Game On!
This morning when I opened the refrigerator and pulled out at carton of soy milk, a large container of feta cheese jumped off the top shelf, hit on the bottom edge of the frig, and emptied itself in a large mucky pile at my feet. I wanted breakfast. I got a clean up job.
I starting to not trust stuff. Stuff seems to be making choices.
Yesterday, I snaked the hose over to the edge of the backyard to water some flowers. It wiggled under a patio chair leg and kinked up so the water wouldn’t come out. After some coaxing we got going again, but only a few minutes later the hose was hung up again on a sprinkler head, stubbornly refusing to move with me over to the pond. Ridiculous!
I’m starting to get it. Things are animated. My house is an animated gif. It works for me to see it like this. Life makes a lot more sense if you become a general animist. Last week I saw my ink pen jump off the center console in my car and hide down under my driver’s seat, by the seat track, in the hardest place possible to be retrieved. There is more. When I was going out the back door of my home, a loop on my jacket reached out and grabbed the knob and jerked me back in the house.
My things are alive; I think they have talked among themselves; some of them may have entered into a pact, to mess with me. I’m not crazy. Respectable people understand this. In Piaget’s child psychology, he asserted that a child’s mind assumes all events are the product of intention or consciousness. I have always had a child’s mind. Really, we all do. The feta meant to jump. The garden hose is playing games.
I am in good company on this. David Hume, a very fine and respected mind, writes in his Natural History of Religion, “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”
I have made the transfer, and I’m wiser for it. If you know that the things in your house are just like you, you can manage them better. The TV wants to stay up at night; just like me. That’s why when I press the “off” button the TV stays on, because it has switched over to cable mode and must be returned to TV mode to be turned off. Tricky, that TV.
I put my coffee cup down the other day. When I went back to get it, it was gone. I later found it hiding in the microwave. I know what happened. It got cold and went for a warmup. I understand these things now. And I’m on to their strategies. Things are not always going to stay where I put them so I must sometimes go looking for them in different places than I left them so that they know that they aren’t the only ones thinking. Aha! Clever me.
But, I still sometimes get caught unawares, surprised by the resistance or the playfulness or the downright stubbornness of things. I put the bike in the back of the SUV the other day and it jumped back out so that the door wouldn’t close. I had a horse like that once — didn’t want to leave the barn. I get it. Sometimes I don’t want to head out for the day either.
A contact lens jumped out of my fingers recently and took off for the floor. I trapped it in a corner and got it safely back into its case. It gave me a blue glare as I dropped it back into the soaking solution. I’m on the alert now.
I’m in the game now, I’m keeping score, and I’m winning. This morning it is things 5, me 10!
That’s a pretty good score for a morning’s play.
Game on!
Restoration
Something in us wants to restore things.
A few months ago I snapped a photo of the gleaming white concrete steps and glanced upward into the narrowly ascending tile stairs.
How many people had come down those since they were made, stepping slowly so as not to slip, hearts pounding, anticipating the bottom, the backwards fall, the sudden sucked-in breath, the deadly shock?
Only a few hours earlier I had kneeled in the bottom of the pit, the tank, the concrete coffin and pounded away on the floor with a power bar. Paint chips flew everywhere, green paint, yellow paint, white paint. Dropping the bar, I grabbed my paint scraper and pushed it down hard, dragging it across the accumulated crud on the top of the paint and concrete. It screeched along the cold surface like fingers on a chalk board.
What was it? I wasn’t sure? Sediments from the water? Oils from people’s skin? The thin greasy yuck of ten or more generations of yellowing anger, lust, hatred, selfishness and pride? I sanded it, I TSP’ed it, I pounded it again, and it slowly yielded to the onslaught, as it is want to do.
I rose up from my knees thinking, “Jesus may have died for your sins, but somebody eventually will have to clean them off of the bottom of the baptistery.”
The whole experience had been rather unique from the beginning. I thought it would be simple, repaint the old baptistery. It wasn’t.
Even the trips to the paint store, three trips, had an interesting aura about them. “This paint isn’t really meant to be submerged,” the clerk said, turning the gallon can in his hands. ”It’s water proof, but … maybe you should go to a pool store.”
At the pool store Mark, the pool expert, added another wrinkle. “You need to bring in a paint chip. I’ll test it to see what kind of paint was on there. Then we can pick a paint that is compatible. Otherwise, it will just peel off.”
But when we pooled the paint chips I brought back, dunking them in three different kinds of solvents, nothing happened. The thick, adamantine pieces stubbornly resisted dissolving in anything. “I think the paint is from the 17th Century,” I quipped. Mark looked nonplussed. But we still didn’t know what we were painting over, just that it was really old, really hard and resistant to solvents. It looked a lot like the peculiar texture of human corruption to me.
Mark wanted to sell me two cans of paint at $90 a gallon and a cleaning kit for $37. I settled for the $59 per gallon epoxy paint after he said that it would probably stick just about as well as the other. I had some TSP and an acid based concrete cleaner back at the church, down in the basement, in the old supply room where you can pretty much find anything if you look long enough.
Mark took a long time. He was really slow. His every movement was in slow motion. He had all day. I didn’t; I fidgeted. Murderous thoughts surfaced in the back of my brain, not compatible with my mission. I chipped away at him in my mind. Why did Mark push the more expensive products? After all and with all due respect, it was for the baptistery! You’d think he’d offer a discount to try to score some points for himself on the side.
Maybe he did. At the register he took 15% off, but I think it was because there was a sale going on. Earlier he had told me he didn’t go to church and that they didn’t give discounts to churches. Other thoughts came to mind. His name is Mark, and his story isn’t over.
Back at the church, I kneeled again in the baptistery, paint roller in hand, the thick white paint dripping off the cover, onto the floor. The moment was sacred. It was an honor to be in this place. The concrete enclosure had a unique, historical, purposeful presence, like the ancient baptismal tank at the Baptistère Saint-Jean in Poitiers, like San Giovanni in Fonte, the Lateran baptistery built by Constantine in Rome.
But this baptistery is no museum. People will not come to look just to look. This baptistery will receive the devoted ones on this very upcoming Sunday.
They will step down into the rippling water, shining brilliant white, reflecting its new paint. They will stand in the water before their friends, families and God, and they will make their professions of faith in Christ.
They will dive backwards into the water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit like people have for thousands of years, and they will lie still below the surface, dead to their crud, dead to their old selves, dead to their sin, and they will be lifted up from the watery grave with faces shinning white – new ones, redeemed ones, fresh ones, life-splashed, righteously strong and beautiful ones.
I hope the paint is dry. Otherwise the saints looking on may see an ethereal, white glow on each baptized face and mistake it for a miracle.
No matter, paint in the water or not, this moment will be a miracle, new life springing up in an old baptistery.
I like it; I always have. I like something old scraped, sanded, repainted, restored.
I grew up with restoration; it’s part of my DNA. My Dad renovated the Christian campground that I grew up on in Missouri. He built a kitchen out of rocks and cement for the camp, and he built a bunkhouse for the alcoholics who came down from Kansas City to get away from the environment of their addiction. They were in a renewal process themselves, getting away from poison in glass, learning the Bible, working with their hands. It was there that I found old Red, the stray tom cat I took in. It was there that my mom made a yard out of a woods, in the home my dad built for us on the campgrounds. In that front yard she planted Iris in the front yard and put up a bird feeder in the back that the brilliant red cardinals came to feed at.
My Dad and I repainted my first truck and car in the camp shop there. My dad was always renewing, running a chain saw or a brush hog to clear more land, putting up hay for the couple of milk cows we had, building a building, building a man. Eventually the chain saws and tractors got to his back, and he couldn’t do it anymore and we moved back to California, but he and my mom never quit this kind of thing. I talked to my dad on the phone the other day. He is now in charge of a program at the retirement home where he lives in that goes into the apartments after someone has died and cleans up. He takes out the trash left when a life is over, and redistributes the things still useful to furniture a life still being lived somewhere else.
When my parents moved to Los Angeles near the ends of their careers, my mom transformed an old mansion into a home for homeless women and children. My dad continued his work with addition, setting up a really cool treatment program for men at the Los Angeles Rescue Mission.
About that time my mom got involved in turning the big house into a half-way house for women and children who were homeless. That’s when I came on the wash stand. My mom found it down in the basement. The style was good, three drawers, sculpted legs, but it was painted white, chipped and dirty. I expressed interest; she said I could have it, so I took it home and began to sand it. Nice, from what I could see. As the paint came off I could see that it was quarter sawn oak with a kind of zebra striped grain.
I used paint remover, sanders and then hand sanding. The problem was that the white paint was in the grain. More sanding and more sanding, and then I made the test. I rubbed an oak stain into the smooth surfaces, and on the backside of each stroke, beautiful golden grain patterns appeared. I rubbed on a light, protective layer and added some new pulls on the drawers. It has had a prominent place in our home for the last 25 years.
Progressively larger and better TV’s have sat on the oak piece. I really like modern technology, but the technology has come and gone, was new, then was old, and was given away, and the oak stand has outlasted the black plastic boxes, circuits and wires.
I like it. I like my hands my hands on a surface, adding an new gleaming finish. And like my mom, I like my hands down in the earth bringing something blue and purple and yellow out of the ground, I find it more meaningful to find, restore and preserve something old than to get something new. I love old homes, old baptisteries, old cars and old wash stands fixed up – they rock.
The other day I was at Sophie’s Gallery in Liberty Station. Liberty station was formerly the Naval Training Center (NTC). It is now a beautiful Point Loma shopping mall. On the walls of Sophie’s were wooden boxes and box tops, with the bottoms painted in scenes and the sides acting as frames. I asked about the art; the owner called it “repurposed art.” I like that. The Naval Training Center was repurposed. The boxes were repurposed. I like repurposed. I am repurposed.
I know now that I am the greatest restoration project I will ever work on or experience is me. I too am a piece of work, under restoration. I have been scraped and sanded, and I too have been repurposed.
Early in life I got old. We all do. It is the kind of old where our social and psycho-personal surfaces oxidize, rust, dull and fade from early psychic dings and wacks. Then we flake and rot, inside. For me, this premature aging was hurried along by my own bad choices and from the stupid mean choices of others. I was this kind of old by the time I was in third grade.
It was the old that couldn’t tell Teresa, my fourth grade crush that I loved her. It was the kind of old that chased Roy Coons into a shameful corner on the play ground. It was the kind of old that had to hit a homerun over third base to feel good, the kind of old that held my brother down and screamed at him during a basketball game, the kind of old that threw over the monopoly game board when I saw all to clearly that I had lost, and then all the fake money and green houses and red hotels went flying through the air and bouncing over the braded rug in the living room and the game was very clearly a mess and over and ridiculously done.
Enough of the stupid and embarrassing examples; it’s the kind of universal old that comes straight out of outhouse of our interior corruption, from the nasty chamber pot of selfishness and competition and judgment and ranking and exclusion. I hate it. It’s so stupid ugly. It is so deeply pressed into the grain of our psychic wood. It is so ground into the psycho-social floor of our very existence. And it is so mean-hard to scrape off. “Help! Call that guy that advertizes about doing remodels. Help! Call the police. Help! Help! Call 911 and get an ambulance here, now! We have to go to the hospital!”
When I was eight years old I told my mom I wanted to pray. Just before that I remember walking down a road and kicking a rock and thinking I’m destroyed — eight years old and done. I remember thinking, “There is something horribly wrong with me! And I am going to be punished; I am going to rot in some kind of ugly, insane and horror-house place forever if something isn’t done about this. “ It may have been imperfect contrition, but I don’t really think that was all of it. I wanted to be young again and I knew that the only one who could do that was the youngest one in the universe. It wasn’t simply fear; it was fear compounded with hope.
And so I did something that was more like letting someone else do something than doing something myself. I told my mom I wanted to pray. Pray what? Pray a prayer that said that I was old when I was still young and that I wanted to be young again. So I did. I prayed that I would be forgiven for the choice that I had made that made me old. I prayed that I would be made over, fixed back up, as restored as an old baptistery fixed up or an old wash stand refinished.
After I prayed, I remember feeling shiny. I remember feeling like I had just been scraped, sanded and repainted. I remember walking out into the backyard and feeling ridiculously light. I remember feeling young again. It was unexplainably crazy good, just what the doctor ordered, what had to happen to avoid being ruined and discarded.
I wasn’t finished by that prayer; but I was begun. The restoration had begun. It is still in progress, like road work in Boston, never really finished but apparently further along, frustratingly slow, but headed in the right direction.
The thing is that more scraping is required than it looks will be necessary in the beginning. The sediments on the floor are harder and deeper than you think. Later, in mid-life I began to realize that I had put on a mask in the first act of the play and that in the second act it was still on and it was keeping me from playing the role that I was now being asked to play.
We had a marriage. We had a Rosalind, our daughter. We acquired a mortgage. We snagged careers. We had friends. We discovered that in having Rosalind, we had a disabled daughter. And it was needful that I understand that there was pain to be faced in working at a minority isolated high school and pain in my wife being overwhelmed and pain in being overwhelmed myself. And yet I couldn’t I couldn’t be overswhelmed because I had to win the game and hit the best hit and fix up the house and fix Rosalind and it just wasn’t okay to be weak or vulnerable or to grieve or to admit that I couldn’t actually repair brain damage.
I went to the doctor. I went to an interior specialist, a therapist, a MFT. It was hard. Men didn’t do this, not so much then, at least not the men I knew. I didn’t want to go. I kicked a rock down a road first and seethed. In the end I went because I couldn’t not. It was too painful. I went in the same way that I had prayed when I was eight years old. I went because I needed someone else to fix what I couldn’t .
Bill, my soul doc, gave me a test. I figured I did well. I had a history of testing well. I did, and I didn’t. I figured I answered in a way that made me look good. I did, but that made it come out that I was trying to look better than I was. I remember Bill sitting down with me and going over my test. He said, “You have a tendency to present a carefully constructed self. You aren’t being congruent.” I was shocked, offended. He didn’t back off.
He gave me a copy of a book. It helped. I could take it easier in book form — read the concepts, apply them to myself, nobody else in the room pointing a finger at my heart, just me and the cool ideas. I have always loved ideas, particularly the ones that operate like a paint scrapers or the shiny ones that work a lot like new paint.
Congruency is where what goes on inside is like what goes on outside. If I feel weak, I express weakness. If I feel overwhelmed I say so and take cover in others love. If I feel angry I find appropriate ways to express that. In the past I had hidden these emotions. I wanted to be respected, so I presented a respect-worthy self. I presented a fortified, intellectualized, managed, attractively storied image. And it worked, kind of. I was respected, and I was perhaps even feared in the way people fear someone that they feel is superior to them.
But it didn’t work in one very important way — I wasn’t loved. People admire a strong man, but they don’t necessarily love him. To be loved and to give love I needed to be real, authentic, congruent. I needed to take off the mask and let people see a whole person, strong and weak, intellectual and confused, right and sometimes wrong. I needed to be remodeled into a more complete person. I needed not simply to be spiritualized, to not just say a prayer, but I needed to be humanized, to live openly with my own flesh. I needed to be comfortable being human in all its rotted and rusted and dented essence.
I began, the first tentative steps of disclosure, of honesty, of humanness. It worked, almost magically. Disclosure begets disclosure. Be open, people are open back. Rip off the mask and others do too. Quit pretending to be a saint and you actually begin to have friends. And then there was the best. I came to a startling conclusion. If I could learn to accept weakness in myself, then I could accept it in my wife and children and friends. If I could quit criticizing myself, I just might begin to quit criticizing others. This was transformative for me then, and it still is now.
This scraped and sanded the crud out of me. This put a new coat of paint on my inner baptistery. This made my face shine, and it made the faces of those I dunked in my waters of acceptance shine too. This began to put to death an old life. This began to repurpose me. I began to live more connected to other people. My face began to shine more, to shine with tears more and to shine with a smile more.
It isn’t done, not by far — scrape, scrape, sand, sand, paint, paint, paint. This week I rolled a new coat of white paint on the old baptistery floor. The last baptism loosened some of the new paint. Weird, the improvement of the old is never done. I’m thinking of tiling the floor now. Paint isn’t going to cut it.
More restoration.
Good.
Babies
“When we got to the hospital, my eyes were dilated to five. When my very pregnant wife got on the scales, my eyes dilated to nine. The nurse came into the delivery room and asked if we wanted an epidural. I said, ‘Yes,’ I’ll take one at the base of my skull.’ “
“When our first baby, Rosalind was born, I cried. I really did. And that’s the part Rosalind likes to hear. She always wants me to tell that. I cried because she was a girl, and I wanted a girl because I was sick of boy children, having grown up with too many of them, and having been hit way to many times on the arms by them. And maybe I cried too, thinking of all the loads of diapers headed our way.”
This is my first baby’s birth story, and it’s true, well some of it. Some of it is just my trying to act like a Bill Cosby dad, because I admire him so much as a dad, well, as a TV dad, because on TV he was so funny and cool and had money — and a smokin’ hot wife.
But if you have a baby you have a story and you tell it to other parents, to your children and to whoever will listen all your life. As a new dad, I watched my wife with other moms, telling our babies birth stories, reliving the glory, the hours of labor, listening to the other mom’s hospital stories. I felt left out. I didn’t seem to have a labor and delivery story because I hadn’t been in labor. Duh! Enough of that, I made a story up, well kind of, because I really was there, even if I didn’t have to pant and push and suffer. But I went through it; I had pain in the delivery room; I had bruises on my arms, and the birth of our baby was my story too.
We waited seven years after we were married to have babies. I was about to start a PhD in literature and my wife said, “It’s now, my clock is ticking, and the alarm is ringing and it’s saying, “Babies!”
I was faced with a decision, to go for the degree, and win knowledge, wealth and influence or have children and live in ignorance, disease and poverty. I choose children, and I have never, ever regretted that. Well, once or twice, I did, but not now. I am the proud farther of Rosalind and Laurel Hasper.
I needed them and I found out that they needed me too. It’s a wild claim, I know, but I have proof.
So many times when my little daughters, Rosalind and Laurel, reached their little hands up to me, fingers and arms and eyes all saying so very clearly what they wanted. I picked them up and then they were good, there, in the right place, with me, their dad
Last week my mom told me that Ruby, her great grand-daughter from my brother Steve’s oldest son and his wife, woke up in church in her lap to a huge, high cathedral-like ceiling over her head. Her little lower lip trembled. Her eyes began to tear. My mom told me that she pulled Ruby to herself and held her tight and then little Ruby’s lower lip calmed and her eyes closed again. Good, all good.
They need us, and we need them too.
Last Wednesday, Aryah, a friend’s little daughter ran over to me and threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek with all the three year-old innocence in her little brown arms and silky, soft cheeks and fuzzy pulled-up hair, as cute as cute can ever be. I couldn’t have felt more honored. She is so adorable that her momma took her out recently and a modeling agency representative asked if she could be brought to the studio for pictures. Her mom said, “No. Aryah doesn’t need more of that kind of attention.” She is already well on her way to a princess syndrome, thinking she is all that, having perhaps too many times overheard, “She is so cute.”
Babies , we love them — madly, instantly, unmitigatingly, and they love us back. We love holding them, looking at them, feeding them, taking pictures of them, comforting them. Babies – we even love the ones we have just seen for the first time and whose names we don’t even know. The cute ones in commercials, the sweet ones passing us in their mother’s arms on the street, the funny looking eighteen month ones, hand-held, staggering like drunks alongside their mom’s in the malls – we adore them all. They turn our heads; they get our second looks. Their little bald heads and beady eyes stop traffic in the grocery store and bring people together in little huddles on the street. “Ah, he is so adorable.”
When babies aren’t so loved, most of us are pretty much undone. When Ceausescu fell from power in Romania in 1989, and the scale of his social experiment to increase the population came light we were stunned — babies with no doting parents! “No!” According to NGO estimates, more than 170,000 orphans were languishing in orphanages under appalling conditions. The plight of the unheld, the unkissed, and the unfussed over shocked us and broke our hearts. It broke theirs too.
All babies should be brought home, even though it is a fearsome decision. Bringing Rosalind home was a thrill and a scare. It was like Christmas and Halloween combined. It was Christmas because we brought her home, like a wrapped and beribboned gift; it was Halloween because we were afraid a scary problem would come to our door that we couldn’t get rid of even with “phone” advice from the on-call nurse. And it happened. She cried, at night, late, and into the night. But we had to figure it out for ourselves. They said she had “colic,” which basically meant she cried and they didn’t know why. So we figured out or were told about a “colic hold,” or football hold, as we came to think of it. We tucked Roz under an arm in much the way a running back carries a football, lying on her stomach, head toward the arm pit, keeping her in place along the arm by getting a firm grip on one of her ankles. This hold is very handy, as the baby then just kind of rides along with you, near your body, and you have one hand free to do other things, like eat, hold a book, run the remote and other essentials of good living.
As you can see from this, babies aren’t always fun. Take diapers, for instance – not fun. Before we had our first baby, I was told that we would need about ninety diapers a week. I was num-chucked, floored, down because of the count . “Ninety diapers a week! What would a person do with ninety diapers?” I was to find out. But even hearing it pronounced like that, like some terrible, negative prophesy, scared me. That would mean that there would be a whole lot of something around my house that I preferred to not keep around the house, but to consign to a private, discrete, proper porcelain place.
I threatened to move to the garage. I was told that if I didn’t stop it and step up I would be banished to the garage. It was not to be, the garage, a way out. Flat, smashed, runny – we took turns managing it. It was only fair. “Gag me. It’s your turn.” We had friends with a rule about this, “Finders, keepers.” You do what you have to do, but you don’t like it. I used to give Rosalind “Giraffe Man to play with,” a little stuffed orange giraffe, while I changed her diaper. At least this could be fun for somebody.
But there was also the good stuff, the other end. Both our girls were both bald for the first year, with that nice soft layer of fuzz topping them off. We loved it, the fuzzification, the fuzzosity, the fuzzitude of their tops. Male pattern baldness doesn’t attract much attention, but total baby baldness is a big hit and people instinctively run their fingers over this soft warmth. With our babies, we teased that we were rubbing vitamins on their little, bald heads to make the hair grow. We weren’t. We were rubbing our lips on their sweet heads and kissing the stuffing out of them every chance we got. That is what eventually made their hair grow.
To compensate for not having hair, we got our girls cheeks — big, fat, sweet, rosy, downy cheeks. I like to say, “Love some cheeks.” It came from a time when one of them said, “Want some cake,” or something like that, and then in our family, post that, we say, “Love some cake, love some kitties, love some… “whatever it is that we love. We pointed out the cheeks to other people, and we told people we paid extra for them, as if cheeks were an upgrade, like a sunroof or leather seats that we could brag about.
Sum it up for yourself; do the math, fat soft cheeks, bright eyes, oversized, fuzzy topped heads, short and chubby arms and legs, miniature fingers and toes – these things pretty much avalanched us down the slope of total baby adoration.
Take baby toes. Baby toes are an instant hit everywhere. “Look, they are so perfect,” we gush. Baby toes are a miracle to most people, like the appearance of the virgin, or like bread and fish multiplied. They are so small and fresh, but exactly like ours, well, not quite. I was recently standing around with some young adults who were all wearing flip-flops. Their toes weren’t perfect, but instead, even in their mid twenties many of their toes were already bent to the side, headed toward old age and perhaps a hobble.
But the babies, in miniature, the toes, the fingers, the silky soft skin, it is so often so good, so right, so fun. Fun, fun, fun – babies are so fun, some of the time. You can see that they aren’t always when you see their sleep-deprived moms and dads just trying to get through the next day.
I remember being a baby; I don’t. It’s surprising, our brains are growing so fast then, learning so much, but remembering so little. But my mom remembers and I remember through her. I woke in the morning hungry, starving, begging, “Circee, circee, mama circee.” I so I got my Cheerios and I was so grateful that I dropped some over the edge of my chair to the dog, and they picked me up and let me out and I turned around and I was shoveling Cheerios into my babies mouths and sitting on the floor playing with their toys with them. And I’m still eating “circee.” I love my Wheat Checks and Honey Nut Cheerios and Shredded Wheat with soy milk and Splenda.
One of the best things about having babies around the house is having their toys around the house. Adults love the toys — nothing new here. In the Indus Valley Civilization, (c 3000-2,500 BCE to c1500 BCE), at the ancient site of Mohenjo-Daro, archeologists found children’s toys, small carts, whistles shaped like birds, and toy monkeys which could slide down a string. We have long loved miniature, and we have loved the motions that make our babies laugh.
The first mobile we bought was as much for us as for baby Rosalind. When we had a room with a crib and a mobile, we got smug and knew it was for real. We were parents. I was particularly thrilled with “Discovery Cottage.” When we put the little cylindrical guy down the chimney of the plastic house and out the slide he came, Rosalind laughed and laughed with delight, and we laughed too watching her laugh, this little slice of laughing reality reprising all the laughs of the ancient children, the ancient Indian child pointing and delighting in the monkey flying down the string or the ancient Greek child tossing her yo yo’s out from her little person with joyful abandon.
As the girls got older, early grade school, we took them to the pool. At that point we had moved to a master-planned community for all the usual reasons: the good schools, the walk around the block without crossing any major streets to get to school and the pools. The pools were worth the mortgage payment alone. The girls grew up in the water, as all kids should. Water and kids mix really well. We played bucking bronco. The girls sat on a bogey board, wrapped their little fat legs and finger around the edges and held on for the wild ride. Back and forth, up and down, twisting and bucking and rearing back and diving forward, then the flip. I’d flip the board upside-down, their heads pointed to the bottom of the pool, then on through the spin and back up to air and sun again, and then back under and back up, fifteen, twenty twenty-five times. I forget the record, but it was high, over thirty times under water without falling off, the screaming and laughing and water flying and high-fives at the end. Babies and big babies are fun to play with.
Besides toys, the other entertainment was language. The fun and the cuteness of big babies is the fun found on their lips and tongues. The first smiles blew us away. The first “dada” and “mama” melted our hearts. And then they really talked — funny-cute. Laurel loved a, “Yion” (lion) and had an “owie” on her “yeg” (leg). When we were driving Rosalind would often shout out “Gog, gog,” and sure enough ten cars away, hanging out the window, there was a dog. She was never wrong. Rosalind wanted to go on a walk and see “naturous” things, and so we did. It’s hard to remember all the cute things said and done. We don’t, but when we are again around babies, some of the special moments and movements come back.
Audrey came to our house last week. Audrey is eight months. She is all eyes and she misses nothing. She crawls fast, throws a leg under herself and sits out and up like a college wrestler making a move on his opponent. She smiles and claps and everybody wants to hold her which she doesn’t mind at all. At the end of the night, as the celebrity in the house, she didn’t want to leave. She arched her back and had to be bent into her car seat. Babies are strong and strong-willed– sometimes. Odd, how similar Audrey is to me, to adults everywhere; we never grow out of not liking being pushed down. And so we understand her when she doesn’t want to go in her seat; sometimes when the party has been fun, and she has been the center, a girl just doesn’t want to go home. Audrey is writing her story.
When you have a baby, you get stories, and the stories just happen to you, you don’t have to make them up, but they shape and change and define too. One day we went up to the mountains for a hike. A bicycler crashed along of the road. A Life Flight Helicopter came for the rescue. People gathered in a dirt parking lot nearby. It was exciting to us, but not too little Laurel. She reached up, eyes up, hands up, I took her up, she clutched me with the tightest grip ever and said, “Scared of dat, daddy, scared of dat.”
I took her to the car. We sat there through the chopper loudness and dust-churning craziness. She didn’t quickly forget it. For several years thereafter, when a helicopter would fly over the house, she was wild-eyed with fear that it would fly in the window. This is it; calming our children’s fears, trying to make clear to them what is dangerous and what is not. But a good childhood is not much fear, more fun than fear. It was for us.
The first smile, the first time sitting up, the first clap, the first crawl, the first step, the first word, the first party – whew the fun is nonstop.
I remember our first vacation that required a flight. We flew to Kauai, a good place to take kids, because it is surrounded by warm, clear, beautiful water with bright fish in it, and turtles. We snorkeled with them, nonstop. I remember snorkeling with Laurel, at tunnels, a reef very close to shore, very shallow, but with an edge. We were swimming together, and suddenly we came to the outer edge of the reef, and a cliff, and deep, darker blue water. Out over the edge of the nothingness we swam, and Laurel looked down with me, floating with her floaties and she grabbed my arm hard with her little fingers.
I pulled her close and we cruised in a little circle and back over the safety of the beautiful reef, with its little fish and plants, her size.
This is it, the swim together, the fingers grabbing us tightly when they are afraid, the arm circling, the guided tour back to safety.
We love our babies, and when it works out the way it should, they so love us back. We need them. They need us. You can tell from the red finger marks pressed into your arm when you take them out into the wonders.
Aristotle, Rumpelstiltskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Power of Nomenclature.
Several nights ago, I drove from San Diego, out Interstate 8 East and into the mountains. I cleared the foggy marine layer at about 1,000 feet and saw the magic belt sitting white and hot on the horizon. At about 1,500 feet a fireball fell through my windshield.
I stopped above Alpine and got out. Alpha Tauri, or Aldebaran in Arabic, meaning “the follower,” was burning an orange hole in the face of the bull. It was 4:00 am.
I lay down on my back in front of my car on a folding lounge chair. It wasn’t that weird; other people where gathered there at the viewpoint for the same reason, on cots, blankets, sitting on the roof of cars. I could feel the heat from the Lexus on one side of my face, radiating from the hood. My horse was near me, Pegasus run long and hard uphill and now grazing quietly by me, her master. A night breeze blew over my toes carrying a sweet fragrance up from the canyon below me. The coastal sage scrub chaparral had her perfume on.
In the tradition of Adam and Linnaeus and all the great name makers, I looked up naked eyed, my binoculars on my chest and my coffee cup on the sidewalk beside me, and I named the ancient names of the named: Perseus, Cephus, Andromeda, Cygnus and Orion.
And down through the ancient celestial places fell the Perseids — fast, hot and beautiful, looking like dollops of lava or flaming jelly fish streaming to earth. Wow, did I feel good. I was glad I had woken up at 3 am out of a dead sleep and decided on the pre-conscious, sleep-drunk spot to drive up into the mountains in the dead of the night. It made me glad that I knew that August 12 and August 13 were the days for the Perseids and that I knew the names of the constellations that the tiny pieces of comet dust were falling through.
I stayed under the stars until the sun came up, a light glow over the Cuyamacas in the east, gently erasing Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini. I drove home full of streaks and points, clusters and a blazing image of Jupiter in my mind. I fell back into bed at 7 am and got up at 9 am feeling like I had some mutant version of the Perseid flu for the rest of the day.
That night I told my wife, “If I get up in the middle of the night tonight and wander around the house like I’m getting ready to leave, hit me in the head with a stick. If I get back up and start walking again, hit me until I stop.”
Sleep matters, as well as marital bliss, but so does seeing stuff and so do their names. To name is to know. To name is to differentiate, to similarize and sometimes to name is to see at all. Do you really see the Willets and Black Stilts and American Avocets in the salt mash if the only net you have to catch the lot of them is, “Look, birds!” Yes, you do see something but you do not see as much as when you know and love their names and their distinguishing features. I love learning the names of things, saying them out loud, pointing them out to the uninitiated, to my students, to my disciples, to whatever peripatetic followers will gather ‘round.
I religiously read Smithsonian magazine. Their writers name stuff. A recent article exposed the truth; jelly fish are taking over the world. It sounds more like something you might read in the National Inquirer. But no; it’s science; jellies around the planet are multiplying and asphyxiating fish, clogging nuclear power plants, disabling aircraft carriers and sinking fishing trawlers. There are too many jellies now.
But it was the names of the jelly fish, not the mayhem, that stuck with me from the article – “blue blubbers, bushy bottoms, fire jellies, jimbles. Cannonballs, sea walnuts. Pink meanies, a.ka. stinging cauliflowers. Hair jellies, a.k.a. snotties. Purple people eaters.” I love them (although not in the water when I’m snorkeling or boogy boarding), and I love their names, the snotties and the bushy bottoms. There are 1,500 jellyfish species. There are the true jellies, and the comb jellies the other gelatinous animals like the Portuguese man-of-war, a colony of stinging Cnidarians in the category siphonophores. Yes, yes, yes – it’s a knock in the head, the multiplicity of jelly, the variety of jelly, the weird expressions of jelly, the names that the jellies draw to themselves by the fabulous wardrobes they sport.
I love the siphonophore; that’s what I am; that is what we all are as we suck in the bits and pieces of life that swim near us in our seas, and toss a net of taxonomy and nomenclature over them. Then we can fish them out with their names when they pass our way again. In this way I wish to think of myself as Aristotelian. Aristotle made direct observation of nature and detailed categorization of his observations. He spent time categorizing things, dividing the world up into elements (earth, air, fire, water and aether) or types of creatures such as egg bearing or life bearing.
I want to follow Aristotle; it’s been argued that those who do succeed. I want to observe the things resident in the particular cusp of creation I inhabit and revel studiously in the names of local bits of reality and draw general conclusions from their unique identities — the California Buckwheat in all its rusted glory, thriving along Interstate 8 and throughout San Diego county, the Blue Knobby Starfish luxuriating in the tide pools off Point Loma, the California Alligator Lizard running on the white stucco wall in my backyard in Eastlake. I wish I could run on walls.
Two springs ago I trekked out to the Azza Borrego Desert with some friends. We were in search of a Native California fan palm grove and some water, a little oasis tucked back up in the quiet desert hills. The sky was a perfect Southern California cornflower blue. The desert was smoking hot and rocky and dusty. We started through some creosote flats and then went up though some ocotillo ridges.The trail was steep at points and full of large rocks to scramble and hobble over.
My teen friend Daniel was having a rough go of it, so I took his hand and we hiked together, me easing him along the trail. He had trouble judging the terrain, the height of rocks I think. His Down Syndrome didn’t help him process the desert. Now there is a name the parents of a new born baby don’t want to hear, “Downs.” I’ve been there, I know. I was there when my friend Peter Anthony was born and “Down Syndrome” was said in a private room and his parents heard the name and held it in their minds, like a diver holding his breath underwater and then they came back up to the surface and cried and went home and made a life out of making a good life for Peter. They’ve done really well, as has Peter Anthony.
Daniel and Peter have been in the same class, as well as my daughter Rosalind, a class that we parents didn’t imagine we would ever place our babies in. I know what it is like to get the diagnosis you don’t want to get and the label you don’t want your child to have, but which they have to have to get what we call “services, and how it feels to put them in the special needs class and to live there everyday with disability and a different classification than you ever expected to have live within. But we got it, the category, the label, the classification; it’s life, the categories and names and places that fall to us. And so now our kids are in the same classes together, at school and church, and the truth is that now I like it and so do our children – much of the time. We have a place, with the disabled community, a pain family that shares life.
But you have to watch out for Peter Anthony. At church, he escapes to the front to whack on the drums on the stage. I think it is because he can barely hear, and he that likes the vibrations from the drum heads. He also likes to sneak away to the bathroom and get toilet paper and put it in his hat for safe keeping until a time when his mom isn’t around and he can pull it out and wave it. It’s good to wave things, our hands, a mobile phone at a concert, it’s soothing, in the air, back and forth for a moment.
One morning, Peter was seated in church, in the front row, waving a small streamer of torn toilet paper. I saw his mom, toward the back, watching. I said to my wife. “Take a good look at Peter Anthony, because you’ll never see him again.” But we did because his mom loves him, but you know he caught it for the public waving of things not made to be waved in public, whether stuck on the bottom of a shoe and waving unwittingly behind or held high in the front of the church for everyone to see. I once saw a trailer with an outhouse on it being towed down the street and a long streamer of toilet paper had snuck out of the outhouse door and was unspooled in the wind and waving in a wildly free undulating motion for twenty feet or so down the street behind the trailer, practically reaching all the way to my windshield. It was a hoot, unexpected, a party in the bathroom on the street. But for the most part, some things should be kept to the bathroom, on the roll – “Really now!”
But on the day in the desert, hiking out to the Palm grove, Daniel and I labored together up and down the rocks, making a trek together, not staying in the place we were assigned to, leaving behind whatever classification we usually carried with us and streaming out into the middle of nowhere like toilet paper blowing in the wind from a traveling outhouse. The final stretch down to the native fan palms was steep but worth it. There water ran from pools in the palmy shade and our feathered friends came for it all, the shade and the water and the replenishing ambience. I spotted a Phainopepla with its striking black crest. I love this feathered friend and its name. It sounds noble and Greek and exotic me, Phainopepla. And then we saw the Lazuli Bunting, with bright blue head and back, just a little lighter in shade than Christy’s Red Hot pipe glue, and his white wingbars, as white as PVC pipe newly laid and his rusty breast and white underside. “Wow “ again and again.
What at day! We hiked to the oasis and saw it and named it and carried a memory of it back home. Like seeing a weird jelly in the ocean, we saw a weirdly named and colored bird in the desert and claimed it as our own. In my Audubon Field Guide To Western birds I checked it off the Lazuli Bunting as I did the brilliant yellow Hooded Oriole, another bit of feathered color and another name that I have stored in my mind to encourage me in my journey over the rocks and steep descents.
But of course not everything we name is a “Wow”; certain thing are not. When my daughter Laurel was little, she fell in love with Melissa and Julie her Sunday morning preschool teachers. But she didn’t feel the same about Dan, Julie’s husband. One day she told us, “I like Julie, but Dan is yucky.” Life is a process of growing up and figuring out what is yucky and what is not.
When I was little I too ended up thinking a couple of people at church were yucky – the one of the guys who sung in the choir and worked his jowls in a comical way and also the pastor. The pastor was probably a fine man; but I didn’t identify with him at all. He wore a dark suit, talked too long, and gave long invitations at the ends of services, pleading for someone to come forward as he called for just “one more verse of ‘Just As I Am.’” I was tempted to go forward and accept Christ on many occasions, although I had already done that earlier in life, just so we could all go home. It seemed like a humane and righteous thing to do, for the pastoral staff and the rest of the congregation.
The deal was that the pastor seemed to me to be in a classification of his own, a “Pastor,” or “Priest” or “Reverend.”He seemed to me to be a kind of spiritual impresario, a resident stage actor, not really authentic, not human the way the rest of us were. This may have been a classification I imposed on him, but the way I saw it became a problem for me and made me not want to be a Christian if to be a Christian was about scaring people into heaven and talking them out of being human. Something about too much talk and not enough story didn’t work for me. Something about talking without being funny or crude or descending into the dust and sweat of the particular, the earthy and the loamy — it didn’t work for me. To me, he was “yucky.” He seemed to fly too high; his talks were like planes with no landing gear, soaring up into the theological sky and never coming down to what I was thinking about – about girls, fast cars and Saturday nights out with my friends, about the big bass I caught with a top water lure in the lake near the house, about the ground hog I shot with my 22 and then felt bad about, about Zane Grey, about the homerun I hit over third base and about Roy Coons. Roy was the\ boy I shamed and humiliated on the playground by chasing him and calling him names.
And so church didn’t go so well for me, most of the time. I remember one time in particular. It was a Sunday evening service. My older brother Steve and I were sitting in the back, and it came to pass that he released a pestilential vapor, a noxious effluvium of a very particular variety, the one that cause the Black Death of the 14th Century in Europe, a thing so earthy, disgusting and dangerours that it was never given a name. After he did this, I began to shake and he did too. Whether it was from nerve damage or because the whole thing was so funny, it was hard to tell, but we sat together in a repulsive ambience, jerking convulsively, shaking the pew, and all the while silently praying that we wouldn’t lose it and howl with unholy laughter and bring unwanted attention to his sin. It was so wrong in so many ways to do what he did in church and therefore so interesting and so very delectable that we could barely fathom it, but the fun ended when my dad came to the back. He then commanded us to the front, with everybody watching with quick glances, to sit with my him and my mom between us, because we couldn’t be trusted to have class when we were alone. We simply could not be trusted to carry off a disciplined life, to live within the rarified sphere of ecclesiastical rectitude.
I have spent much of my life trying to recover from church, to both stand in the front and laugh in the back, to negotiate the space between the profane and the scared. And I am still trying to get past those names, “pastor,” and “Christian,” without getting past them at all. I am a Christian, to the core, and I have now been a pastor for twenty-two years, but I am still trying to define those terms, to live with those labels, to understand those classifications in ways that fit the reality of life and the unique essence of what it means to be human.
Aristotle divided life into creatures with blood and creatures without blood. I want to be in the class of creatures with blood, a pastor with blood in him, a Christian who knows he has blood in him and must have blood on him, who is connected to God and yet still connected to what it means to be fully human. I want to deeply understand what it means to be a man with a rich range of emotions and a fabulously diverse range of thoughts. I want to understand the divine as it smacks up hard against the human, as it did in the life of Jeremiah and Isaiah and the other great prophets, and I want to learn something of the interface between God and man. I have always thought that what was interesting to study was the overlap between distinctions, the land where classifications merge, the places where things that we differentiate and name have something in common, those places that conjure up brilliant metaphors and fascinating similes and profoundly unique connections.
I have a several microscopes in my office at the church and a globe of the earth and a rock collection and a chambered nautilus and picture that I took in South Africa of a white rhino herding her baby across the road. I am and always will be a man of the earth, of rocks, of the sea and of sea creatures, of photography and art and the image and the particular that represents the universal, in other words a Christian after the heart of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
This is the way I see it; praise to the one who made things to name, to classify and to order, and all the things also that run counter to those names and are different and in between and fickle and in some odd and intriguing manner spotted or dappled or stippled.
I believe that this is all very deep in me, and in many of us. In grade school my friends and I copied the names of birds and flower from the Encyclopedia for fun. Now when I go to the desert or mountains or the beach or travel anywhere I drag along bird and flower books and sometimes my sky charts.
I love Aristotle. I love the modern nested hierarchies of internationally-accepted classifications and categories. I love information systems, intellectual disciplines, thinking about how to sort and store knowledge.
I love and honor the power of naming. Rumpelstiltskin, the gold-spinning dwarf, was not vanquished until the queen could say his name. He sang:
“To-day do I bake, to-morrow I brew,
The day after that the queen’s child comes in;
And oh! I am glad that nobody knew
That the name I am called is Rumpelstiltskin!”
But the queen overheard the song and said his name and then Rumpel was done and his power was broken, and that happened when she said his name, Rumpelstiltskin, and then he left without her child, and he never came back.
With the queen, I want to say the name of the dwarf and the names of God too. I want to say the names and call to our attention what is good and pure and right and noble, and I want to say the names and banish what needs to be sent away forever, things like the addictions and humiliations.
I want to live after the manner of Hipparchus and Tycho Brahe and Linnaeus and Adam all the other namers of names.
I want to and I will learn the names and celebrate the names of the stippled and dappled things of creation. I want to say and to see.
Amerian Avocet, a long-legged shorebird with long, thin, upcurved bill, distinctive black-and-white back and sides, and a bright rust-brown head and neck during the summer.
Alberio, a gold and blue binary star in Cygnus.
Heliotrope, a sun loving pink and purple flower that climbs up through other plants and smells like cherry pie.
Bushy Bottom, a jelly, from the sea, with a bushy derriere.
Halophile, an extremophile that loves a highly salty environment.
pastor, a human being who is searching for God just like the rest of us, but take the time to get to know the rest of us and help us.
God, himself.
Good!
Beautiful
I want it. I want to snorkel it, I want to telescope it, I want to drive in it, I want to plant it in my backyard, I want to eat it, I want to look at paintings of it, I want to see buildings that revel in it; I want to put it on the top
shelf of my brain every night and sleep on it. I want to happen upon it unawares on the ground or on a wall or on a face and be startled again by the drop-dead gorgeousness of the gorgeousness of the gorgeous.
Last week, I saw a man hand a woman a bag of free food – beautiful.
I saw a cat peak with yellow eyes, black face and white whiskers through a hole in a box—beautiful.
I saw the shadow of a tree on a wall, shadow art, lacey and intricate grey drawings, caved paintings, duplications of the ideal forms of things. I was Platonic again in that moment.
I saw a baby crawling, sitting, clapping, bright eyed, expectant, insatiably curious – absolutely beautiful.
We live in a God-kissed world; his lipstick is all over the place. This is why sunsets and Indian Paint Bush are red.
I couldn’t resist the charms of a pack of rosy colored Impatiens at Lowes last week. I brought six plants home, all blooming with best shade of red ever and planted them in my back yard along with some new bright green sod. I planted the flowers in front of my repainted, white, stucco terrace wall. I really like the rough surface of stucco; flowers and trees and grass look knock-you-out beautiful posing up against stucco. It never stops — the divine smouching, the physical evidence, the outrageous beauty.
On August 1, 2010 the sun flared, an arcing pillar of hot, white light rising up and flaring out from roiling surface. Recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory at extreme-ultraviolet wavelengths, the photographs show a massive white, orange and yellow pillar of fire rising up off the sun.
Nice! Beautiful! We needed that, the flare, the flicker from the sun, the color in our eyes. Yellow fire, we’ve seen it before — the candles on Christmas Eve, flickering over the communion, highlighting the wine in the cup. The pure golden fire, lying on the beach as the sun sets, a glitter path of golden light running from the falling sun, across the waves and onto the sand.
It’s good for us. On August 1 we soaked in the flare, literally, the rays, as they flew on the solar wind to earth. One day a larger solar storm may stike us and destroy the electrical grid and wean us from TV and the Internet and managing our money online. If that happens, it will be okay, really; it will give us more time to look around, at the beauty.
I see that Lunt Solar Systems is now offering an affordable, compact hydrogen-alpha solar telescope that features a 35-mm etalon, with a bandpass narrower than 0.75 angstrom. It can show the Sun’s prominences and delicate surface detail. I want one. We all should have one. Iccarus should have left off with the wings and just sprung for one. A solar flare, seen from afar, can make a day.
But the deal it that there are a lot of things to distract us from seeing the good stuff, to interfer. Too much, we miss it.
Today, more than a solar telescope, I felt like I needed some protein, and so in the morning, I engulfed my soymilk, wheat checks and coffee. The brown, latticed squares crunched hard and fast, as well as the second bowl and the second slurped cup of coffee went down smooth. As the protein, carbs and caffeine weighed in, I began to near humanhood again. The first grumble at our house is sometimes, “Just give me the coffee, and no one will get hurt.” Eating and drinking is good habit, a good habit, but good habits can keep us from seeing better stuff — flares.
Last night, I wanted sleep more than star light or meteors or other bright visual stuff. I know that because I closed my eyes at 8:30 pm. with the light still on for my wife’s reading, and went to sleep. Running my reciprocating saw all morning cutting metal bolts and flanges in the backyard had dramatically depleted my stored energy. These bits and pieces of rusted metal were remnants of someone plan for a patio cover — never realized. We dream, of the sun and of shade, but sometimes, like Jonah by his withered plant, we fail at it.
This afternoon, I wanted safety, not beauty. I know that because I slowed on the turn around the lake in my SUV, coming back from Lowe’s, negotiating the SUV lean, wishing I was driving the MGB that I owned in college, but being careful in what I was in – a living room on wheels, not much more negotiable in a turn than a book mobile. But speed will have to wait, perhaps until the Infiniti G-35 sport coupe that I occasionally lust after and may some day fall for. I checked the intersection at H Street and Eastlake Drive before entering to avoid any Mr. Toad’s driving furiously by. And last night, for more safety, I avoided watching the evening news. What I don’t know isn’t in my mind, to scare me. Safety is overrated. It too often wastes the use of our eyes.
And this evening, I felt like I needed a real kiss, not a solar kiss. I know that because when my wife came home from work, I was really happy to see her and gave her a big hug, and we ate Mexican food together on the patio and talked over the day’s trivial events, as good wives and husbands do all over the world, making sense of the day, calming the little things we did and said that day down, telling them in a story, settling them in for the night. We were Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan, folding and stacking the mental mess, putting the good on top, packing the undesirable at the bottom of our minds. The Mexican food helped because Mexican food makes for good talk because it is multi-colored and beautiful – green, red, yellow – and it can inspire multi-level thinking, and with a Corona to wash it down, it can inspire colorful conversations – sometimes.
But protein, sleep, safety and kisses are not enough. Something is still missing. We also need beauty. This is one thing I have sometimes forgotten but keep coming back to strong now. I need beauty, a cup full, a bowl ful, a world full, a sky full, everyday. So does everyone else, but we all tend to forget it in all the pursuit of the other pursuits that pursue us.
During my recent garden project that resulted in a nice layer of sod in my backyard, I glued a lot of schedule 40 PVC irrigation pipe. To stick it together, I used Christy’s “Red Hot Blue Glue.” I love Christy’s glue. It’s beautiful with the lid off, ropy, as deep blue in color as my grade school girlfriend’s Teresa’s eyes and it makes me dizzy in the same way she did. To avoid Christy’s seduction on my recent project, I wore my snorkel and mask when gluing the pipe together in the trench. It’s the same breathing tackle I used in Maui on our last trip to the islands. But when you wear your mask and snorkel in the backyard while carrying a can of blue glue and some white pipe around, you risk the neighbors avoiding you forever hence forth. But it can’t be gotten around. The pipe must be laid. A beautiful lawn is really all about what’s underneath, schedule 40, some male and female connectors, some risers and Christy’s hot blue glue. One night I wore my mask and snorkel to bed, putting it on while my wife was in the bathroom. When she came out, I was ready, looking out over the sheets through my silicon mask, breathing noisily. Her, not so much.
It’s universal, the lunge toward beauty, the beauty projects, the willingness to lay pipe to create lawn. Some of our greatest minds have been chronically in need of a daily dose of the gorgeous – obviously. Consider Xie He, the Chinese art critic known of his six elements that define a painting, Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch master of painted light, Carl Linnaeus, the Swiss father of taxonomy, Antoni Gaudi, the Spanish architect of biomorphic buildings, Coco Chanel, the French fashion designer, Satyajit Ray, the great Indian filmmaker, Auguste Escoffier, the French emperor of chefs, Leonardo da Vinci the Italian genius, Shakespeare, the English bard – all clearly ached for beauty. All their art and art criticism and science and architecture, clothing, movies, culinary delight, intricate machinery, fine literature and a lot more stuff in our world bears witness to our wildly aesthetic bent, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, da Vinci’s flying machines, Coco’s little black dress – “Wow!”
And we don’t merely need one beauty; we long for and crave many beauties, one of them being that shapely thing we call size. We humans are wildly attracted to things cubic, things with circumference, with volume. When I was in college a friend and I shared rides to school. She was taking beginning Astronomy and loaned me one of her text books, The Stars by H. A. Rey. It is a children’s book and so it is very helpful to everyone.
There I first learned about the stars. Stars have circumference, a lot of it. They have pull, gravity, and an appetite; they eat and are eaten by each other. I was smitten by the huge, round, hot, white, blue and red orbs and their groupings in space.
Using her big blue book, I identified the constellations for the first time in my life. I thrilled over discovering Orion, as if I were the first discoverer, the belt, the sword, the nebulae therein. I bought my own copy of Rey’s book. I went on a trip with her class and wandering innocently up to a telescope I bent down and saw the faded butterscotch orb and brilliant arching rings of Saturn.
“Incredible! It doesn’t look real. I didn’t know you could see the rings of Saturn in a little telescope. That’s the Cassini Division in the rings? Wow! Superwow!”
I gushed. I grinned. This was it. This struck a chord in me; the ring was for me a beautiful F# minor 7th, a combination of harmonious notes to play again, to come back to whenever playing an E, an A2, a B2 and a C# minor 7th. It fit, it belonged, it seemed to me that it wanted to belong in this measure of song, in this movement, of this piece, in this given universe. And perhaps it was more even than that, and indicated something fishy going on here, something behind the scenes, something weirdly wonderful in the physics of the stuff we live close to.
The split between the A and B rings is one of the most beautiful splits in the universe to look into, much like the Grand Canyon or the split between the left and right brain. The rings on each side of the Cassini are flying flocks of rocks, shepherded by moons. How cool is that?
“Gorgeous! Amazing! Wow. Wow. Wow!”
I read in H. A. Rey that if you placed Saturn between the moon and the earth the rings would almost touch reach the moon on one side, the earth on the other. I celebrated that and still do, inside and out. That night I also saw the moons of Jupiter and its cloud belt. I was astonished, ripped, wrought. I went back home and bought a four inch reflector. I pointed it up and was astonished. But it wasn’t big enough for my appetite. More light was needed.
I bought an eight inch Celestron — beautiful, in itself, in fact, so much so that by it I was distracted from the stars for a moment much in the way that cars distracted me from math in high school. What a gorgeous work of art is the Schmidt Cassegrain telescope — the central opening in its primary mirror, the folded light path, the sleek and shiny corrector plate. And the views it gave up, they were something to “ooh” and “ah” over — Saturn’s belts, Jupiter’s red spot, Venus’s crescent, Mar’s white polar cap against its dusky orange sphere, the perceptible disks of Uranus and Neptune.
I went crazy for aperture. I found a used 13.1 inch Coulter Optical Dobsonian in the paper, bought it and refurbished it. It was a light bucket. I fell in love with the mirror. I cleaned it, stroked its silver skin, polished its gentle curve. I now owned an observatory. I could find and gawk at hundreds of fuzzy galaxies with 100 million stars in them, more, more, more, the hunt for the mystery, the look, through the eye piece at the wonders. I couldn’t get enough celestial beauty; I still can’t. I adore the Orion Nebulae, the Ring Nebulae, the Veil Nebulae, the great globular cluster M-13, the Whirlpool galaxy. They never stop thrilling me. Anyone who has missed them should do nothing else at all until they have seen them. One should not exit earth wthout seeing what is beyond earth.
The other night I looked up. The moon was huge and far and white. I put it in my eye, and I washed a little bit of the difficult day out with it. This is it, the beauty washes us, it cleans us, it restores the orderly in us again; the beauty is Mrs. Darling, bent over our disturbing dreams, straightening the covers, kissing us on the foreheads and saying “Goodnight, my little sweethearts.”
We must go places where we can see further. It should be mandated that we frequent viewpoints and lookouts. This last spring, I went out to the Anza Borrego desert east of San Diego. From highway 79 just south of the town of Julian I stopped at the desert outlook. I squeezed through the sun roof of my SUV and sat on top. Thousands of feet below and miles away, were the beautiful, sandy desert and beyond the blue Salton Sea. I soaked my psyche in the far off.
But what is the beauty of distance, of size of volume, without the beauty of color. Color is fuel, drugs, the palate of the mind. I love color. This spring my wife and I hiked the trail from the top of Torrey Pines, south of Del Mar, down to the beach. Stopping half way down, the color palate was stunning, yellow Sea Dahlias, red Paint Bush, blue heliotrope, purple and white Black Sage and the red sand cliffs and the aqua marine ocean with the black dolphins riding on it, swimming south in the sea in lyrical, synchronized movements.
I needed this because I had worked too much in confined spaces, too close to sheet rock and neutral wall paint for too long. I went home cured, temporarily.
I love the watery beach with the same love that I have for the desert. They wear similar makeup. One year when we went out to hike the Palm Canyon in the Anza Borrego desert, just east of San Diego, it rained. There we were, hiking up the canyon, ogling the flaming red tips of the Ocotillo, the yellow clumps of brittle bush, the magenta explosions shooting out the tops of the beaver tails. Then it rained, and the canyon was transformed into a cathedral, the wet walls became stained glass windows, rich in reds and blacks and gleaming browns and yellows.
A few years back my wife and I toured Italy, an art circle tour. In Assisi we visited the basilica of Saint Francis. We were struck by the frescoes in the lower church, said to be painted by Giotto in his revolutionary naturalistic style. The life of Christ was depicted in blue and red and green and brown, simple shapes, elemental colors, archetypal stories. Linda cried. I asked her why.
“They are so beautiful,” she said.
She is on to it. Everywhere we go we should be weeping, over the beauty, everywhere, in nature, in art, in each other, in faces. Just consider the glorious beauty of faces. I recently looked into the face of a woman with cancer and then into the face of her mother who had just prayed for her, thanking God for giving her, her little girl so long ago, a very old woman praying for her aging daughter and all the beauty she was at the beginning and is now, perhaps near the end. I looked in their faces as they looked in each other’s familiar faces and there was pure, love-drenched beauty..
A few Sundays back, I saw a little girl walk to the front of the church by herself, standing in line, only eight and yet making her own decisions to take the sacrament, making her own choices to put herself in the moment of holiness.
She stood expectant before the woman serving her, like Vermeer’s girl at the window, caught in the light, reaching to open the glass to something beautiful. The little communicant held the bread, her short black hair cropped straight along the bottom of her chin, her head tilted as in the painting, angled slightly down and yet opening to something outside of herself.
Then she took the cup, and held this too, perhaps too long, certainly longer than the adults before and after her, either not sure what to do or simply savoring the moment, maybe a little embarrassed, always looking down at the hem of her dress, sipping the blood of Jesus so carefully, half emptying the cup and handing it over, as if it were too special to drink it all. Vermeer would have been frozen, stunned silent and motionless by the beauty.
We need such beauty, often, close, experienced, savored. We would do well to know that more and to make the conscious aesthetic choice to really see it when it is in front of us and to go find it when it is not, to know it, to treasure it, to soak in it, and to let it inside of us to fill us up again.
I paused under a tree recently and to notice the little bright circles on the ground. It was the sun, shining through the leaves, reproduced, the solar pinhole effect, 386 billion billion megawatts of energy, in a tiny, me-sized, accessible image! I was reminded; we are here to pause, to Sabbath, to enjoy! This is it — the pause; we need to pause; we must pause.
I striped my church’s parking lot recently, laying down new white parking lines on the black asphalt. When I was finished, I paused, it was the divine pause; I enjoyed my work. This is how God must have felt after making the zebra. Stripes! It’s good. My striped parking lot is of the divine order of things.
I like the Hebrew Psalm, number 148. It’s a hymn of creation, the writer exulting in the galaxies, angels, sun, moon, rain – everything up there praising, the writer exulting in everything down here, including little creatures, praising. ”Praise the LORD … “small creatures,” the Psalmist writes. I guess that includes ants and fleas. The Psalm presents a world-view that reveals a vast, universal hymn going up from the earth, from flea to galaxy, creation — all praising the maker of the beauty. It makes me think, hard.
It is a privileged to see the living Vermeers, and yet, while we do our best to pile up beauty around us, art on the walls, food plated and presented perfectly, the faces we love captured and framed, the pet fur that we love kept near us in a box or a cage or a yard, our chromey and zoomy cars in the garage, our flowers on the table, much of the beauty of life isn’t in our hands to give and take. We go looking with our telescopes, but the event isn’t within our grasp. It’s cloudy or not; it’s given, or not.
On a recent warm, San Diego afternoon my wife and I paddled out into San Diego Bay from J Street Marina over arched by a steeply angling sun. We had come out to gape at the wonders. Sitting off-shore from the Chula Vista power plant, we turned in the kayak and looked west toward the Pacific Ocean. The roar of cars on Freeway 5 at our backs, we could see the Silver Strand running north from Imperial Beach to the almost-island town of Coronado, a beautiful narrow strip of sand crowned with red tiled roofs and glowing palms. Condos, big houses, boat slips, the famous Hotel Del Coronado, upscale retail – more contrast to the industrial shore line behind us.
We luxuriated in this watery commons, we soaked in the distances, we beheld the reflective plane, the flat lines as beautiful as those in a John Marin seascape, and then we turned back toward the power plant. My eyes traced the long line of one of the earthen dikes built to create its intake and discharge channels. What a contrast to Coronado’s strand. Chula Vista’s thin strips of fill material are as ugly as a ransacked room, narrow lines of eroding fill dirt and pieces of broken concrete. As we sat in our quiet watery moment, the beauty of the bay broke through like a shy smile. The departing sun glittered across the ocean, over the strand, down the bay and onto our faces. The breeze became gentle, the water smoothed and then suddenly, very near, we saw what we had come to see.
A large curious head and curving protective shell broke the surface of the water. We aren’t alone. Swimming very near was a giant, green sea turtle, one from the group turtles that have made their residence in the warm waters of the power plant. One doesn’t have to go far in Chula Vista to see the marine treasures. In 2009, Forbes magazine rated Chula Vista as one of the most boring cities in America. That’s interesting. Are there boring places? Or are there only bored people in uninvestigated, beautiful places?
We watched transfixed as the turtle broke the surface, opened its mouth, and then slipped back into the depths. It was a sighting of a wonder. It fell into the neural folder in my mind that held all the other sea turtles I have ever encountered. It found space beside the turtle I swam with two years ago on a gorgeous California summer day in La Jolla. That day, my marine buddy and I paddled together from Jolla Shores to the La Jolla Cove through glitteringly clear water, moving in tandem through the sparkling blue Pacific.
It landed in the same neurological row as the baby turtle I discovered while snorkeling off the west coast of Maui last summer. I found this little one on the bottom, sleeping under a rock shelf, then coming up to breathe with me and descending again in a slow arc to safer quarters.
Sea turtles, something given, offered – they are part of the beauty that we paddle through life with.
Last week on a bike ride with my wife, I saw a Snowy Egret fishing in a mud flat along the strand in Coronado – beautiful.
Today I say a large white bloom crowning the top of a dark green, glossy-leafed Magnolia tree on the main street running to my house — gorgeous.
And today I watched water cascade over the rock waterfall that I built in my backyard pond, glistening silver in the sunlight and splashing happily onto the green lily pads that I have planted and carefully nurtured there — spectacular. Monet would approve.
It’s given, non-stop, everyday, offered, to us, out of love, for us — the beautiful!
Fur
I was half asleep, napping on my day off after a challenging work week. The sleep research shows that we need to catch up on sleep, after putting out, by putting in 10 hours or so. I was catching up and so was Megan, nesting down at my feet.
Then I felt her weight on the covers, fur moving my way. It was a bit odd. Megan is afraid a lot, tactile defensive. It figures, with her past. My daughter Laurel, one day walking from jury duty to my office, found Megan on a block wall by a bank, eyes swollen shut – a hungry, lost, crying kitten. Laurel called me; I came and got her and Megan in the car. We took her home with us.
Megan is now family; she lives within the walls, not on the wall, and she lives with all her needs met and more, yet she has never fully recovered from her time outside on the wall. She has her terrors, her abandonment issues, her eating disorder. She is now over weight. It’s interesting, the issues of our animals and our responses to them.
Megan is in therapy now; I’m her counselor. It’s working. That day on the bed, she crept up to my side, did that half turn that animals do before settling, and nested up against my side. I didn’t touch her; she would have retreated. We slept snuggled, her weight against my stomach, a familial closeness, hanging out together, both doing deep breathing. This is why we have pets; to have something to breathe in sync with that doesn’t make a fuss when we don’t do breathe right, or do anything small and insignificant right, the kind of ridiculous fuss our human companions tend to make over little things that don’t matter now and never will. Mark Twain quipped, “If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”
I’ve always enjoyed animals, from the day I dragged the tom cat I named Red home and made him mine, to the time I crawled under the chapel to drag nineteen puppies out in a cardboard box, picking up each soft warm body, much to their mom’s dismay, and bringing them out into the light, into society, to the present as I live with two black cats who I generically refer to as “fur,” as in, “How was fur today?”
Something in us wants to find a creature, adopt it, and love it. It is the pleasure of domestication. My friend Tim has turtles, Vance and Adriana have birds, Natalie has a gecko. Some like scales, feathers or a carapace, but I prefer fur. My wife likes turtles and so we have several in our backyard. She and Tim talk turtles: worms, eggs, great escapes, stuff like that. I don’t really get it. What can you do with a turtle? They won’t fetch no matter how many times you throw a ball past them, and there is no snuggling; just gawking at the prehistoric, head-snapping food lunge and a bit of hand washing if you pick them up — Salmonella. From what I hear this rod-shaped, non-spore forming, motile enterobacteria, isn’t that much fun either. It doesn’t make a good pet.
Tim is really into turtles. He has five of them, all of them gifts from my wife. There was some hanky panky among the turtles in our backyard and we needed to off load the results. I saw some of the action; it looked like two Volkswagens had gotten into a wreck with each other. Tim adores his adoptees so much that he built a turtle habitat, sparing no expense, making a kind of turtle condominium out of wood and screen. His turtles live in perfect conditions. Dynamite, his favorite, is growing at an alarmingly rate, as if trying to live up to his name. To accelerate things, Tim sent off for worms and began farming them where he throws his garbage. I’ve seen this plot of ground; its terrifying. One shovel into the dirt will conjure up a massive, squirming ball of twisting turtle entrees. It takes a life, sometimes a lot of lives, to make a life. People with pets in need of particular foods end up trafficking in all kinds of less than appetizing carcasses — dead mice, live crickets and buzzing flies. I saw an ad recently on the internet for a reptile lunch box.
Early in Tim’s turtle adventure, one of his cata roughed one of his shellish friends, who at that time was not much bigger than a quarter. The cat got the tiny carapace in its mouse and carried it from the backyard and into the house where the tiny tortise was found on the floor looking a bit like a leaf dropped from a tree. Tim rushed home from work and off to the vet with his traumatized friend. The doctor examined it carefully with his stethoscope – respiratory concerns. When we heard about all this from Tim, we hooted and hollered and made a lot of hilarious and derogatory remarks, but Tim took it all in with a knowing smile and lost nothing of his deep love and care for his terrapin friends. There is something in a modern man that wants a backyard farm, a suburban ranch and a creature or two to care for. There is something us all that values the things we raise. One of our neighbor’s dogs ate rocks, the rocks below the barbecue that the grease had dripped down on. The surgery bill? It was $900. They paid it — true love.
One day when she was little, my daughter Laurel found a Gulf Fritillary, a Passion Butterfly who had just emerged from his chrysalis home with one of his wings badly wrinkled. The wing was deformed and so the butter couldn’t fly. She named him Jack. She told me she loved him. She held him on her finger; she prayed for him; we put him back on the passion vine from whence he came, but her passion was for him through that day and night.
That night as she went to bed, she worried over Jack. Jack was gone the next day, as butterflies tend to be. Recently, Laurel and I talked about Jack. Laurel is now 20. When we found Jack she was about eight or ten. The story is archetypal for us. We go back to it now and again, as if it were our Beowulf or our Iliad, the mythic past when Laurel loved Jack. There is a tenderness to the plot, a little girl, a disabled butterfly, a rescue and the poignant awareness that sometimes there is nothing that we can do. Such stories are social catalysts, linking family members together, amping the value of something important to them. If only we were all loved like Laurel loved Jack.
But we aren’t, and we don’t. We discriminate, badly, against some of the creatures. I know that I do. I demolished a wood deck in my back yard recently. We think of a deck as a nice clean place to set up a table and chairs and eat a la fresco with pretty plates, lemonade and barbecue. That isn’t the whole of it. A deck is a habitat, and if you don’t know that, try looking underneath. The underworld of a wood deck houses biota — molds and mildews, wood rotting bacterium, various species of bulbous-bodied black and brown spiders, termites and the larger creatures of ill repute, mice, rats, opossums, and skunks. It’s a motley lot of undesirables. But they live close to us for several reasons, one of them being that they keep us honest. They save us from an overly romantic view of the creation. I love a house cat and a backyard dog. But there is another, darker side to me. I’m death to spiders. Opossums don’t move me. When I took out my deck; I decimated the spider population on my square of suburban wilderness. I found some opossum bones in the dirt, but I didn’t grieve. When I was a teenager I shot a ground hog. That I grieved. I did it to impress my friends. Impressing people is overrated. I wish I could take it back.
But even our scientists rank the species and in this way perhaps they devalue some of them. They measure encephalization quotients, EQ’s, and some fur friends don’t do so well — opossums. EQ is a amount of brain tissue plotted against total animal size. Humans weigh in at 7.6; opossums fall far down the list at 0.2. It’s difficult to find a opossum who has gotten past preschool; they aren’t the brightest crayons in the box. You can catch one in the same trap seven nights running. It’s hard to get worked up over them, although the prehensile tail is pretty cool. I saw an opossum walk across the top of my backyard fence the other night. It’s about three-quarters of an inch wide. That’s good balance. But I didn’t want to snuggle him. Many people think of the critter as a large rat, but it isn’t so; it’s a small kangaroo, well at least in the same family, a marsupial. It is the only marsupial native to North America. So there.
To an opossum’s credit he can fake his own death. I wish I could fake mine sometimes. This could be a useful way to extract myself from difficult situations, chores, arguments, social engagements I don’t want to attend, things like that. The opossum does it by falling over on his side, opening his mouth in a death-like grin, and letting saliva run out of the corner. Cool!
But we don’t want a fake. We want the real thing, a honest to goodness pet. We want to win something’s trust, woo something, befriend something, love something. We call our cat, Shanaynay, “friend.” We call her feline housemate Megan, “girlfriend.” Something in us loves a fur friend, their softness on our finger tips, their peacefulness on our laps, their lack of judgment, their cuteness when they chase a string or a ball, their happiness when we arrive back home after a time away. Last night we found the cat’s toy mouse by the door from the house to the garage when we came home. Megan was anticipating a playful reunion. If only our human friends had such hopeful thoughts of when they might see us again.
When we adopted our cat Shanaynay from the animal shelter, she rode on the broom when we swept the kitchen; she rode on the vacuum when we hit the rugs. No fear. She has never had fear. She is so unafraid of us we can’t keep her off the counters. She looks for her black fur with big yellow eyes that are never afraid of us. It’s good, no fear; if only we could all be raised in such a loving way that we had no fear. I hate it when we are afraid of what shouldn’t ever hurt us.
Megan has fears, but she is gradually overcoming them. I carry her up to the shower when I bathe. Sometimes she realizes what is happening and lumbers up the stairs after me, making her own way into the bathroom. As we begin, I put her towel down beside the tub, and she comes and sits on it. When I get out of the shower, she is there, waiting, and I get her back and sides and head a little wet with my hand. Her black fur forms immediately into little bundles, into fur tufts and fur locks. She lets me make this change to her, but then she quickly gets a little nervous over her new state of being and moves out of reach again, as we all do from the kind of touches that both thrill us and disturb us at the same time, the touches that tap into the wildness left inside of our tamed borders, what in still in us not yet domesticated. Megan moves apart an arms length to lick herself consolingly and calm her ruffled psyche. I dry myself and dress and then it’s her turn.
It’s a pattern, a drill, and she has it down. I pick up her towel, sit down on the toilet seat, and call to her, making the soft feline, chuffing sounds she makes when she sees a bird outside. This sound is primal, and I speak it like one speaking a language that they don’t pronounce correctly or understand fully. She dissembles, dallies, and then when she can wait no more she comes to me. I throw the towel over her and begin with her head. She can hardly bear it. She falls on her right side, always her right side, and she clenches the mat that surrounds the base of the toilet with her claws. Kneading the now bunched up stringy mat passionately, as if it were her lost mother found again, she begins to articulate the experience, to narrate the process. I go against her grain, pulling her damp fur back from how it naturally lies downs. This works, her fur begins to separate again. She wheezes. It feels the opposite of what she felt when she was lost on the wall. She begins to believe again, for a moment. She is so happy, that is until we are out the door of her safe place and off to the day again. Then some of her anxiety falls on her slowly drying fur again, and she runs from me and goes under the bed. Weird little beast.
But if she is weird, she is weird in the way that all of us creatures are weird. She is weirdly wired to need a social network. If she could, she would be on Facebook, Twitter and Flikr. And she would do this because it is safer than physical contact., but sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.
Actually the animals, of course, aren’t all safe. I knew a girl who told me one time that her worst fear was being eaten alive by a large animal. I had never thought of that before; it is frightening. She had some really good curves and should, as things turned out, have been more afraid of herself and her own kind.
I have run from animals, dogs, snakes, goats. We had a billy goat when I was growing up. He had a mean streak in him. The word on the street was that he had been abused or teased. It was my job to feed him. While doing my duty, I kept myself at the edge of the length of the chain that tethered him. I’d set his pail just within his reach, then scram. One day he came to the end of his chain and kept coming. Not sure how that happened, but I didn’t stick around to find out. I’d said some fairly mean things about his mother, and he hadn’t forgotten.
At the place of safety, where he usually had his neck jerked, where he was usually reminded quite nicely of his rank, he experienced the joy of Montresor in Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado,” a savored revenge realized. And yet before he reached me, I wasn’t there and the chase was on. He asked me as we went along what I had said about his mother, but I couldn’t remember in that moment when I was trying to think of something to compliment him on. The brain is like that; our judgments and our mercies are compartmentalized, and when we are harsh we are harsh and our compassions can’t seem to lay a gentle hand upon the raised arm and calm it down again.
I headed for the cabin where my dad was meeting with some other men. The thing was that when I arrived at the front door, Billy was drooling on my back, so I took an alternate route around the building, yelling as I went past the windows. The second time around, I think, my dad came out and the course of the war changed directions again. Billy was had, by the horns, which made perfect handles, and the mood between us changed again. It came to me, what I had said about his mother, and so I answered his question.
“Your mother smells like a goat,” I replied late.
The fun with pets lies in part in the surprises, with those unexpected moments when a kind of crazy happens. Once when we were little, one of the family’s Boston Terriers ran into the room startling the cat who proceeded to launch straight into the air while the dog ran right under it, the dog running under the cat in the air, the cat coming down on the other side of the dog. We hooted, hollered, yelled, “Did you see that,” and didn’t forget it.
One Christmas we bought two angels for the front yard, about three feet high, covered with lights. At the heart of each angel was an electric motor that slowly flapped their wings. It rained; I brought the angels in, plugged them in and enjoyed the show. So did the cat, and on one particular series of wing flaps, she attacked.The angel went dark, the cat lit up, and with tail smoking she exited the room, fast. Every Christmas when I take the angel from its box, I note the orange wire nut and remember the fun and tell the story when I get the chance.
Perhaps, however, the essence of a particular pet lies not so much in the events of their lives, but in their personalities. We have had our share of weird cats. Ruby was peevish, bit people, walked sideways into the furniture, saw things that weren’t there, and we gave her back to her foster mom. Indiana Jones was a black and white fluffy ball of madness, white whiskers exploding from above his wild eyes — Dean in On The Road — launching off the couch and into thin air with no apparent destination in mind, a beat zaniac, crazy for the night, a gone little guy. We locked him in the garage one evening to protect our sleep, and he broke out and we never saw him again. I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” Indiana did, although the corpse was probably not that beautiful once it finally rested in peace in the coyote or fox that ate him.
And Shanaynay, what a personality she has. I have never lived with a cat as social, as tactile, as friendly as her. When I go up to wake up my daughter Rosalind in the morning, Shanay is sleeping under her arm. When I go back down to work on my laptop, Shanay comes down to find a place on my lap. If I won’t let her, she sleeps on my lower legs. When we lay on the couch in the evenings and watch TV, she comes to lay on someone chest. When we leave the house, she weeps. When we come home she is at the backdoor to greet us.
When my wife goes to bed, Shanay likes to sleep by her head, put her front feet on her neck and knead. When we drag a string on the end of a pole, she tears after it; when it goes airborne, she does too. When we drop it, she picks up the string in her teeth and drags it to our feet for more. When I run after her, she runs from me, her tail up, crazy with the chase. She runs to her scratching pole and rips it up, then takes off behind the couch with a wild look in her eyes.
With her expanding repertoire of fun behaviors, our names for her have also expanded. Sometimes I call her dogs because she acts like a dog, and sometimes I call her Shindog Millionaire,which is a variation of dogs that came to me after I saw the movie Slumdog Millioinaire. Sometimes we call her Lafonda from Napoleon Dynamite. Sometimes Roz calls her Shanaynay, Lafonda, babies, cresent roll Hasper. We can tell what we value by the number of names we have for it.
When I come home at night I am genuinely glad to see her. She is my domestic livestock, my black leopard, my little bit of jungle, my friend. Something in me wants the warmth, the fun, the companionship, the touch. It is back to touch. My cats are soft. That pretty much gets it for me. And when they don’t sit on me, they sit by me, lying on the floor below my soft chair, always facing toward me, giving the catish slow blink, being there, with me. That counts.
School
I feared Mrs. Protava, just as everyone around me did, and I knew I was to respect her because my mom and dad did. She loomed over all of us like some kind of intellectual colossus, this huge paper-toting, book-packing, chalkboard writing, suit wearing, test-giving, rank-making female titan, and in her great hands she carried proof of things and made demands on us. Everyone I knew obeyed her and I did everything she told me to.
I was in the first grade.
But somehow, and I can’t remember just how, she learned something about me that I didn’t know and she told my parents and they intimated it to me. It was revealed by a test that she had given me. It was my first awareness of that I could possess a reputation, a public identity, and that this identity could be created by a number that they knew but wouldn’t tell me.
Such numbers, revealed to our teachers by standardized tests, are powerful things, although as I came to learn later when I became the teacher, they aren’t the essence of the thing.
I spoke with a man last week who said that in grade school he was put in special classes because he had problems paying attention. Then he told me, “I knew I wasn’t stupid, but my mom didn’t speak English well and so they put me in these classes and we just went along with it.”
He told me that later in his education, he was put back in regular classes, but that by then he was way behind, and he couldn’t do the work and that he requested to be put back in special classes so that he wouldn’t fail. He kept repeating to me, “I know I’m not stupid.”
After school, he became a tile layer. When I met him he was out of work and that was hard, but I could see that he was still reeling from elementary school.
So am I.
There was some kind of score I got on a test in early grade school that meant that Mrs. Protava would expect something from me, that my parents would expect something from me and that I should expect something from myself. I realized intuitively that this was a good thing about me, a high card that I might play, and I concluded, without talking to any of the adults about this card, that if I played it at the right times, played it often, that it would make people love me. I think we all go through life vaguely aware that we have cards to play, and that value is attach to them by others, and that the cards are, among other things, beauty, intelligence, personality, family, wealth, character, skill or conversely the cards are the lack of each of these things and others too that are like them.
Roy Coons didn’t have good cards. I will never, ever forget the day on the playground where we chased him like a wild pack of animals hunts another animal. He ran crazy, zigzag, like prey, and we chased him running straight and hard. He was dirty, he wore old clothes, he was gaunt, and he didn’t speak the way we were taught in our grammar books. And for some reason that I didn’t know then and do not completely understand now, we went after all that hard. It was an event that I have never forgotten – the sweaty running and yelling and pursuing and the dodging and fleeing and the ripping and tearing that we couldn’t or wouldn’t see or hear but must have happened in a very deep, interior place in Roy. I wonder what ever happened to him? Kierkegaard was right. “Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.” It stuck in my mind as a day that I learned something important about myself and my classmates; the teachers weren’t the only ones at school ranking people.
This doesn’t change when you graduate or when you don’t. I’ve noticed that some people tend in to see life as a ladder some as a level playing field. Some tend to see us and them, while others tend to see just us. Some tend to want to differentiate, some to not. It’s interesting. I’ve played the game both ways, and I’ve decided that I tend to hate to see people shove people down and step on them. I don’t like to watch boxing. I don’t like it when I’ve dominated others; I don’t like it when they have dominated me.
Once I got one of my brothers down one day. I was yelling at him. I don’t remember over what; it might have been a basketball game, or something else important like that. I remember looking down at him, pinned on the ground and then crying, suddenly very aware that I was ashamed of what I was doing and that I embarrassed that I was doing it. I’ve never forgotten that moment either. It stands out as something I wished hadn’t happened, but there was quite a bit of that perhaps shouldn’t have happened between us brothers, hitting, breaking, hurting. I got off my brother that day because I really didn’t like the whole hysterical thing. I have found that I like it better when I am more rational, sitting eye-to-eye with people, sharing a place on the blanket, sharing a place at the table, solving a problem by talking about solutions. I’m best in an environment of give-and-take, throw it up the air between us, see what comes down. I love to be a leader, but the kind of leader that promotes collaboration.
School, mostly, was a good place for me. My friends and I copied all the flower names out of an encyclopedia, just for fun, on our own. We wrote all the books we that we read each year on little note cards and turned them in for rewards that I don’t remember. Mrs. Myers, our teacher, assigned this. We copied some of the great art of the world and wrote up brief biographies on the artists. I still have mine. I liked Mrs. Meyers assignments, but I didn’t like her, then. One day when we were at the board, she asked us, “Are you boys passing gas?” I had never heard it put like that. I couldn’t get over it; it was too high to jump, to wide to run past. It was so hilarious to my brothers and my friends that after that we repeated her question endlessly when we were together and roared every time as if it was the first time. It defined her, I think, as from another universe.
My mom detected that I had an attitude regarding Mrs. Meyers. She told me that I had a habit of correcting Mrs. Meyers in class, and it was implied that this was a bad thing. But the truth was, as I later discovered, that I wanted to be Mrs. Meyers. I have never liked sitting in the room at a desk; I have always wanted to be the one standing upfront talking, not saying weird things, or getting other people to say weird things, but creating a safe place for the saying of unweird things. Unfortunately, when I was a new teacher, I said some things that my students probably still remember and in not a good way, worse than Mrs. Meyers, things like, “Get out of my classroom, now.” And I gave out a lot of “F’s” when I did my grades. I understand the whole “A” to “F” thing very well, and I see its value, and I like it, sometimes, and sometimes I am so done with all that.
I didn’t always do well in school. The little girl that I adored, who I told that I loved, she gave the speech at our grade school graduation, not me. I think five of us graduated together from our eighth grade class so it is not like there was a lot of competition. But I couldn’t have done better than her. She was so perfect in almost every way known to a young girl and it was better to worship than to try to beat her. Our school had a weird name, R-10. It was one step up from the country school house, and it was created by a reconsolidation of several. There were two nice rooms and a cafeteria. In each classroom four grades were taught, by one teacher, simultaneously. Imagine the lesson plans for even a day. Mrs. Myers was heroic, a giant in education.
She prepared me well, but when I went to high school, I played my cards poorly, and I got a D in Algebra. It was disheartening. What happened? I’m not sure. I sat in the back with friends who liked to talk and who didn’t like to study. And my best excuse is that I have always and to this day had a love affair with the particular, the detail, the concrete and the narrative and I didn’t see that in my Algebra book, although I know now that it was hiding in there.
One day in my ninth grade year I received a lesson in adult behavior that explained a lot. We were allowed to leave the campus at lunch. So we usually walked down town and bought good food like chocolate shakes and candy bars and gum. The gum was our downfall. On one particular day we got lots of gum, from a gum ball machine. Someone figure out that if you put in your coin, and jiggled the slot just right, so it didn’t fall but the gum did, you could empty the machine. So we drained it and returned to school with bulging pockets of red, yellow and green gum balls. We couldn’t eat them all so what could we do with them? We could throw them, from the upstairs study hall windows. It was a kick, a hoot in a mild kind of way. It was fooling around, like Tom fooled around in the story of “How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen.” It was high fooling around and it was low fooling around and we wombled and mucked and raked with gum balls until the principal of the high school came up behind us unawares.
He was upset. I could tell by all the yelling. I think he felt left out, betrayed that we hadn’t invited him to throw gum with us. Maybe not, but he got to yelling and wouldn’t stop and we had to leave the school in the middle of the day, and I ended up walking home, which was five miles away, at least until my brother came by and picked me up in his cool car. I think he was impressed with me.
I found out who had the problem later in the year. One day before school, the principal went down to the gym and got into an argument with the janitor. And I suspect the principal’s tendency to get a bit lathered up came upon him again and he picked up a pipe and clubbed the old janitor in the head several times. The janitor went to the hospital and the principal went home, even before school got going that day. I knew a little bit how he felt, going home early. I never saw him again to have the chance to talk over the old times and laugh together over what hadn’t gone so well.
But it is just as well. I hate the clubbing stuff, unless it involves a sock stuffed with other socks. Real clubbling hurts and its bad form.
College was a whole new sense of school for me. Suddenly learning became a lot more interesting, freed of busy work and bells, full of tension option and possibility and taught by creatures seduced by language and ideas. I took a literature class in which we were assigned Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Voice of the Desert. The mystique of the desert limned in a scientific, literary philosophic way, with skill in observation and skill in language, I was smitten. It was like copying flower names from the encyclopedia, but better.
I took philosophy. In one class we read Plato’s Republic. This stunned me. The utopia, the cave, the forms, the beauty of ideas, so perfect, so universal that all objects are defined by them. This weirdly clashed with what I had been taught in church, or did it? Here was a fine thinker with a different way of thinking. It opened my mind. There were other possibilities. The Republic allowed me to question the republic that I grew up in; it gave me another option. I wanted to be the philosopher king with access to the forms.
But I am Aristotelian and Platonic in outlook. I love observation. I love sense perception and classification and the particular and the object. I love the science of things. But I also love the science of ideas, the universals, the forms, the categories that define and give life to the multiplicity and complexity and specificity. It is both; it is neither; we try so hard and understand so little.
Plato and Aristotle are not enough sometimes, they do not get at it. Sometimes no words and no philosophies will do, only motion and touch.
One day I went into my daughter’s Rosalind’s room. She was crying.
“What’s wrong, honey,” I said.
“I’m stupid,” she cried out, “I can’t read.”
I was frozen. What could I say? That she could. She couldn’t. Her brain damage was, as we sometimes say, “from birth,” because we don’t even know when it was, but we do know that it was real, limiting, crushing, permanent. She wouldn’t go to college like I did or like her sister eventually would. She would go to college , but she would take bowling and Adaptive PE. Her teachers wouldn’t assign and she wouldn’t read Plato’s Republic.
I looked at her down at her teary face, bent down toward her pillow, full of grief and pain and I broke. And she looked up at my teary face looking down at her face and she slowly she got the oddest look in her eyes, a questioning look combined with a look a sheer amazement.
And she said, “Daddy, are you crying for me?”
“Yes, I am, honey,” I said and we grabbed each other in the tightest hug ever and kept crying together on her bed for a while. It was a moment. She had pain, but she wasn’t alone. And I wish I had something of that in me the day we chased Roy Coon, and that I would a have stopped it and made my class mates stop it and looked him in eyes and said, “I know. I know,” like Julia Child’s husband did in Julie and Julia.
When Rosalind was little, we watched “Sesame Street” together, and I read to her night after night, and we did flash cards and I knew she was brilliant and that she would grow up to love language and ideas and books. And she did because I read her all those stories like “Rootie Kazootie”and “The Little Red Hen” and she fell in love with Robert Louis Stevenson and we watched Hamlet together for four hours plus one night and we have watched Much Ado About Nothing lots of times and she quotes from it now and again, and we watched As You Like It and read The Tales of Narnia and she loves a story and has seen more movies than anybody in our family but it isn’t like we thought it would be at all, and sometimes that just totally sucks.
Life is like that at times, not the way we imagined it would be in the early morning when the ideas came brightly streaming through the window and lay like Vermeer light softly upon the heads of our children in their cribs and on ourselves as we bent over them and smiled.
When I was in graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, I took a Jewish Literature class. Here I met writers who understood the terror and the humor and the history of social ranking. Rabbi Nachman, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Chaim Potok — these men understood the Jewish experience of life, and they told the stories of a ranked people. And they understood the beauty of shtetl life and the life of study and the life lived by the book and the life lived by the imagination that thrives beyond the assignment and beyond the contraints of formal instruction.
I love my education; I love not sitting at the desk anymore. I love being able to read what I want to read and I love to make my own writing assignments for myself. Schools exist to take us beyond schools, to the place where we love to understand ourselves and others. My daughter Laurel is studying in London this fall. My wife and I will join her at the end of the semester so she can play tour guide, and take us out among the small and great wonders of the city, the food and the people. This is it; every student should study abroad; they they would be more broad in their thinking by meeting different kinds of people. People are an education.
I love my daughter Rosalind’s disabled friends, Steve, Donald, Daniel and Angel. No one greets me more warmly than them. Steve can’t talk but every time I see him he signs something to me. Donald doesn’t say much but he smiles and wants to shake my hand. Angel always tells me, “I am going to come to your house and beat you in basketball.” He did that once. Daniel keeps his thoughts to himself unless asked. He is wiser than most people I know. Rosalind will allow no negative word to be spoken about any of them. If I say something like, so-and-so can’t do that, Roz will say, but he can do this. In their circle is no judgment. There is no pretence and there is no superiority.
I never have to play a card to win their love, and they play none when we meet. When we are together we never talk about grades, degrees, credentials, certificates or titles. We are rankless.
I like it.
Wheels
“You’re getting us animals a bad name in the district by your furious driving and your smashes and your rows with the police. Independence is all very well, but we animals never allow our friends to make fools of themselves beyond a certain limit; and that limit you’ve reached.”
Wind In The Willows
As we slid around the corner sideways, I leaned into it and pushed the gas pedal down hard. We launched out of the corner with gravel spinning from the tires and plums of dust churning and dancing behind us, wild enough to make Mr. Toad grin wildly.
I loved this rumbling, tire spinning, drop-dead gorgeous car. It knocked you back in the seat with tire screeching, muffler growling, scenery blurring torque, and it looked good doing it.
Black leather bucket seats, candy apple red flanks, chrome steel wheels, glass packed mufflers and a 390 cubic inch V8 engine – somebody clearly set out to make some fun. It’s partly the touch thing. The surfaces of cars draw us to them, the soft glossy metal, the shapely dash, the arm chair seats, the glowing red dash lights, the fascinating buttons to push, the plush carpets. It’s home away from home. But at the heart of the beast is the engine, and this particular car was engine intensive. If you explored its full potential, then at some point you might need to pull over to the side of the road, step out of the car, put your hands on the hood and wait for the police to arrive.
But there were no police to get into a row with on the gravel road that summer day, just me driving and my crazy teenage friends in the back enjoying the rush. We went fast, we got there quickly, we had our fun, we felt cool, but on the way home things went south, or north or whatever way it was that I didn’t want to go. The car got away from me on a corner of a gravel road and we went into the ditch with a horrible bouncing and pounding, gravel and rocks whacking up against the bottom of the car with tremendous noise and force. I was Jack Kerouac’s Dean in On the Road, powering across America in my “old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from under it.”
When I got out I expected to see crushed sheet metal — nothing, just a beautiful car sitting in the bottom of a ditch gathering dust. We had reached the limit and passed it.
We couldn’t call for help. It wasn’t my car. So we improvised. We built a ramp with rocks, and pushing from behind and spinning the tires again, we drove it out. Not a scratch on it, if you didn’t count the scratches and dents you couldn’t see on the glass packs underneath. I drove home more carefully.
I didn’t tell my dad what happened that day until he was very old and feeble and couldn’t do anything to me anymore for what I had done that dusty summer day with his prize1966 Ford Fairlane GT, two-door coupe.
It didn’t start there. This is too deep; it goes back to my childhood. I loved riding in my stroller — I must have — it is deep in us, this thing for movement. We moved in our mothers, and kicked too. When we came out they rocked us and carried us and drove with us and pulled and pushed us on wheels. I loved being pulled in my little red, metal and wood wagon. Didn’t we all? When my babies were little and cried, my wife and I took them out for a drive and they slept, then it was “lift her carefully,” keep her moving, slip her into the crib, tiptoe away – no one really wants to stop moving. I pushed the girls fast in the driveway in their little plastic Little Tikes red and yellow coupe, sliding them sideways in the turns, laughing hysterically when they screamed with fear and delight.
We took the girls to Disneyland, lots of wheels. They loved Disney’s Autopia. It was the first freeway they drove on. One Christmas when I was little, we got a little electric race car set. The bright little cars rode on tracks, fast. They screamed down the straights and if pushed too hard flipped into the air on the turns and rolled across the carpet. Sometimes I’ve thought that my love of cars came from my dad, but I can’t blame it on him. I think the thing with wheels and speed goes deeper than that.
I saw a deer last week, looking at me steadily from a wooded refuge in the Laguna Mountains as I sat in my friend’s Porsche Boxster watching her. Throwing her head and the front of her body to the left, the graceful doe made a body leaning, leg thrusting turn and in a moment of hide-blurring acceleration, disappeared into the trees. We turned and spun off too and were soon flying down Sunrise Highway with the top down. Living things love to turn and accelerate. Our love of speeds is genetic, deep, the need to flee, the joy of speed, the thrill of the pursuit. Wheels were invented to make work easier, and for fun.
My first skate board was a piece of wood on steel wheels. I remember hitting a rock, I launched, my body continued in the direction I was headed but my board remaining stubbornly behind. I rode it on the huge wooden porch on the back of the chapel at the campground, down the porch the sweeping, body leaning turn, kick the leg and fly again, back the way I had come, not very far from where I kissed my first girl. Wheels and girls have long had close proximity to each other, because girls like wheels as well as boys, and wheels changed the dating patterns of the American teenager. With wheels, they could get away and be alone.
When I was in the ninth grade I got out of the house for a Saturday evening with my brother. It was great fun, fueled by alcohol, gasoline and hormones. We cruised through town in my brother’s 327 inch, 350 house power Chevy Malibu. It got crazy when in the zone between cool cruising and an all-out, high speed stomp. I was in the backseat with his girl friend when we crossed a shallow ditch, ploughed through a front yard lawn, exited just to the left of a telephone pole and re-entered the street in the wrong lane. Whooohooo! It was better than bicycles and skate boards. I learned a lot from my brother.
When I was 16 I got my first truck, an old, classic 1954 Ford pickup. My dad helped me paint it a deep maroon. We painted the steel wheels white. I loved that truck. It had a stick shift on the column and a light rear end. That meant that when you popped the clutch with the engine revved, the rear tires squealed, the truck vibrated up and down, and then it shot off with a wildly mechanically stressed six-cylinder roar. I felt cool in front of the girls that I was afraid to talk to.
My next car was a 55 Chevy two-door hardtop. It was a six cylinder powerglide automatic, a good car for a teenaged boy. My dad helped me split the exhaust manifold so we could put a dual exhaust on it and make it cool. My dad cut the manifold with a welding torch, welded the ends closed, and hooked up pipes and glass packed mufflers to each half. The six sounded sweet with twin pipes, but it was a ruse – no pavement ripping take offs here. The transmission only shifted once. Do the math. But a car is a car and over time you could get this sheet metal beauty up to several dangerous speeds. One day, driving fast because I was late to work at the grocery store, I passed the car in front of me only to realize that when we were side-by-side on this narrow two-lane highway, another car appeared around a corner ahead, coming toward us head-on, in the lane I was in.
I braked hard. The car I was passing shot ahead. I tried to pull in behind it and then I was sideways, sliding down the road sideways at 70 miles per hour, in the ditch, bouncing to a sudden halt, my hands shaking, nothing hurt on me or the car. I drove very carefully on to work, feeling like the car might slide out of control again any minute. That cautious feeling lasted for a couple of weeks. This is how it is with cars, a dance in and out of safety. When Ford first put seat belts and padded dashes in cars people complained. “You’re making us feel unsafe.” Ford took them out.
We drag our wrecks away us and put them in the parts of town we don’t see so that we don’t think about torn and twisted sheet metal. Yesterday, I was down by the wrecking yard in our city. You get there on Nirvana Street. It’s isn’t nirvana. A huge arm could be seen above the fence, bent crooked over a giant pile of fenders and grills. It descended on them with a claw hand, picked up the remains and moved them to another pile with a terrible grinding and crashing. What seduces us one year, repulses us the next. A wreck isn’t fun.
I’ve been in a number of car accidents. In South Africa we practically destroyed one of the mini-vans we rented, small event at a time. We broke the windshield hitting a rock, we ploughed into the back of another car in Mbabane, Swaziland on a rainy night and bashed the front bumper, and we popped a tire while driving through the Pilanesberg Game Reserve in South Africa. We were like Dean and Jack again, bashing the Cadillac in Chicago, hydrants bent over, the “fenders stove in.” We teased that we’d have to buy the van when we returned it.
The flat tire in the reserve was interesting. One of our South African friends told us that some Japanese tourists had gotten out of their car in a game park and gotten eaten by a big cat. It sounded like a game park myth, but we had gotten the point and we knew the drill, “Don’t get out of the car.”
But what do you do? The tire went flat, no one came along. The mobile phone didn’t work. We took action. We looked in the owner’s manual, nothing about changing a tire when the big five are present. So the driver and I improvised and made pit stop work of it. For a safety net we posted our wives at either end of the car to watch. We figured the cats would get to them first that way and we could get back in the car. It worked; we were rolling again soon, past the elephants ripping up a tree, past the graceful giraffes, past the wart hogs rooting in the ditches, past the crocodiles lying by the lake and past a white rhino herding her baby across the dirt road. Now there is danger.
I loved that drive. We came to the end of the park as the sun was setting in brilliant golden racks of clouds. It rained. I love our cars that day. I will always remember rolling through the park in the BMW sedan, the sunroof open, “How Great Thou Art” playing on the stereo, the animals peering at us from the bush. Good, all good.
I’ve had so many good rides, rolling in the back of a big tour bus through the hills of Tuscany, Italy with Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli singing “The Prayer” on the CD player. The Old Road to Rio, the blue water, the green jungle, the white sand beaches, then the freeway in the city where we traveled in total chaos, no observed lanes, no signs, just a huge mass of sheet metal moving through a tremendous cloud of exhaust fumes. Missing our exit we pulled of the freeway into the only place to pause, the front yard of a house. A policeman on a bike gave us a ticket. What a hoot! Then there was the little black taxi in Oxford, England where we threw our bags in the back and climbed into the little bench seats beside them. I loved the cruise up to Idyllwild in my black 300 ZX, scooting around the corners, powering down the straights, t-tops off, engine wound up, CD player loud, it doesn’t get much better than that. Then there were the one-lane bridges in Kauai, rolling past theTaro fields of Hanalei, arriving at the beach in the jungle at the Na Pali Coast to snorkel in the beautiful blue ocean with the yellow butterfly fish. Driving is a tour to and through the beauty. I love the road up to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I love the drive down through King’s Canyon in Sequoia. We all have a road that we love.
But at its thumping, pulsing heart best, driving is social. We drive in cars with people we love, we eat in our cars with the people we love, we talk and laugh and point and get bored on long trips in our cars with the people we love. And each time we drive down the road, each and every time, we are going out with our community, we are mixing it up with all the people who for one choice or another happen, at that precise moment, to be going shopping, going to work, going to eat, going to see their mom or dad or whoever. These dear ones are our fellow travelers, our entourage, our car club, our fellow wheel devotees. We caravan with them, flowing at similar speeds as them, slowing for them, stopping for them, waiting for them to turn, weaving around them, yelling as they cut in front of us, being waited for by them as we make our turn. We endanger the ones we travel with just by being out there and we drive to protect the group that we travel with by staying clear of them. And we trust that every driver we move down the road with will protect us, stay in their space, obey the road rules, do predictable things and they trust that we will. They don’t, and we don’t — some of the time. We say things and make gestures and hate big SUV’s and little sports cars and fight with traffic and hate road improvements that we will later love and drive serenely on. And sometimes we give ground at an intersection, letting the other car go first, and we offer a small wave and a smile that passes through two windshields, and in those sane moments of wheeled civility we actually care for our community and we love them.
This week while I was driving down a street in an industrial area I saw a good sized rock lying in the street. I rolled by, felt uncomfortable, turned a corner, spun a u-turn and went back. I wanted to keep an accident from happening. I pushed my emergency flasher, got out, and picked up the rock, except it wasn’t a rock. It was a piece of soft foam like you’d find in a couch cushion. I tossed it past the sidewalk and it bounced softly along the ground. Nothing new here. I got it wrong. No, I didn’t, for I was thinking of the other drivers.
Do we, think of the others? We do, and we do not. We are aghast at what British Patroleum has done to the ocean. But if we drive we are confederate in making things like the Deep Horizon event happen. I hate pollution. I love the rumble of a hot V6 or a big V8. I am ruining the world for future drivers. I am thinking about the next car I want to buy. When I fill up, I pump oil into the ocean. I hate that. I keep doing that. I am growing disillusioned with the internal combustion engine. I’ll drive an electric car, if it goes fast and far.
A few years I went to the junk yard to find a chrome tip for one of the dual exhausts on my Mazda RX-7. Some things never change, chrome tips, speed, the use of oil, repairs. It was an eye opener. I saw my car there, many times over. The thing is, it didn’t look so good, the deep layers of dust on the hood and the dash, missing tires, a gaping hole where the door should have been, no hood. Missing pieces changes the look of things. One particular beauty had grass and weeds growing out of the rotted floor board, extending out through the opening for the missing windshield. So this is what it comes too, weeds blocking the view out through the windshield.
The guy leading me through the maze of cannibalized cars stopped to speak to an employee. He said very clearly and carefully, “If I hear any more death threats from you I am going to call the police.”
While I was later waiting at the cash register, to pay for my junk, I kept glancing around the room, anticipating something weird would happen. I imagined a gun in the bosses’ top desk drawer. Cars can bring out the worst in us.
It’s interesting, death threats among the junk. “You little rotters!” Seduction then abandonment and rage. Here it was in front of me again, what I loved was being obscured by danger and dust.
I drove home reflective.
Yet something remains. I will always love to move. Getting old sucks because I wil begin to go slower and then I will stop where there is no stop sign. But even there at that point of motionlessness, I believe I will move on, without the wheels or maybe with them.
The prophet Ezekiel saw wheels.
“As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went.”
Strange, wheels intersecting wheels, beside living creatures. This is a picture of the future, there will be wheels, we will keep moving, the way we face. I am in love with the visions of our friend Ezekiel, I love the living creatures and the sparkling custom wheels, I love the four possible directions, the anticipation of the turn and the bound, the wind carressing the body, the blur at the edges of the vision, the quickly narrowing focus forward, the flying to somewhere different fast — I believe and put my faith in just this thing.
It’s the hope for us, the thrilling, soon coming blast forward.
Stories
Up the metal steps went my body, in through the narrow door and out onto the black rubber mats. The steering wheel was to the right, as usual, but to the left were rows and rows of spines. The spines went all the way to the back. The room rocked a bit as I stepped further inside. I chose one and opened it up to the thin white layers inside. I skimmed its dark lines to see if this one was for me. I loved them, all of them and this room, parked in front of my grade school. It was one of the first magic spaces in my life; it was the book mobile.
I was raised on potato-tuna casserole and “Rootie Kazootie.” Rootie hit home runs while Polka Dottie led the cheer, and then he rescued El Squeako Mouse from Poison Zanaboo. There were other children’s stories, so many, “Little Indian,” “The Little Red Hen” and “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” I sat under my mother’s arm and braved danger after danger. Little Indian bravely stayed by his hurt horse though the dark and scary night. The little red hen baked her cake alone, outwitted the fox and shared her cake. Peter Rabbit hid under a pot to escape from Mr. McGregor. Talking animals, for many of us, were our first best friends. Perhaps our parents read these too us for their moral values, as if children’s literature exists to instruct and preach. That didn’t work. We remember a good story, a unique character, some good lines. It’s enough.
These reside in deep memory, our storybook friends and their adventures, and we don’t merely remember them, resting somewhere in the recesses of our cerebrums, snaked back to the surface throughout life by our hippocampuses, but in one way or another we eventually live them. I hit a Rootie Kazootie home run in grade school, turning on an inside fast ball and smacking a line shot that just kept rising over third, sailing over the outfielder in left, landing at the bottom of the hill and bounding into the trees. The arc of that shot, my unimpeded romp around the bases, crossing home plate and still waiting for Ronnie to find the ball – “Gosharootie,” life is good when you are the star, even if for just a moment, of Kazootieland.
Most every story that we read has universal elements with counterparts in our lives, like shadows have the thing that casts them. Take Little Indian for instance, the brave little child who loves the horse he finds. I too found a lost creature one summer day when I was little, a big red cat lying in the daisies, and I hauled him home under my arm. I can still remember his soft, flexible weight, almost dragging to the ground as I rescued his mangy hide, and made “Red” my best friend, day and scary night. And my mother hen baked me white cake with chocolate frosting on my birthdays every year, and we all ate it, whether we had helped or not. And I don’t remember helping. And we planted vegetables in a large garden spot near the house and the rabbits nibbled on them when we weren’t looking. Our early stories are the literary templates for our lives. And our later readings teach us how to write our own, Darwin borrowing phraseology from Humboldt’s personal narrative when he wrote his Beagle diary.
In writing about the value of fairy tales, G. K. Chesterton said, “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.” Chesterton tells how he learned from the fairy tales what he would later learn from philosophy and theology, that life was supernatural, mysterious and unpredictable. Ideas are powerful, and resident in tales they are even more powerful. We begin college in the nursery, encountering some of the great oppositions of life, good and evil and the will to persist in the face of dark magic until a beautiful woman or a beautiful kingdom is won.
When I think of stories I think of my mom. She read them to me. And she read them with me. When I was in grade school my mom and I read Zane Grey novels together, ones we had gotten from the bookmobile or the little library in town. We loved Riders of the Purple Sage. I totally connected to The Lone Star Ranger. ”Duane could draw it [his gun] with inconceivable rapidity, and at twenty feet he could split a card pointing edgewise toward him.” I wished I could do that. I doubt if my mom did, but these stories became a bond between us. Her liking them seem to amp their value in my mind. Later in life when my wife and I went to Catalina Island to vacation we read Riders of The Purple Sage because Zane Grey had a home on the island, now the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel.
Stories change places, turning ordinary towns into tour destinations, small houses into rooms people pay to tour. All you have to do to see what a writer can do to a town is to go to Hannibal, Missouri. Tom and Becky and Huck are now longer carefree; they’ve gone into business together. When my daughter Laurel and I went to Concord, Massachusetts we walked through the home of Louisa May Alcott. The tour paused with awe in front of a little desk in her room; it is now a relic. We wanted to touch it; maybe the magic would enter us. But it already had; we had both grown up in homes with desks and bookcases full of stories.
My mom saved a few of our early childhood stories. Their thin, fading cardboard covers moved with my family from house to house and state to state, and on a day I don’t remember now, I found some of them in a box at her house and brought them to my own home, twenty-some years after first hearing them, and I read them to my little daughters. These scraps from my childhood, a Little Golden Book, and a Better Homes and Gardens storybook, unlike my transistor radio, came alive again through my own voice and storied my own children’s childhoods. My daughters sat under my arm and heard what I heard under my mother’s arm, “The Little Red Hen” and “Peter Rabbit.”
I walked into my daughter Laurel’s room the other day and noticed that on the table by her bed were stacks and stacks of books. She is majoring in literature. The stories got to her. She wants more. When our brains are still forming, the stories we hear are archetypal, a part of deep memory, mental construction, identity formation. The other night we got to talking about children’s literature, and one of my daughters went and found our old copy of “Rootie Kazootie.” We took turns reading pages and laughing.
“’Come one step closer,’ Poison Zanzaboo cried, ‘and I’ll soak El Squeako in the lake!’”
“’Whatever can we do?’” cried Polka Dottie.”
It’s enough to make a modern egalitarian boil, the helpless cheerleader and her Mexican mascot mouse who they keep in the dugout for luck. I opened to the back of the title page, “Copyright 1954 by Steve Carlin.” I’d like to have known Steve, had him to dinner. He made up words. he must have been a fun guy.
We laughed at the Dogerooties and the Yankapups and shouted, “Zingarootie.” I checked on the chicken, broiling in the oven. The barbeque sauce on top was getting a tasty shade of dark. My daughter got out the serving dishes. The Little Red Hen was again about to share again.
Stories have a power that goes beyond their physical existence and beyond even the ideas expressed in them. Stories are community, and sharing our tales is one way we love each other. As my girls grew up I read to them out loud all seven volumes in The Chronicles of Narnia. When they were barely old enough to understand, we read out loud Treasure Island. We exulted together in The Wind In the Willows, driving furiously with Toad, journeying with Mole and Rat. For hours on end they sat on my lap or under my arm, reveling in story, in language and most of all in having an arm around a shoulder, a hand on a forearm, a leg touching the border of another leg. Touch and story are a perfect compound.
Sometimes I didn’t read stories at all; I told them stories. They have always loved to hear the stories from how I grew up, like the time I shot my brother. In telling them, I try to stick to reality, but it’s hard. The stories tend to get away from me.
They like the one about the clubbing. This one involved a clubbing game that my brothers and I invented when we were young. We would fill our socks with other socks until they were hard and bloated. Then we would separate, hide and hunt each other. Our improvised games were often about maiming or killing each other. The intent of the sock game was to bludgeoning each other into oblivion. On one memorable occasion, I crouched down beside the washing machine in wait for my brother Steve. I put my right hand back over my shoulder, club ready. I would strike, as quickly as the Lone Star ranger could shoot. The pocket door from the kitchen slid open. I could see the light change on the floor. With one fluid, non-stop motion I rose from the floor and swung the club down on his head with a vengeance. Except it wasn’t Steve; it was grandma. She swayed, staggered back, gasped and collapsed on the linoleum in a defeated heap.
It was shortly after that, that she moved back to California. It probably didn’t matter to her that her beating was intended for my brother Steve. She went home anyway. I was distraught. She had bought us a TV. More good was sure to come from her living with us. Perhaps the clubbing was the last straw. But maybe it was just time.
The girls love this story; so do I. I’m the hero. But it is the girl’s birth narratives that are perhaps the most popular in our family. When I tell Rosalind’s I say, “I cried when you were born. You were so beautiful. I loved you so much.” She is beautiful, the bluest eyes, the most lovely skin color. We played a call and response game throughout her childhood. “When will I stop loving you?” I’d ask. “You’ll never stop loving me,” she’d respond. That mattered when we were told that she was brain damaged, when we realized she would never read beyond the second or third grade level. When my wife or I tell Laurel’s story, we say, “When you was born, you were ten pounds and fourteen ounces. You were big because you were late, almost half-grown, practically ready to go to school and you didn’t want to come out. They had to suck you out with a vacuum. You looked like a cone head for weeks.” Other stories involve their very early years. The girls were both bald for a year or so and they had fat cheeks. I tell them, ”We paid extra for your cheeks. And we rubbed vitamins on your heads to try to get your hair to grow.” Sometimes they have asked, “Did you really?” Such simple narratives are our histories, our oral traditions; we all need them. We want our mythic tales. We want to have a story about ourselves.
I know adults who don’t know who their parents were; they don’t know any birth stories about themselves. They live without a personal myth. One of them has an attachment disorder, another a relational disorder; they are screwed up. Stories matter.When we don’t have early childhood stories we grow sick. When my girls were very little I made up stories for them. I’d begin, “Once upon a time there was a piece of dirt. He felt so sad because he didn’t think that he was worth anything. Then one day a little girl came with a seed.” The dirt, or bug or plant always ended up finding their place in the world, making a contribution. I also told the girls stories about animals, who did what the girls would like to do, fly, eat, adventure. The most famous stories I told were the Rusty Jake Stories, renown throughout my clan. Rusty was my brother Steve’s dog, but when my brother wasn’t home, Rusty took my brother’s motor cycle for a ride, with the family house cat on the back, and they went to Washington. They were stopped by the police, but had to be let go, because their were no laws on the books about dogs riding motorcycles, and they saved the President of the United States and came back home to cheers and a parade.
Stories make choices for us. In grade school Rosalind picked a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, our good family friend, when she was asked to choose something to memorize for a class assignment. She heard the whole of Treasure Island very young, in the first or second grade, and she invited the author back.
When I was down beside the sea
a wooden spade they gave to me
to dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
till it could come no more.
Rosalind grew up at the beach in San Diego. On one of her early trips to the beach she ate sand, hand over hand. We never knew why she did that, but it came out in he diaper and we were amazed – we have a sand eating baby. So when she chose this poem, she could taste it, and she could smell the salty air and she had seen the sea wash away her sand castles. She had already lived her story poem. Why do we read what we read? Perhaps we move toward the stories we have lived or almost lived or hope to live someday.
For my family, and for all of us, stories come to us in so many different packages. They are so much a part of our lives, and of course, they aren’t always in books. One of the most powerful first stories I bonded with my daughter Rosalind over was The Little Mermaid, a movie. It was the movie that saved Disney and it added to us too. We came home from seeing it cheering, singing the songs, “Kiss the Girl,” and “Under the Sea.” Disney had rediscovered it, the formula, the songs, the dialogue and more great stories were to come. We were taken up, as a family, with Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Hercules.
Hercules was a standout for us, the characters, Hades, Pain and Panic, the clever dialogue. We use it around the house. The characters became a part of our family. The movie is about Hercules searching for his own story, what happened to him when he was little, the reason he is different, the identity of his father, Zeus. It is one of those universal stories, zero to hero, and the more important discovery of his family and his own true love, Meg.
We loved Meg, ”I’m a big tough girl, I can tie my own sandals and everything.”
“Thanks for everything, Herc. It’s been a real slice.”
Pain and Panic gave us one of our most repeatable family mantras, ”If? If is good.”
Hades was sheer genius, “So is this an audience or a mosaic?”
We live by our movie lines; they have become part of the family ideolect, a homey parlance to joke with. People do this, quote lines from movies to talk to each other. The dialogue comes off the page and works in the real world. People quote from What About Bob, from Napoleon Dynamite, from everything. The stories in this way get integrated into our lives. They become part of our mythology, the shared narratives that we use to understand life.
On the movie screen, on the TV, on the computer screen — it doesn’t so much matter how the stories are delivered, but it matters how they are told. A good narrative is a good narrative and nothing will substitute. I read a lot now online, on my phone too, a news story, an article, Facebook, Twitter, checking my blog. I love a story song, something unexpected. niche, heard on Pandora Radio for the first time. I love a good sound bite, a pithy Tweet, but I think that most of all, I still love a good book. There will always be something about the page, about the longer read, about the physical experience of books, especially the books we keep. My battered copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, the checked and underlined passages on the smooth, thin pages, those favorite lines I find my way back to, ”Nothing will come of nothing,” but something will come from a good story, like Macbeth or As You Like It, which is one of the sources for my daughter Rosalind’s name. And there is my old hardback copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems, the numbers of my favorites written in the front of the book so I can find my way again to those explosive bits of insight that blow the top of my brain off every time I read them. ”Tell the truth but tell it slant…” I like the pencil check beside this line in my book.
Books are so physical. There textures and their smells compliment so nicely their ideas and concepts. After we reread “Rootie Kazootie” the other night, I smelled it, the pages. Matija Strlic, a chemist at University College London, has figured out that the smell of the paper in old books comes from hundreds of volatile organic compounds released into the air from the pages. From her research, she writes of discovering in old paper “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.”
Reading is a total sensory experience, the grassy, tangy, musty pages, the spines, covers, dust jackets, paper pages signal us through our fingers. Many of the books on the book mobile, as was common with library books then, were bound into heavy, fabric bindings, dark red, blue, green, brown, and hardened with glue. The authors, titles and call numbers were printed or embossed onto the spines. I can still remember the heft of them, the rough feel of their covers in my hands.
And stories are relational and meant to be handed to other people and shared in close quarters. How often have my wife and I called out in the evening after reading alone, and laughing, “Hey, listen to this.” I still find stories as a way to find my people and bond with them. I love a reading groups where we eat together before we talk books and then we gather in the living room and puzzle over print and story and concept and quote lines and laugh and remember and travel together to a world of ideas and foreign places and togetherness. A story in another person’s mouth is a new story. I’m always surprised by what someone else sees that I don’t. We read The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony and discussed it in a group recently. I commented that I thought Lawrence was a masterful leader shown in how he immediately addressed problems. My friend Melissa pointed out that she was more impressed by his subtle leadership, the way he let others learn for themselves and take leadership for themselves.
Our lives are journies to find good stories and to explain those stories to each other, to find something to pass on to the little ones sitting under our arms, to get back on the book mobile, the idea mobile, to take a cerebral ride, to bring friends along, to have something to tell while we eat. So has it been for all of us, or if it has not, then I wish that it may be so in the future.
Life is story and story life and there is so much more to tell.
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touch
There is no overestimating touch.
Touch connects us – to everything; it always has, it always will. Our feet are conveyor belts that carry us to more touches. When my wife came home yesterday, I walk to over to her as she came over to me and we wrapped our arms around each other.
We were constructed for tactility. Our arms were made long enough to care for our toes, and long enough to steady our babies riding on our necks. And our fingers were constructed as perfect baskets to ferry strawberries and cats and other loved things closer to us. I licked some guacamole off my fingers recently. The soft, delicious slickness of the green ambrosia slid from my finger tips and into my mouth. All good food is essentially tactile, texturized, mouthable – the velvet, lightness of cool whip melting on our tongues, the chewy edges of caramelized coatings on meat gluing our teeth together, the liquid flow of milk soothing our dry throats and acid stomachs. Our experience of life’s resources is essentially tactile.
On summer nights when I was a child, we sometimes ran crazy in the dark, playing tag in the hot, cool air. Children, at night, running after each other is a delicious freedom, something like wild horses running free in open spaces. We lived on a campground that my parents ran, and during the summer months the camp was full of children. One summer night when the campers were all out, playing tag, which is just another of the many fun activities we make up so that we can touch each other, I rounded the corner by the lilac bush, and there she was. I had seen her a few days before in the dining room, where we all ate together.
What makes something cute? Puppies, kittens, baby elephants – cute is cute, big eyes, pug noses, legs, curly hair. Whatever cute is for girls, she was it, and I loved her, so I kissed her on the cheek. At the moment it seemed right, the most natural, innocent, wonderful thing in the world. A summer night, a lilac bush in a grassy field, a game of tag, the most darling little girl, a pounding heart — a small kiss. It was the perfect touch for what I felt.
I lived to regret it. She went back to her cabin that night and told the other girls. There was a mole; word leaked to the outside world, and my brothers found out. If that wasn’t bad enough, when she went home, she wrote a letter to me. My brothers ferreted this out too. It couldn’t have been worse. It was a mystery to me: Why did she do that, be kissed and tell everybody?
I knew then that I had made a huge mistake. My brothers sang a song:
Randy candy, puddin’ pie, kissed the girls and made ‘em cry.
When the boys came out to play, Randy candy ran away.
Then I knew. If you liked someone, you shouldn’t let it be discovered. And kissing – it could bring you disgrace! Why? At ten years old I couldn’t figure it out, I couldn’t bring it to light, I couldn’t fathom it. I learned to stick to cats, mostly, and dogs. I still like them, a lot.
I rub my cat’s ears, the friction ridges on my fingers sliding over her soft black fur, the epidermal ridges on my fingers amplifying the vibrations rising from my contact with her. I love ruffling her fur, smoothing it down again. I run the backs of my fingers over her, then I rub her head with my finger tips. I luxuriate in her softness, and I enjoy my skin ridges, my high places that link me to her fur. My corrugated skin is so useful, so alive, so well-designed, so pragmatic, helping me grip my food and hold onto the hands of my people.
Touch is ancient. In our beginning, we were all touched. Our first bits of reality were experienced inside of our mothers skins, in sacred spaces where we differentiated and became sentient. I’ve never heard anyone admit to neonatal memories, but we have them. We first heard our mothers’ voices while embedded in their bodies, and in those moments we made our first tiny steps toward learning language. We may not be able to access the cognitive memories of neonatal life, but we do have physical, tactile memories of it. We remember it in primal, chemical, neurological ways. Our bodies remember cell division, and so our bodies know things, how to do things. We can and do replace our own skin about every two weeks. Our livers can regenerate from as little as 25% of the original. And our bodies know they came from other bodies. We experience this memory when we come very close to another person. “I’ve been here before,” our skin thinks, because we have.
The other day one of my daughters put her head close to mine. Our skulls bridged. Our checks touched. I almost couldn’t stand it. It is always like this for me when I get to close to my grown babies: I experienced an overwhelming chemical-electrical storm of connectedness — powerful, familiar, close. It’s my past; I’ve been here before, I will be here again, de ja vu and foreshadowing, at the same time, my neurons remembering, my brain anticipating more. Closeness was the first thing with my babies. Every night when they were infants, my wife and I held them to put them to sleep, lying on our backs on the couch or floor, our stomachs and chests their human mattresses. I remember their little sweaty, baldish heads lying sideways, against my chest, sleeping, the smooth soft down on the top of their heads against my lips. I breathed them, their baby fragrances, they breathed more deeply and heard my heart beat. We bonded, our rhythms in sync. These moments — something deep in me knows them, the heart beat, the breath in and out. I began here. You too.
You remember, although perhaps you don’t, but then so much goes unrecognized, doesn’t it? I’m beginning to think most things have been unobserved. The age of exploration and discovery isn’t past; it hasn’t happened yet. Magellan wasn’t one of the few at the right time and place; we are all voyaging, out to sea in a small boat, peering over the horizon, looking for next place we might port, touch.
Why have we not been more cognizant of such things? It is because we have come to see our selves not at boats but as islands, by no fault of our own. It happened at birth. In those first magical moments, we began to move away from touch.
One of the most startling experiences of life has to have been when we were born, when we were suddenly and shockingly first held in someone’s grip, held from the outside, and set then aside in a cradle, in a nursery, wrapped in a covering, not a skin, our first moments all alone, not touched by flesh. That must have been a rude shock and an awesome thrill. Our first taste of autonomy, lonely; our first taste of freedom – exhilarating! We must have startled, and begun a startle pattern that has not stopped – each moment of responsibility since then a startle, each moment of opportunity to choose another startle, the steady forward-jerking freedom to decide to be touched, or not.
Autonomy is rocket fuel, projecting us both into and away from the tactile world. Very soon in life we learned to flip over on our backs, we discovered the crawl, we got up on our own two legs and cruised the edges of the couch, we took our first unaided steps into open space, we tottered, we landed on our behinds, we got up again and walked! And in those moments, those incredibly mobile, ambulatory moments, we were empowered, and we looked back at our mothers, and gloated, “I am free of you.” Don’t you remember this? Yes, you do, for with this power, you have carried your body away from the touch.
Much of life is an effort to get back. I remember Teresa, in elementary school. She was the most exquisite thing in my fifth grade class. She had long golden hair, a cute nose, slender legs, and she was wicked smart. I’ve always liked smart. My wife is smart. I fell in love with her brain. I still can’t predict what she will say on any given topic, but I know it will be worth hearing, not the crowd’s mantra. But in school, I was afraid of Teresa, and of my classmates, and I was very afraid of telling her how I felt. I knew that what I felt was good, but I was afraid the ridicule that might come from embracing the good. So I worshipped her from afar. We do this, secretly, throughout life, adore others from a distance. I think she liked me back, but how can one tell these things in grade school? She used to smile at me from across the room. When our eyes met, I gave a shy smile back and in that moment of connection, I received electric shock therapy. I was connecting again. Our eyes would touch, across the room, and lock. Jingle, jangle, emotional tangle – it is more than my ciruits could bear. We always unlocked, fast.
One day in the seventh or eight grade, I could stand it no longer. I wrote her a note on a small bit of paper I carried it with me as I exited the room to get on the bus. I dropped it on her desk as I went by. It said, “I love you.”
I was an idiot. I had done it again. I was playing tag, and in another unguarded moment, I had gone too far. A note! It was a document. Someone might get their hands on this. I had to be more careful. So I was careful: I didn’t follow up. I kept it to ”Hi” when we passed each other on the playground. I loved her from a distance — all the way through highschool, and I never asked her out or told her again how I felt about her . Other guys did, and I was jealous, but I didn’t. Negotiating affection had become a mystery to me. The whole dating and kissing and talking thing totally eluded me, and it even came between me and the possibility for the expression of infatuation and affection and physical closeness. If one didn’t do this the way everybody else did, going out to eat and to a movie and to kiss hard in the car, then what did one do?
I have total and complete recall of several dates in high school. It was so awkward that it was painful. I remember going to a basketball game with a very attractive girl and not talking much. The first thing you noticed wasn’t her eyes. Afterwards we parked in a secluded spot and kissed each other fiercely. She got me down in the front seat. That was interesting, but she was kind of aggressive, and there wasn’t much room. The steering wheel seemed to grow bigger than it ever had been before. You can kiss for a long time, but eventually it can make your lips hurt, so after a while we gave up and went home. We were trying to connect, but we just didn’t know how. Not enough talking. I didn’t learn how to talk to girls until much later in life, when my wife, who was more experienced than me, schooled me in the art of conversation.
Looking back, I can see now that other things besides girls come between me and the possibilities for closeness. There is so much working against us holding hands. The other main thing besides girls would be dead things. Dead things come between us, the first of this order being pacifiers, blankies and toys. These things are wonderful, helpful, magical. but they also intrude, cut us off, substitute, become essential to us, multiply endlessly, clone themselves, take over – food, clothes, books, cars, houses endlessly. By such dead things we live. Touching them is magic. But it may become dark magic, making people disappear right in the middle of a bright room, plate glass between us and those who have come to talk to us.
I remember being given a portable radio for Christmas one year. I still remember the shiny green plastic case, the chrome handle, the black speaker, the row of defining numbers, the tall silver antenna. Voices came to me through my radio, hit songs, local baseball games, other worlds. I went to my room, lay on my bed, I treasured it; I have always had a love affair with technology. I kept it for years, long after I stopped using it. I’m not sure when that happened. Those aren’t memorable moments, when we throw a mobile phone in the back of a drawer in the laundry room or unload a TV at the Goodwill. I remember occasionally seeing the radio again while going through its storage box in the garage, looking for something else and there it was – Christmas, a connection to a larger world, life. But it ended up getting dusty in a cardboard box like so much other stuff does. Its dials and buttons lost their intrigue.
Things don’t eventually cut it. They have a golden touch, a Midas touch, but it is a cold touch, not enough. We want something warm, living; we want to get back to first things. What to do? It is complicated. I was born by the means of a caesarean section. The knife saved me. But I assiduouslykeep knives away from my skin now. The knife is necessary, but I don’t love the knife. I don’t have the pocket knife that I treasured when I was a boy. Things shed. The knife the doctor used to remove me from my mother is probably in a landfill now, rusting away with other trash.
Stuff seduces us then rots. I love stuff and I always will, but I have learned to speak more bluntly now to new and shiny things, to cameras, phones, TV’s, cars and houses. I take them by the chins and I say to them, ”Look at me. I know you; you little traitors. You are so hot now, young and smooth-bodied, but someday you are going to sag and rust on me aren’t you? You are all fixed up and cute tonight, but after we kiss, you little rotters, you are going to let yourselves go, aren’t you? And someday you are going to leave me, aren’t you?” And they nod because they know they will, and hang their heads in shame and are afraid. For they know what they are, and they know too that if they hang around too long, we will leave them.
We hunt and we gather and we move; we clean house, have a garage sale,empty boxes, give to charity, put things in the recycle bin, abandon things. It it isn’t easy. We need the soothing touch of dead things, but more deeply we want and need the warm touch of living things. We need useful things, pot and pans and toothbrushes, and so we get them and dance with them and loose them from our grips and get more. We are addicted to things. We are not. We are. We are bag ladies, shopping cart people. We push stuff in front of us, we pull it behind us, we cram it in with us, we hang it off of us.
A lady came to my office recently. She was hung with white, plastic grocery store bags. They were wrapped around both her wrists, full of food, hanging heavy on her, pulling her down. She asked if she could leave her bags with me. I was immediately confused. It isn’t uncommon for me. Why would she be giving me all this food? And then it came out that she was coming home from the store to her nearby apartment. She had ridden the bus to this point, but now that she had to walk, her strategy was failing. The bags were cutting off her wrists. She had to have another plan. She would go get a cart from home, and bring it back to my office, so she could ferry her groceries home. Could she please just leave the bags with me for a few minutes?
It was obvious what I should do. I helped her take the bags off, holding them up, loosing their tight grips on her, freeing her red skin. My fingers gently touched her wrists. I was the dematologist, removing the plastic growths, restoring her mobility, healing her wounded skin, setting her free. We put the bags in my car and I drove her home. I helped her carry them upstairs, and then I left. She never came back to my office. I wonder what has happened to her and her disabled son. When we opened her door, he was sitting at the table, surrounded by stuff, waiting for his mother to come back home.
This will keep happening. Exactly this scenario. We will stock up.”My God, we have to eat.” We will drape ourselves in goods, we will attempt to carry too much home with us, we will not be able “to get these stupid bags off” our wrists. We will need help untangling. And we will touch briefly, “Your it!” But our touches will be short, bit parts we play in a childhood game, and we won’t know what to do after that. We will wait for out mothers to return but when they do we will only look up briefly, busy with our distractions at the table.
I don’t know exactly what to do with this. I’ve never met anyone who did.
My daughter sat beside me the other night while we watched a movie late, and she rubbed the hairs on the top of my arm. It was soothing , a magic moment at the end of a day. A bit of the stress of the day was conjured out of me. Skin to skin— I don’t want to get away from this. None of us should.
One of my friends, who is lives in a tent down behind Target, or when it gets too crazy down there, up under the overpass where the 805 and the 54 connect, told me the other day, “The worst thing is the lonliness. I sit by myslef in my camp and wish I just has someone to talk to, someone to be with.”
The other day, a guy who lives in a group home came came to a food line that a friend of mine oversees. I know him. He is big, tall, dresses like a skin head, but is not in any way racist. He is a simple person, with a simple understanding of things. She gave him a hug. A few minutes later he came over to her again and said, “I just want to thank you.”
“Why? she asked.
“For hugging me,” he said.
When my friend related this story to me, we paused, reflected and concluded what is most surely true, no one touches him.
If we knew how to fix what is wrong with the world, I suspect that we would have to begin by making sure that everyone on earth was hugged by someone safe and good every morning, and that just before every person lay down to sleep every night, someone loving and tender would gently rub their backs and kiss them goodnight on the top of their heads, even if just for for a moment, close enough to hear each other breathe.
it’s good!
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