stuffed inside a dirty plastic bag. I was in a tree-hungry frame of mind. I had big plans: I was going to turn the two acres of pastureland I owned into a miniature forest. So I planted every one of them: all but one would be planted in the hedge row I was planting. The final tree would be planted in my yard. None of the saplings was over 12 inches tall.

Most of them didn’t make it. Nature is a strange beast – forgiving of those plants within the embrace of its various ecosystems, but harsh on those who move to town. Taking a water-loving tree like a blue spruce and re-purposing it as part of a windbreak in an arid, grassy prairie took far more water than my meager drip-irrigation system could supply, and one by one my poor little blue spruce trees began dying off. Within a few years all but the tree in my yard were gone. 

Then, one day, as I was walking the perimeter of my property, I happened to kick over a tuft of grass  and discovered one of my original blue spruces, still alive and apparently well. In the three or four years since I’d planted it, that lone overhanging tuft of grass had slowed the rate of evaporation around the tiny tree just enough that it was still alive, although it had barely grown two inches. Surely there was a lesson here, something to be learned about the ferocious tenacity of life. I kicked away the grass, watered the tree copiously by hand, and assumed that sunlight and my care would allow it to flourish. It died that winter. Perhaps there was a lesson there, too. 

But there is one of those trees left. The spruce in my yard, bathed in lawn sprinklers, is now well over thirty feet tall, and like its name sake, is  a glorious, rich shade of blue. It was for several years the silent and secretive home to a nest of magpies, is a perch to the occasional Cooper’s hawk and refuge for any number of chickadees, house wrens and finches. My hedgerow is still a work in progress, as I learn, ever so slowly, what will work in my particular ecosystem. But my blue spruce, which towers over my house, sometimes reminds me of what could have been, and how, long ago, I might have tended to those other small lives differently.  

Like what you just read?

Read more of my work! My debut novel Leaves On Frozen Ground is now available at Barnes and Noble.

They were out again this morning. Six o’clock and still pitch black, their headlamps and lighted tennis shoes swaying in cadence to their brisk march down the road below my subdivision. The Green Ladies!

The Green Ladies have got their shit together. Aside from being illuminated by enough clip-on beacons to light up the produce aisle at Walmart, they have overcoats and pants in luminous green, the same stuff that has become de rigueur for highway construction crews. Even in the pre-dawn blackness, you can see them coming a mile away. You may well be able to see them from outer space. Ain’t nobody gonna run over a green lady and get away with it.

I have  huge admiration for their perseverance. Rain or shine, wind or snow, they’re out there, just the two of them, burning up calories and getting their cardiovascular fix. They’ve been doing it so long now I feel like I know them, and I wonder how I’d be received if, for instance, I were to stop and say hello. After all, they’ve been waving at my car for years, and I’ve returned every wave, this notwithstanding the fact that they can’t possible see me. 

The Green Ladies give me inspiration just by being out there. Although I’ve never got a good look at their faces, I would guess their age falls somewhere in the pre-geezer zone, about like my own. How many pre-geezers do you know who march up and down the streets of town at 5:30 in the morning? I think about that all the time.

And then I go back to sleep.