Rod McKuen - Flight Plan


SATURDAY 22nd & SUNDAY 23rd Click on the logo below to visit the all new Stanyan House web site as well as the new Stanyan Bar & Grille Message Board		Rod on Maui, August 2003. Photo by John Scoggins. ©2003 by Stanyan Entertainment. A Thought for Today Believe in something, even if it’s only your own ability to believe. Little Towns & Pretty Places #5 in a series MEXICO Tres vidas, three lives. My lives in Mexico were many and yet reduced to one. Each January, five years running, I escaped below the border to write, to find myself. To find something. I wrote, ate the sun, washed down guacamole with marguerites and grew fat on rice and beans. I stayed near the ocean, that served the sailor part in me and being miles from any city I let the countryside ride over me. I locked the world out by not reading newspapers or listening to the radio and so a set of January’s and half of several February’s too stay on as mysteries. I prefer it that way. Five years in a row I made the first six weeks of the calendar up. circa 1980, previously unpublished. Oval Window There is an oval window in my bathroom at Tres Vidas surrounded by some vines. Every evening - or almost, a single geko comes attracted to the light there he hangs against the pane till morning. Being on the inside I see his underside beautiful, motionless and white. I wish we had a meeting language. I want to know about him. He seems so solitary, unafraid. I am attracted to solitary things. -from Alone, 1975 & Beyond the Boardwalk, 1976 Sleep warm and I’ll see you again Monday. RM 11/19/2003 9:54 PM PST. Click on the Stanyan House logo to buy Rod McKuen books, CD's and lots more Click on the heart logo to subscribe to the Rod McKuen mailing list Catch Rod McKuen live! Click on the links below for details of concerts and appearances. ROD McKUEN CONCERTS ROD McKUEN APPEARANCES



		SATURDAY 22nd NOVEMBER Boris Becker o Charles Berlitz o Benjamin Britten o Michael Callan o Hoagy Carmichael o Tom Conti o Jamie Lee Curtis o Rodney Dangerfield o Charles De Gaulle o George Eliot o John Nance Garner o Stephen Geoffreys o Andre Gide o Terry Gilliam o Mariel Hemingway o Arthur Hiller o Peter Hurford o Billie Jean King o Jacques Laperriere o Staughton Lynd o Geraldine Page o Patrick Lee o Wiley Post o Scott Robinson o Joaquin Rodrigo o Gunther Schuller o Robert Vaughn SUNDAY 23rd NOVEMBER Abigail Adams o Billy the Kid o Guy Bolton o Maxwell Caulfield o Manuel de Falla o Ellen Drew o Ruth Etting o Manuel de Falla o Merv Hughes o Victor Jory o Boris Karloff o Steve Landesberg o Johnny Mandel o Harpo Marx o Franklin Pierce o Shel Silverstein

		If our past actions and mistakes don’t provide lessons for the future, what will? Privacy is paramount to peace. Don't compete. You are lesser than no man and none are better. All creatures, beings, people are alike. How can you compete, win or lose a race, with someone other than yourself? Being you is hard enough, but someone else? Forget it.

BEACH DIARY		The sun full measured this second day of this fourth year of coming back and coming back and coming back again to Mexico. In the trees it crouches now until it springs out harsher than remembered to bake me through the noon. Siestas notwithstanding the heat has got them all impatient, amorous or ambitions. Lizards in the patio squaring off at either end then racing down the tile toward each other, hind ends reared and hind legs stiffened, they snap and scatter in the dance of courtship. In the end like movie dinosaurs they crash and roll in twisted knots the balance of the afternoon. Having seen the ritual acted out and realized I started back to sleep beneath the kindest weather that I’ve known in twenty months. Suddenly they are in the hedge. Rustling, threading through the roots, tunneling in the dead leaf carpeting. Whoosh, and one comes flying through the thicket like an alligator given wings. Later when the sun starts slumping seaward it will be the gulls’ turn to file through the air in bad formation. Not as agile as the sparrows (as near P38s as any bird) nor as graceful as wild geese jetting home at spring, these troop transport gulls are clumsy. Fuel tanks full you can almost see their sleep beginning as they fly, no, stumble by. Sands crabs again scrambling sideways dragging unbelievable burdens through the soft red sunset. A fish head gorged up by a gull twice the sand crab’s size. Another darts off easily with half a clam. My long shadow passing past them is enough to send these recluses down their well dug holes. Could I invade this spider diary I might turn up the seashore chronicle of one whole winter or at the very least a pattern more elaborate than the tank like tracks of a thousand sand crabs invading that first atoll past and all along the shoreline. Evening and a single gecko’s loud percussion heard above the waves beyond the wind and crickets, not yet chorusing but making ready. Geckos everywhere. Between the roof beams along the stuccoed wall above the arch of every doorway. A dozen now. More. Pale off white in color almost yellow. Only slightly darker than the once white plaster. Hanging on, upside down and sideways. Not moving, not sleeping. Geckos, unlike crystal. Not hard like alabaster. Marzipan and fragile looking. The echo through the arches as they chatter, could be one or five. Castanets in double time. I half expect that Spanish dancers will come bursting through the door, vests and petticoats of every color heels stomping, snapping, clicking, ready for some fine fiesta. Stars. A few are falling. No comet yet, but it’s expected. The day has opened up progressed and gone. I have watched it move from the lizard’s lost siesta to Don Quixote of La Mancha’s imagined but not held fiesta. -from "Moment to Moment:, 1972, 1974

Birthday research by Wade Alexander o Poetry from the collection of Jay Hagan o Coordinated by Melinda Smith o Sound & Fury Dr. Eric Yeager o Webmaster Ken Blackie

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