Flavor is Mostly Memory

 It was autumn in 2008, shortly after the Ossetian war had started in neighboring Georgia, when I first had zhingyalov hats.

I’d spent the summer in Armenia, specifically Kotayk Marz, about an hour from Yerevan, but still rural enough to allow permit long sheep crossings and great ambling walks into the hill country—which in Armenia is everywhere; it is all hill country and each hill has for its capitol a monastery, many of which, I visited.

 

After a summer spent roving with sheep, and through dark and quiet monasteries, I was lean and sun-burned. I frequently felt wolf-like, descending the hills in the evening, returning to the village, glowing peaceably there in the valley. Even in the homes, there was the smell of stone and lanolin; I sniffed it hungerly coming down from the twilight heights. 

 

And now the autumn had stolen over the country like evening coming to the valley and I was in Yerevan visiting probably for one of the first times. The stone configurations of the city, after the mud walls and dried manure fires of the country were almost cyclopean. I had walked down from the hills and into the Valley of the Kings. At Sasoonsi David, at the Cascade, I expected sphinxes, but the edges of Yerevan are turned down into the countryside, and even without the flocks, one could well imagine their bleating transit comingling with the traffic. 

 

Anna and I were in the liminal area where the center of Yerevan butts against the neighborhoods surrounding it. At Barikamutsyun, there is a large market in the autumn, and stalls sold dried apricots and fresh persimmon, peppers pickled in plastic Coke bottles and sweet and syrupy wine more purple than anything I have ever seen in the natural world except cabbage. 

 

Anna bought me lunch at a small bakery stand—I went by the same stand a few years ago. It was summer and there was hardly anything there; maybe it was too late in the day, but maybe it was something else. When I was there with Anna, she ordered me zhingyalov hats, among the best I ever had because it was the first time I ate it. Tortilla-like, but simultaneously crisp and oily-damp on the outside, and the inside was a mountain field cooked down and distilled, snapping with summer green, and mellowed with autumn frost. “Hats” is bread and “zhingyal” is “greens” which Armenians usually call “kanachi”. So, they could call the bread “kanachiov hats” or ‘bread with greens’, but they don’t because “greens” doesn’t have the same lexical quality as “zhingyal”. Using the word from Nagorno Karabakh or Artsakh (as it is called in Armenian) evokes the green mountain stronghold where these greens come from, much in the same way we, in the States, speak of “Vermont maple syrup”. When we consider what we want on our pancakes, it makes it more palatable to summon frost-scarred apples in a neglected orchard near a barn, red, orange, yellow foliage and Robert Frost presiding over the whole thing. If the New England American English dialect had a different word for maple syrup, we’d use that word when we wanted to speak about enjoying maple syrup, but American English hasn’t been around long enough to splinter in such a way; Armenian has, hence zhingyalov hats.

 

The pastry well-deserved the name, though. For what was essentially street food, zhingyalov hats did preserve the mountains, the springs, and the verdure which surrounded them. Most of Armenia, especially in the south, is pretty dry, but Artsakh is green, perhaps another reason why the word “kanachi” doesn’t fit. In a way, zhingyal is greener than green. 

 

Zhingyalov hats wasn’t too common, though. Most places I visited in Armenia had piroshki. Every time I was in Yerevan and up by Barikamutsyun, I’d stop by the stall and have zhingyalov hats—my favorite snack in the whole country. 

 

Back in the States, I looked for it in Glendale. I looked for it in Buenos Aires and other places with large Armenian populations, but while they had familiar cakes, drinks, and even Grand Candy, no one ever had zhingyalov hats. It was like something that couldn’t really be replicated, or, if replicated, it couldn’t be sold (there are plenty of Youtube videos which show you how to make it). 

 

After seven years, I was glad to find the bakery stall still there by the Barikamutsyun Metro and, amazingly, it was autumn when I visited. My wife and I sat there on the curb and ate tsitsak peppers, drank syrupy sweet wine and shared a generous portion of zhingyalov hats which, due to its questionable structural integrity, we had lain over our knees as we ate, to avoid losing any of it. With the smell of dry, stony, smoky Armenian autumn as digestivo, it was one of the best meals I ever ate, but it wasn’t the best zhingyalov hats I ever had, not even close. 

 

This was in 2017, and we were between homes, taking a long time getting back to the States after living overseas. I was no longer a volunteer, and no longer subject to any regulations beyond the law of the land and, as such, at last free to visit Artsakh. 

 

As we moved south from Yerevan the autumn twilight deepened, the light sunk to the horizon where the mountains moved up. The light turned golden and so clear that mountains, beyond mountains, beyond mountains were still visible as a kind of slate backdrop on part of the sky. You looked at them and thought, “That could be Iran it’s so far away.”

 

We got into Stepanakert at night, and, though we were there for a good four or five days, most of what I remember was either in evening or night. At any rate, I remember fires, and smoke and moving quietly between things as one does when traveling. 

 

I think our second day in Stepanakert, we took a marshutka up to Shushi and, while waiting, stopped into a bus station café. The type of place which is ubiquitous in Armenia, especially near transportation points. In the autumn, it is cold inside; the men are bundled up in black coats, smoking, chatting. The women come from a back kitchen when you enter and have an aura of flour and deep fatigue about them. The tables have a small dish of salt and maybe a small plastic vase and plastic flower.

 

Our poor Armenian hushed the room briefly while we ordered. Everyone straining to hear an accent, or discern something about us before asking. After a respectable pause, someone asked “a kuda vi?” Assuming we would understand Russian. “Amerikaits enk,” we replied. Which resulted in a stream of Russian beyond my understanding. We channeled the conversation back into Armenian, and I strained to hear the difference between Armenian and Artsakhi Armenian, but I don’t notice anything. Meanwhile, our food arrived. 

 

I don’t want to belabor the point, but this small, hole-in-the-wall place at the Stepanakert bus station had the best zhingyalov hats I ever had the pleasure to eat. The rest of the time we were in Artsakh, we were either eating there, or wishing we were eating there. In fact, to this day, my wife and I still share many moments when we wish we were eating there. 

 

I’m not accustomed to eating greens, so I don’t have the vocabulary to explain how delicious these pastries were; they simply had something comfortably familiar from the natural world in them, something pleasant that you only find when you’re outside. I guess the best way to put it is that usually food tastes like something ‘inside’ to me. It smells like ovens, and kitchens and fire, it tastes like it came from these things. I guess it tastes “man-made” for lack of a better way of putting it. The zhingyalov hats from Stepanakert tasted like this, too, but it also had something of twilight, of frost, of clover being munched by lamps, and, of stone. Simply, I’ve never eaten anything else that somehow preserved the thrilling smell of wet autumn stone in the same way.

 

But since October, when nearly 110,000 Armenians fled Artsakh, that bus station, and that café stand empty. All around them are empty stores, empty streets, empty homes. The autumn evening seething through the windows left open, overflowing like fog onto the streets and running downhill to the bus station to fill the café. When someone moves in, will they have any idea of the enormity they have usurped in just one space, just one plate? 

 

Where is that recipe now? Has it made its way to Goris, up to Yerevan? Likely, like the world’s 7-8 million Armenians, it could now be anywhere. But, finding it in Glendale, Buenos Aires, or even Yerevan, will it ever taste the same?

Dad Brain

 The days rub together until all the rough edges are gone, their frictionless freight smooths the involutions on my brain and, when I speak, I do so in the clipped empty utterances one uses with an interlocuter who clearly isn’t listening. I start talking and just sort of hope the wind is going to finish my thought. It’s not a problem of articulation because I start talking without even having an idea of what I’m going to say. The issue is that once the words would rise up to meet each other, like birds leaving a telephone wire. Great starling murmurations of thoughts and plans would come swirling out of my mouth. Now, the first few incoherent words: a bird flaps off, scooting into the air, looks back and sees she is alone in the great yawning sky. 

 

I wonder if it’s because I don’t write much anymore. Until about 19, my speech was so choked with popular references—in particular, The Simpsons—that I scarcely noticed that what I came up with on my own was less significant; really just verbal glue that held the references together. My personality communicated itself through those references, if people caught them, they laughed, if they didn’t, they thought me eccentric. And then, all at once, I got tired of watching TV. Maybe the quality of the programming had changed, or maybe it was that, as an adult, I was no longer limited to the house. I wandered into the world, and I did so in such an uninformed, curious way, that the world gifted me with experience and stories. I was like the proverbial fool whom God watches out for.  

 

The role of tv references in my conversation changed to stories: the time I slept in the dumpster, the time a homebum almost stabbed me in a late-night taqueria, the time two skin heads almost pushed me onto the El tracks, etc. etc. Instead of connecting situations in my life that paralleled something funny that happened to Homer or Fry, I connected moments to each other and, because I was moving around a bit, and spending my time with different people, I like to think the stories weren’t dull, or self-absorbed for the people who had to listen to them—but who knows. 

 

Writing helped me refine the stories. I was writing so much for school, that I’d gotten in the habit of sitting in cafés and hammering away on a laptop. It was work, but it was recreation, too. When finals were coming up, I’d bring a stack of books into Thieos Diner and write notes, term papers, etc. When finals were over, I’d take a few walks for a change of pace, but it was cold in Lansing in the winter, and, I’d eventually find myself back at the diner writing, but without term paper prompts to answer, I started writing stories. 

 

I tried some fiction. One of the first I liked was a very Salinger-esque story about a kid who takes his date to Taco Bell, not to eat so much as to just hang out in an “ordinary” place. The date, predictably, isn’t into this plan, and harangues the protagonist for not having enough interest in the things they’re supposed to like. 

 

I can’t find the story, but I’m sure it was terribly translucent. The date was an obvious foil to reveal the benefits of doing things differently and having a too tender relationship to the world. The protagonist, was meditative, slow, and sad. Which was how I felt most of the time in those endless Michigan winters. It wasn’t a bad feeling, but maybe I romanticized it too much. 

 

The story ended with the kid going home after having a potentially break-up-level disagreement with the date; he feels little, but becomes almost happy when an unnamed cat jumps onto his lap and allows him to pet him/her. The story let the reader to wonder about whether petting the cat could provide as much satisfaction as talking to a human, provided the human was disagreeable and the cat, agreeable. 

 

I couldn’t write that sort of thing anymore because that slow, and sad feeling has left me—I almost want to say deserted. What was once my impetus to write and connect and flesh out the pieces of my life, changed to low-level anxiety after I had kids. And anxiety, low-level though it may be, does nothing for the writing process.  

 

So, other than when something exceptional happens, I don’t sit and write those feelings anymore. And then there were the years—really years—I spent writing cover letters, teaching philosophies, and answering essay questions in less than 500 words about my experience teaching. I think I got sort of enamored with the idea that I could write a cover letter just the right way and change the direction of my life (I mean, I was applying to jobs in Massachusetts—I know very little about Massachusetts, but I once wrote myself into a job interview there—which I declined). Only now do I see that I was using these applications partially as a way to give purpose to my writing when I couldn’t find it in previous methods. 

 

Now, when I’m not clocking ten emails an hour at work, I’m at home, wrangling my kids, trying to stop them from screaming, or from getting hurt. Sometimes, I think I’m going to do something else, like work in the garden, but I have to realize over and over, that when I do anything I’ve only shifted the burden of their care onto my wife again. I feel bad enough just going to work every day, I can’t make her do all the discipline, food prep. and careful explaining during the weekend, too. But you’d be surprised just how much I do. I still haven’t learned how to do two things at once. I’m either just standing there—empty-headed—at the park, or I’m frustratedly trying to vacuum, or replant the amaranth, and tell one of my kids: “don’t, no, hey, watch out!” Either my wife gets the kid out of my way, or I postpone the task. How the hell she manages to do anything while I’m at work, I have no idea. 

 

Yet, she gets more practice, so she’s a little better at multitasking. She’s even learned the subtle art of talking to other adults at the park without letting the kids fall from dangerous heights. In my case, either I’m listening to you, and my kid is about to start wailing any minute, or I’m saying “don’t, no, hey, watch out!” and you’ve gotten the message that I’m a lousy interlocuter. 

 

Well, let me tell you, idly chatting parent, I used to pepper my conversation with witty Simpson-isms; I once had a great story about a guy in Boystown who kicked out a plate glass window; I used to feel sad, and slow; I was more than “don’t, no, hey, watch out!”. I can only hope that, some day, I will be again—not so sure I want the sadness back, though. Life feels much less profound without it, but I like being able to turn my happiness on just by smelling my kids’ hair even if I can’t explain why, and I know that the day will come when they’re not going to tolerate this anymore. I guess, then I can go back to feeing sad, if there’s anything left. Until then you're lucky to get “no, hey, don’t, be careful!” Even those I get mixed up sometimes. 

Eucalyptus Blood

I spoke with Paige the other day. She reminded me I hadn’t written anything since last April. “I know,” I’d said. “I think about it often.”

 

When I was teaching, I used to have a little time to myself, I’d get to the café early to grade and revise lesson plans, but sometimes, I’d sneak in a little writing early in the morning to get myself started. This way, by the end of the day, I’d feel more well-rounded knowing I hadn’t spent all six hours in front of the computer working for the benefit of others. 

 

Now, that’s very much what happens. Every morning, I ride past the oily black mud and the scarred and stacked trunks of 100 years of Eucalyptus growth where they’d ripped the long stand of fog-stirring trees out to make way for the future bike path. The trees, in some bizarre study, had been found untenable for bikes to pass under, though cars had been passing under them for a long time, and—over a weekend—they’d torn them all out. Now my morning commute had this rusty smell which I imagined to be some kind of profound eucalyptus sap, like the life’s blood of the tree that one never smells unless they’ve hacked down many of them in the same area and then left their trunks out in the damp, salty air, still porous and seething with their passive respiration in the final gasp. 

 

I ride past the ruined grove and I think about writing something about it, but then I get to work, and I start replying to emails, my blood pressure rises, and I start walking quickly; I start handling things, things which aren’t mine to handle. I start doing a job. 

 

It’s work I’m probably better at then teaching. It’s helped me realize that I really like to do things on my own and just hand them over completed. Being Socratic was always a little difficult for me. I found it hard to guide with discussion, when I either wanted to chat, or lecture: there wasn’t much middle ground. Now, I get to do both—lecture and chat, at work, and at home with my kids. I don’t have to attempt the middle ground—but I don’t write much, and those eucalyptus trunks are pulled out of the black mud, one by one they go, lumbering down the highway to be pulped god knows where after growing 100 years in the same place. I don’t write about it. I just watch it, and one day very soon, there won’t be anything there at all. My kids won’t even remember the trees, but they’re indelibly fixed in my memory.  

 

Eucalyptus will always make me think of Golden Gate Park, or The Presidio in San Francisco. Both parks are nearly resinous with the smell of wet eucalyptus nuts, tramped on in the walking paths, and pressed so that their oils drench the streets when they’re run over by cars. The air that washes over the northern part of the city like a wet sheet of fog flapping out that green smell as it rolls over the ocean currents borne on the air. 

 

Even in the Tenderloin, when Mikey and I first moved there, the eucalyptus smell sunk down to this low part of the city, almost masking itself as another indigenous piss smell, but too florid to fit. Every evening, it was the rise of the smell that cleaned the city, and by mid-day, it would burn off along with the laundry smells, and the bare sidewalk would look washed, and empty. 

 

In Golden Gate Park, the unmolested eucalyptus had sprouted out like great earth-bound circulatory systems with little bronchioles way out into the sky, little clutches of tiny, feather-shaped leaves, 100s of feet up, very wet, very green, but forming a crispy, thin, at times, slick carpet under the trees, along the foot paths, smelling much older, like prehistoric, which isn’t hard to imagine with the other giant broad-leafed plants that live in the fog, like the growth at the healing margin of the world, growing brighter, riper here than anywhere else before sloughing off into brown and gray, and growing brittle and dry. 

 

When my wife Gina and I moved a block from Golden Gate Park, we’d go for evening walks and find the place as packed with animal life as it was with human life. Coyotes were trotting along the shoulders of the streets, racoons were thumping around in trash cans, mice thrilling through the grass, and the fog descending on the trails of birds, like breezes blowing low and in incongruent directions. In that part of town, the green belts of the Presidio, Park Presidio Blvd., and Golden Gate Park really hemmed the people in and, especially in the evening, the natural world seemed to put up a fierce struggle to reassert itself. Succulent gardens, tame by day, trailed over the sidewalks, sand from Baker Beach swelled in the gutters, and always the eucalyptus nuts thocking down on the wet grass, the wet pavement. Absolutely the sort of sound that didn’t happen if no one was around to witness it because it took imagination for it to happen; too wet the ground, too light the green pods, and too thick the fog for a sound without a visual cue. They were so many coins dropping through fountain water, settling at the bottom with quiet flashes of light. 

 

Even when they did Outside Lands, just a few blocks away in the park, all the light, sound, smell would get enveloped, filtering out from the park in something wavering, and disembodied. Gina and I walked right by once, and though we probably passed with a few hundred feet of the stage, the stand of eucalyptus trees between us and the band, led to a long debate about who had been playing as we walked through the Avenues back home. Within a block, we could hear nothing.

 

We were working a lot then, to pay the rent, to save, and because we had no reason to refuse extra work. For The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, I had the day off and Gogol Bordello was going to play, a band I’d always planned on seeing in a small bar with beer sloshing over the crowd, with other people’s armpits—ubiquitous when arm-raising choruses began— in my face, and now we were going to see them outside, in SF, for free. I brought a messenger bag with a 12-pack of PBR, and probably everyone else planning on seeing them did the same. 

 

In the late afternoon, we sat in the bower of a few curling oaks, which were reaching toward the sun, out from under the cedar and the eucalyptus giants, their distinctly lobed leaves pressed into the gummed mud around our feet, the beer cans crushed and stuck back into the increasingly empty 12-packs, until you had to rattle around in there to find a full beer. The cool cans on the warm day were covered with condensation and the leaves found their way inside the box to stick to the sides of the cans like camouflage. 

 

I don’t know how we managed to find our way out of that bower in the twilight when the band was about to start, but we somehow stumbled out, fog-damp, and blissful, still with a beer or two tucked into our pockets, beers that, later, when the band began to play, we poured over the sky as a bacchanalian libation and then danced the lost cans down into the wet earth. 

 

The roseate coastal light coral pink, the sky crowded with clusters of branches and leaves, arms around my loved ones, strangers smiling up with a knowing look, with the unity of purpose that comes at a concert when everyone can know and appreciate at least one thing about everyone standing in front of the stage, something that makes us all feel knowable. In such an unknowable world, it’s something to be able to look at a bunch of people and say, “they all like X band”. 

 

Gina doesn’t like to sing at concerts, doesn’t like it when other people sing, but I had to keep throwing my head back and drinking in that unifying sky, that indomitably green San Francisco smell. We yelled, sang, sloshed beer around, embraced each other, toppled into the crowd and from the crowd, even as it toppled into us; we cheered at the band, cheered at the world of such beauty, and cheered at our mothers and fathers for loosing us into such a world, especially because no one knew if such an experiment would have a satisfactory result. 

 

And at the end of the band’s set, everyone knelt down and picked up a few pieces of trash, and I, still bubbling over with love and beer, started grabbing all the trash I could, so thankful and only finding one way to express my thankfulness. I picked up trash until it was almost completely dark, and Gina had to steer me out of the park, which had now been given up to night, and raccoons ringing the dumpsters, and fog, still clanking of Pacific buoys, rolling over the city like a slow-motion wave. And, on the walk home, the alcohol-thinned blood, and the amplifier’s tinnitus being the only indication that the whole thing had happened, so quiet and empty were the avenues, so burgeoning was the sky and the rolling fog. 

 

…

 

It's probably been at least five years since I’d had a PBR, much likely longer. I just made it out to a DIY show by the ocean a few weeks ago, but I was alone and the gap between bands was long, and the day with two kids had left me too tired to want much more than sleep, or maybe a quiet moment with a book by an open window. I was glad to be there, but it was nothing like it was, and I looked around at the kids arriving to the show wrapping their arms around each other, and dragging PBRs out from their twelve-packs to give each other, and, I thought to myself, “my kids have all this to look forward to. They will have their moments with the eucalyptus leaves, and twilight skies, with the roar of the ocean barely perceptible, like a sonic under current.” 

 

I ride by that grove, and smell the blood of those 100 year-old trees, and know something else of life. I have a clearer sense of what has been given up although I never set out to learn anything. I just went through the world, stopping to appreciate it where it was markedly beautiful.   

 

 

The Ghosts of Titan

 I think it was after high school, but it’s been so long I couldn’t be sure. That summer, about 20 years ago now, was blurry anyhow. I didn’t sleep much then. I drank malt liquor more often than I should’ve and I was unmoored from the scholastic schedule I’d been tied to for 12 years. So, that summer floats around chronologically. It could’ve been right after high school, but it could’ve been as late as, what, my second year of college? When we get older, our memories become stories and disconnect from the specific periods that once endowed them with meaning. 

 

Probably the most important detail of that summer was that Matt’s baby had been born. I remember that much because, when I wasn’t working, I’d go over to his place on Lansing Ave.. We’d sit on the porch and drink beers and Anna would come out on the porch with baby Autumn, who I don’t remember ever crying. When I lit a cigarette, magnanimously as hell, I’d leave the porch.  

 

It sounds ridiculous now, but not smoking around babies and children was a new idea to most of us at the time. I grew up around cigarette smoke. The consensus was that it was less noxious than a fart. Through clouds of dad’s Winston smoke, we’d yell at each other for farting in the car. Smoke we took for granted. And now, after high school, in this one way, I tried to improve myself beyond what had been available to my parents’ generation. Taking it for granted, of course, that this was a reflection of the superiority of my generation, rather than just the accretion of knowledge over time. 

 

I walked this line between trying to understand adulthood, and indulging in its liberties. I wanted to make my own way in the world, but I also wanted to be out in the world having memorable experiences that gave my days meaning. Matt’s baby was beautiful, but she had no meaning to share with me. I’d wave to her, pretend to be captivated by an innocence I had no way of comprehending, let alone valuing. I had no idea how vast my ignorance was. Of course, I still don’t. It’s like the spreading dark in the evening, running out of the east. Boundless around my well-lit home of feigned understanding. 

 

That summer, I worked third shift at the Admiral gas station. I guess I thought it a good compromise between responsibility and the indulgent carelessness I was constantly in pursuit of. Yeah, I’d have to work, but I’d also be awake all night. Each shift would be something of an adventure. The perfect liminal space for a 19 year-old.

 

The reality was that the place would be deathly still around three every night (after everyone had gone home from the bars) and I’d drink sickening amounts of burned robusto gas-station coffee to stay awake while listening to the hum of the refrigerators, the chilling white halogen lights, and the distant highway traffic. I’d try to read, but at that hour, it was almost impossible. To read and not put yourself to sleep. So, I’d pace around the store.

 

It was a big store for a gas station, but the kind that was filled with a lot of nothing. They had stuff like baseball hats that no one ever bought. It was a bit like a dense forest with a very important tree. A very well blazed path led from the door to refrigerators to the counter, the rest was a wilderness. 

 

People bought three things: gas, cigarettes, and, soda, All the shelves with the motor oil, window scrapers, and whatever else was practically furred with dust. The only time I saw someone else enter these wilds, I’m pretty sure he was contemplating robbing me. It was late and he came in and went straight to the back. I don’t know, there was something in his manner that made it obvious he wasn’t looking for anything, and that he was biding his time, pretending to look at stuff. After a couple of minutes, he started to approach the counter with purposeful strides. It was like two am and just the two of us in the big, glowing store, and, just as he was about to reach the counter, someone walked in and he turned and went back to the back of the store. 

 

That happened three or four times before he finally gave up. But, like I said, I can’t trust my memory much from that time. It may have been a pretty brief episode.  

 

There was one other time when people would end up back in the aisles of miscellany. Admiral was the type of gas station—I went on to work in another one later in college—that was deeply discounted and just plain cheap. They sold generic soda (Shasta) and cigarettes (USA Gold) which were cheaper than what sold in, say, the Shell station. The gas would occasionally be a full 20 cents cheaper per gallon at Admiral. Things would be going normally and then, bam, a call would come to lower the prices, and the line of cars would be snaking down the block to save that extra couple of bucks. 

 

Today, in Northern California, where the gas is possible the most expensive in the country, my wife thinks my mania for finding cheap gas funny. But, she didn’t grow up seeing people get hysterical about gas prices. When I see cheap gas without a line around the block, something tightens in me and whispers: “quick, get in there before everyone else finds out!” It’s a call that would be difficult not to heed. I’ve tried to ignore it, but then it badgers me for half the day for passing up good opportunities—not just this one, but others. When I get cheap gas, I affirm that I take action. And I guess it’s important for me to feel this way. 

 

My shift was 10pm-6am, but the place was so ill-managed that they’d call me in to do other shifts on my days off. Taking these shifts was like a way to prove myself. Yes, I was still a kid, and I couldn’t fully appreciate the miracle of a friend’s baby, but at least I knew how to work, and the way to work was to take any work offered. By the end of the summer, my sleep schedule was completely screwed up from doing all that swing, and I didn’t learn a thing from it. 

 

But there was one little thing. One seed. One event that only now seems to make sense. It’s like my own Sirens of Titan story, that Kurt Vonnegut where it turns out the whole point of humanity was just to make one intergalactic delivery. Maybe that’s my lesson. Our lives are just series of deliveries, exchanges to put things into place and into perspective. We try to learn, but we just move things around.  

 

I think I was on the second shift. And to give you a sense of just how garbled my memory is, it was winter—at least it was cold, and people were wearing jackets. It makes no sense, but there it is, a winter memory stuck in the middle of a summer time-frame. 

 

I’m at the counter, late afternoon, selling discount cigarettes and setting up pre-pay gas pumps, when a guy walks in with a vintage Ghostbusters II baseball jacket. It’s black with red and white cuffs and an embroidered Ghostbusters II logo on the right breast. It’s button up with red buttons and a collar. It’s an amazing jacket; who can tell what wormhole it dropped from. The guy wearing it clearly has no idea how cool this jacket is. I can tell ‘cause I’ve gotten used to watching people walk into this gas station and reading their mood, watching them stand in line and interpreting their movements, and this guy, is just standing there, brushing up against those dusty baseball caps in this shroud of Turin. 

 

When he gets to the counter, our exchange is brief.

 

“Man, that jacket is so cool!”

“Mmmhmm.”

“That’ll be 14.20. Where’d you get it?”

“I don’t know.” –And he says this like it’s the most inane question he’s ever been asked. 

“Would you ever sell it?”

“No.” –no hesitation on this at all. Despite what he seems to regard as the most unimportant of coats, he barters like someone who thinks every piece of junk he owns must be more valuable than gold. 

“Oh, well, it’s an awesome coat, man. I loved that movie.”

“Mmmhmm.”

 

Damn. I give him his change and just watch the jacket go out the door. I’m a little disappointed and, at once, relieved to see there’s nothing on the back. I don’t know if I could’ve handled it if there had been a big embroidered ghost on the back, too.

 

At the door, the man stops—mind you, in my memory, this is winter in Michigan—he takes off the jacket, balls it up.

 

“Hey. Catch.”

 

And he goes out the door with my pathetic “are you sure?” trailing after him. 

 

…

 

It didn’t fit of course. I tried to wear it a few times, but the sleeves were halfway between my elbows and wrists. It made me look like a zombie. More than a decade later, my wife, who has less freakishly long arms, assumed ownership when we returned from years of living abroad, had kids, and finally got the bags of stuff I had squirreled in my parents’ basement squirreled away into our apartment and then, thank god, our house. 

 

My memory of this period, I can vouch for. Our own babies were growing into toddlers, and it was difficult to not pay out a different kind of attention in observing them. I was still working too much, but my work with students didn’t demand that I prop myself up under 3am halogen lights with burned coffee and rubber mats to feel like I was fulfilling my duty. I wasn’t young, but I was better rested most of the time. I was able to pin memories to a more reliable internal calendar.

 

The director for Adult and Community Education had been out since September, nearly the entire time I’d had the job of student development advisor. I’d taken on a lot of that work to keep the department afloat. The more of this work I did, the more I discovered the importance of the department in people’s lives, and the more work I had to take on to meet these needs. 

 

Some of our afternoon classes were for the developmentally disabled. Once a semester, to satisfy a requirement of disabled student services, someone had to talk to these students about their goals. It was my pleasure to go into the classroom with a stack of bureaucratic forms and turn them into interesting conversations with students who, for the most part, greatly enjoyed being asked questions and the opportunity to talk to someone. 

 

More than a few of these students had what I can only call a theme. Once Gus was on the topic of Transformers, he was difficult to disengage from. Tim loved fractals, and showed me all the ones he’d made on a program. Another student whose name I forget wrote Tolkien-esque fantasy stories. And there was Rob whose theme was not just Ghostbusters, but, specifically Ghostbusters II. When I squatted down on my haunches next to his desk to ask him about his goals, he told me about Vigo the Carpathian, and the slime under New York. He pointed to his Halloween-costume worn as a shirt and his baseball cap. “Ghostbusters II!” He told me, grinning at the idea, at the phrase, at the way the words sounded. 

 

I am a little ashamed that it took me as long as it did to make the connection. Luckily, my wife didn’t mind when I asked for the jacket back, at least not when I told her what it was for.

 

Rob took the jacket in nearly the same way it’d been given to me. Unceremoniously. It was almost like I was giving it back to the man who’d tossed it to me the Admiral station so many years before. I couldn’t tell you what it meant, it was just obvious that it was something I needed to learn how to do. And once it was done, there was nothing to remember. 

 

 

 

The Path is the Destination

 We started looking before our landlord kicked us out, but it was tentatively. To buy a house, in those days, still seemed an adult absurdity and we felt the pressure of our previous movement pushing against the idea. When I looked at houses, stuck into their lawns, tightly pushed up against the other homes on the street, their doorways and hearths spilling age and insignificance, I continually balked. Besides, I thought. These places are terrible. They were all build in the 60s and have been steadily cultivating mold in the walls ever since. The days are long past when I would move into an apartment in such terrible condition. And If I’m figuring right, we’d never be able to do anything but pay the mortgage. No “projects” neither big nor small. It would be nothing but work and live in a place more like an old garage than a home. 

 

And so our attempts were half-hearted, but something nagged at me and Zillow made it easy to feel like there was some of a game to the effort. Neighborhoods waxed and waned in terms of desirability. One night, I stood outside a new listing in Sunnybrae and a curious neighbor told me—for good or ill—that they were nearly blighted by bears. After that, I was caught on the idea of living there until there was a rash of cash-only teardowns that seemed almost within reach in Greenview. If we bought one for 300K, we might spare enough savings to prop it up against the wind; perhaps such a place, too could serve as a place to grow up for our daughter. Modest, damp, square backyards with stunted trees: in short, a place already mature with nostalgia enough for several children to remember bare feet on the cold spring earth, Christmas mornings in a fairy light living room, the sound of someone doing the dishes as you fall asleep, dust motes floating around neglected windows, streaked with nose oil from rainy day watchings. 

 

But, again, these places were always beyond our commitment level. We may have sabotaged ourselves with a realtor—which I kept embarrassingly pronouncing as “realAtor”—who wasn’t very committed to our cause. “Put in your highest possible price” being her only token of advice, which, given the market, was about the only thing about the whole process which was obvious to me already. And everyone else kept telling us it was all about the letter. I wrote a real tearjeaker, but I don’t anyone ever read it. When they sat down to review offers the first question must have been, “what’s our highest cash offer?” And the second question must’ve been, “Are they ready to close now?” I’m sure my great letter, along with so many others, settled in the bottom of many a waste basket; there was a picture of our family at the bottom of it. We were hugging and smiling.  

 

To buy one of these mold-fraught rattletraps, stuck in the mud, needing new roofs, which all sold for 100K over asking in cash seemed a very desperate action until our landlord, upon learning my wife and I intended to have another kid in 7 months—I had waited to tell him until I was sure—gave us the boot. The bastard. Not that it was any of his goddamn business what we did anyway, but, well, one tries to be sociable when living in one’s landlord’s backyard. 

 

A note of advice I will give to my kids: never, ever, live in in anyone’s backyard. It is surely the worse kind of trap for assertiveness if one has a kind disposition. I forfeited all my rights because I wanted to be friendly with someone I thought was doing us a favor. 

 

Not that I don’t understand his logic now. He wanted to help out. When we moved in, we were a starry-eyed couple just looking for a place to live. But when we kept reproducing and, in his eyes, taking advantage of his kindness by doing things such as putting a coat rack on the wall without his permission, we became volatile agents in his property; the problem was, he never told us this. It must’ve weighed on his mind day and night. Watching us. Wondering when in god’s name we’d leave. And what sort of godawful damage the rugrats would inflict on this tidy backyard cabin before they had reached 18. What he didn’t understand, was that we had been trying to buy a house, trying to move out, but, dammit, we were being careful, in today’s housing market, being careful meant the total forfeiture of time. And, in the meantime, don’t forget, we were saving money. The place was only $950. Why would we move to another rental for at least a $500 increase when the goal was to save money for the house?

 

Well, we had to do it anyway, a rainy February, mostly at night, almost furtively. A packed our boxes into our Honda and drove them across town, each night taking a few loads until we were out. And, a couple of months later, we brought our son home to the new apartment; my daughter, two years old, held him on the couch and beamed at him. She’s been beaming at him since. And, no matter what happens, the place in my memory where that happens will be my home. The nicest apartment I’d ever had, but an apartment nonetheless, subject to rent increases, and the noise of neighbors. 

 

Still property taxes increase, don’t they? In a house, you can still have noisy neighbors. And there is no getting away from them when you own something next to each other. With the apartment, flight is always a possibility. And a possibility that was worth a lot of money to me. Especially after I was passed over for the full-time, tenure-track position and the topic of moving became, if not more acceptable, at least more necessary to my wife. 

 

But when the interviews came from Seattle, Portland, Santa Rosa, the situation was everywhere the same. The only place where we could buy a house was Portland, but despite the relatively astounding number of listings, who knew what that market was like. Luckily, the town was plagued with very bad PR in 2021 when the nation was convinced anarchists had taken over, booted out all the cops, and condemned themselves to being prey for earnest criminals who almost lie in wait for such situations. 

 

Ah, what crap, but it probably brought the cost of homes down, speculators, who don’t go to places but watch the news, would be wary. 

 

I didn’t get the job, though. When the feedback came from the interview they told me I knew my subject very well, both theoretically and in practice, and yet, I needed to check my privilege. How the hell one checks one privilege in an interview when the point is to sell your ability was beyond me. They must’ve hired someone who told the search committee all about reaching but apologized constantly for doing so. I find myself unable to feel anything but incredible admiration for someone capable of doing this. They must be thoroughly modern. 

 

Another job, not in instruction, but still interesting, still relevant to my skills, came up and, at the suggestion of a friend and colleague, I applied and, in a bit of a whirlwind, got the job and became a full-time benefitted employee, not in instruction, but in something close to it.

 

While all this had been happening, I’d also become addicted to Zillow. Not only had I been tacking back and forth between listings in Portland; Santa Rosa; and Everett, Washington, I’d been checking listings in Arcata (where all this happened) about three-five times a day, thinking, quite stupidly, that if I caught something just as it came on the market, I’d have more of a chance.  

 

All told, we probably made about six or seven offers, the bulk of them when things were really hot and these falling-down dumps were popping up like mushrooms on the market. We kept going to look at such places, feeling kind of icky in them, like when you open a refrigerator someone’s dumped on the street and, when you find rotting condiments and such inside, wonder what possessed you to do such a thing. But when the price was low enough, we bit. The logic was, “what the hell, we’ll never get it anyway?”

 

And of course we never did. We didn’t even hear back from our realtor until I’d called a few times a few days after the closing. It was like she expected us to know we didn’t get anything, but then she told us to keep trying. A few times, when she was showing us places, I noticed she smelled like she’d been drinking. Not that I’d blame her, I’d drink to if my job was to sell homes to people like us in a market as crazy as this. “I’d offer your highest possible price,” she’d intone as we did the thing where we stepped out of the house and looked back at it, the equivalent of kicking the tires of a new car. We’d nod and then she’d ask “that hasn’t increased at all has it?”

 

I was dismayed to answer that it had not. Even with the new full-time job, I discovered that I lost so much to taxes working year-round that I was pretty much in the same place, financially I’d been as a full-time instructor. At least now I was benefitted and had a retirement plan, I guess. Not that I’d be able to retire when I’d be paying rent for the remainder of my days. 

 

But thank god we hadn’t been able to slap down our entire savings and commit ourselves to very high monthly payments. If we’d gotten one of the places we’d so haphazardly put an offer on—the falling-down-dumps, I mentioned earlier—we would’ve been house poor with a place almost literally falling down around us, around our babies. But the force of “what’s next in life” is strong. 

 

Especially strong with a way to peer into each new place that pops up on the market like magic. There you have over 40 pictures, video walkthrough, etc. etc. I swore off Zillow over and over, but, then, I’d find myself standing in the doorway, singing my daughter to sleep, and I’d take out my phone, and find myself just “checking”. My wife and I did this so often between us, we’d usually know about a new place within a couple of hours of it going up. 

 

And each one, well you live in it for a few days don’t you? At least in your imagination. The places I’d liked on Buttermilk, Villa, Blakeslee, etc. I’d ride by them over and over on my bike, often going up to the porch and standing there, pretending I was waking up in the morning, coming out for my coffee and a breath of air. And then, in a week, someone else would be moving in. It was almost like being kicked out over and over. And it got really discouraging.

 

So much so, that I gave up, or said I did, but quietly, I was hanging on for some kind of miracle. 

 

That’s how you know things are meant to be, when there’s a miracle. 

 

You see, in the back of my mind, I’ve always been a little afraid of this town. Probably quite irrationally I can trace this back to the first time I ever came up here. 

 

I’d applied to a few grad. programs and one of them was up in Arcata. It was five hours north of San Francisco where I was living at the time and I’d never been there. So, I borrowed my roommate’s car and drove all the way up. 

 

I arrived to a quiet, foggy, and just preternaturally lonely place. I parked the car and walked the foggy evening streets, just feeling heartsick, and this was before I’d made any kind of commitment to move. 

 

What was very likely just a chance melancholy resulting from the long and lonely drive, the weather, the lack of any vivacity to the sleeping town, I have long taken for a premonition. And, secretly, I’ve always wanted to escape this feeling which, I have long since ceased to feel, but remains an association.

 

I’m also just restless, and the idea of living in a new place is exciting to me. So, I balanced my perusing of Zillow with job searches and frequently brought all kinds of ideas like New Orleans, New Jersey, New Mexico and other “new” places to my wife as potential places to live. Pittsburgh was my personal favorite when I saw how cheap and beautiful the homes were and, I think I’ll always be a little homesick for the empty factory, and the grey, snowy sky lit with flashing red lights on smoke stacks. The prices of northern California seemed like a great excuse to leave and start again elsewhere. 

 

But, like buying the expensive dump, that too had snares. I might not really have any connections, but my wife had been connecting, making friends, a mom network, a place she knew, my daughter’s playmates, my wife’s parents, they were all here. Leaving wouldn’t be hard on me, but, it wasn’t something she had any interest in doing. And to escape some imagined melancholia from 15 years ago, it didn’t seem worth it. 

 

What finally happened was ridiculous. We’d once before investigated a low-income housing program which gave a land-lease, so the houses were about half-price. They were nice places, but they shared a wall with another, uh, house. I mean really they were just one huge house with a fire wall in the middle of it. No. To me, buying a house was buying a piece of the world, not another “unit”. I wanted to fence off my space and step back from my neighbors to build up my “castle”. 

No matter how much we feel immune to social constructs, they invade our thinking. They are the often the only ways to conceive of things. I had one notion of “home” and I was loathe to relinquish it. 

 

I also didn’t think we’d qualify for the program. We may have been under the income threshold (four-person family with a single income), but, our savings would probably cancel this out. If it couldn’t get us a house, but it disqualified us from low-income programs, what good was it? I was on the verge of just giving it away. 

 

Ok, I’ll be quick about the rest. There’s so many facets to this, It’d take forever. You’ve been kind to come so far with me anyway. It’s been such a fiasco, but there’s a happy ending. 

 

One of my former students send me a link about a house, unit, whatever, on this low-income program. The link was for some kind of social media posting and had the wrong phone number, but the pictures of the place looked alright. We had to look up the right number, and find the person in charge and then badger her with phone calls until we heard back. 

 

There was a lot of documentation to complete, but we went through the process; thinking the whole time our savings would disqualify us. And then my wife went to look at the place and came away quite underwhelmed. Even at 195K, it was a bit disordered and the person living next door was a bit of a hoarder. 

 

However, the program had another place available, I went over and did my thing where I brought my year-old son and peeked through all the windows (with him, I looked an unlikely burglar). Surprisingly, the place looked alright, but, again, when my wife went to look at it, she was underwhelmed. But later she owed that dirty carpets, heavy dog smell, and chewed walls will do this to one, a bit like the way the fog and the silence weighed on me when I first came to Arcata, I guess. 

 

It took about four months, and at many times in the process we had no idea what was happening, but, we eventually were able to secure a loan (we’d gotten and lost one) and, finally, the house, not a unit at all as it turns out, especially because, as of yet, no one lives next door. 

 

I’m still finding things that the dog chewed, and every day, there’s something that gets added to the improvement list, but we’ve already paid half of the place off and we still have money to spare. At night, I can lie in bed and listen to the ocean and the soughing of the eucalyptus trees and, best of all, I can go into the room where my kids are sleeping and see the place where they will grow up. The rooms that will eventually become papered with poster, will become sites of great emotions, dreams, plans; my kids now have a place to fill with memories, and, with any luck, a place to return to examine these memories later on. And this thought, in all its intensity, spills out of the present, reaches into the past, and arrests a 24 year-old visiting the town for his first time who, not knowing what it is, associates it with the strongest feeling he is familiar with: melancholy, not realizing that it is actually the joy of things to come. 

 

Welcome home