The Hole of Progress

  

This might not be too clear, I’m writing from the bottom of a hole, my perception is limited by the soaring dirt walls on either side of me; the sky overhead is a bit vague and uncertain. It’s easy to doubt it’s sky at all; it could just as easily be facsimile: painted clouds on a cerulean board.

 

I started digging this hole back in October. There was an administrative position in my alma mater’s English department and I thought, “Well, it’s full-time and it’s down the street. There’d be benefits and a steady schedule. It’s something worth thinking about.” I tend to be pretty spontaneous with decisions and stuff like that and within a day or so, I emailed a former instructor, figuring he’d have some advice and maybe some insight, considering it was his institution. He wrote back pretty quick, I’m going to paraphrase a bit:

 

“Nice to hear from you! My advice is to apply to everything, but I would suggest scheduling a meeting with your boss. You’ve been at the college four years now. Ask about the possibility of a full-time position there. They might be willing to create something.”

 

I took him up on both ideas. I applied to the admin. job (and never heard anything back) and scheduled a meeting with the Dean of Arts and Humanities where I currently work. He missed the message in the first email and I had to write him again. 

 

“Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but is it possible to schedule a meeting to discuss career possibilities?”

 

I felt like such a toady writing something like that. Perhaps I was asking for something that I hadn’t earned, but, of course, there’s the American value about speaking up and valuing yourself. Besides, the Dean was a nice guy. I figured if I was making an ass of myself, he’d tell me.  

 

I met with him on Zoom a day later and made a case for a full-time position, framing it as though I were asking for more advice. He repeated what my former instructor had said, ‘apply to everything, even admin.’ But he added, ‘I’ve been thinking about putting in for a split Adult Ed. and English full-time position; I’ll talk to the director of Adult Ed.’ 

 

The full-time position potential was exciting, but a long-shot. I knew the English department had put in for full-time positions in the past and they’d been denied by the higher-ups. In my four years, I’d only seen one go through and that was for classes in the prison in Crescent City—I assumed there was different funding for that. Hence the approval.

 

And yet, I was hopeful. The previous summer I’d been informed that the president wanted to visit my class. I’d stressed out about the visit, but it had gone pretty well. He’d sat in the corner nodding quite a bit, which was something, given it was the first time I’d taught poetry. Later that week, he visited my English composition class as well.  There must’ve been something to appreciate if he’d visited two, right? Ultimately, the president would be the one to approve any new full-time position requests. Perhaps he’d appreciated (or heard about) my work forging a connection with the local high schools and creating a path between non-credit and credit classes. Maybe he’d see this position as a way to honor and continue that work. After all, it had benefitted the college as well as the students and I’d made some pretty good connections outside the purview of most associate faculty.

 

Just before the holiday break two things happened. One the president invited me to present on my experience teaching overseas to his Rotary Club and, two, the full-time position was approved. It was hard not to feel that this was auspicious. At once, there was an opportunity for a full-time position and a sort of presidential nod. If he’d thought me a lousy teacher, it seemed unlikely he’d invite me to speak to the Rotary club. Right?

 

I woke up before dawn one morning at the end of the holiday break, gulped some coffee and started the ride, in the dark, down the highway to Eureka. There weren’t too many cars out yet and the dawn had been forestalled by the cloudy weather that had come down the mountains to meet the ocean. The sun couldn’t quite break through and glowed dully behind the mountains like backlighting. 

 

Arriving in Eureka, I had the sudden realization that I must’ve gotten the time wrong. It must’ve been for 7pm, not 7am; what kind of group met at 7am on a weekday? I’d woken up early and come out for nothing and I’d have to come back at 7pm, once again in the damn dark. 

 

The café’s posted hours said they opened at 7:30, but the door was open and there was someone inside, seemingly standing in line. I slipped in the propped open door and approached the counter with the awkward mien of someone not entirely awake and uncertain if a place is open. 

 

“’Rotary Club?’ Oh yeah,” The barista informed me. “We open early so they can have their meeting. They’re in that room.”

 

That early in the morning, it was a surreal experience. No one was masked—to be fair they were drinking coffee—but since I wasn’t, I kept my mask on and couldn’t help but to feel that this looked offensive. We began with the pledge of allegiance—which I haven’t said since I was in high school—standing there, trying to remember the words, I felt like I was parodying it. I wasn’t even sure I had the right hand up and in the right place, but I was too uncomfortable to look down and check. Then there was a prayer. And throughout the whole thing, I’m standing there, drawing stares or seemingly drawing stares from the club’s members. Who the hell was this pinko in their midst who seemed uncertain how to do the pledge and only partially bowed his head during the prayer. In our secular nation, it’s bewildering to be confronted with both patriotism and religion at such an early hour. These are things with proscribed responses and not using these responses with alacrity has seditious overtones and yet, well, they’re profoundly personal. We have varied relationships to God and country—our freedom allows us to express these and yet, well, in certain situations, it’s expected that one will fall in line. My appreciation for this country lies in things like my gratitude for pedestrian rights of way and the lack of a social contract that would force me to behave a certain way. But those things aren’t part of the pledge. To me, the pledge is about relevant as a druid chant on the equinox. I stood there, half-awake, saying those weighty words, trying not to think about the problems that had resulted from their varied interpretation. The announcement of a prayer was just bewildering. 

 

When I looked up from the prayer—perhaps a little too late in trying to look reverent— the meeting had begun with news. So-and-so in the hospital, wants everyone to pray, fire department sponsoring a toy donation drive, etc. Being the only person in the room with a mask, I felt I had a gag on. The damn thing kept creeping up into my eyes as I swallowed nervously. I was continually reaching up to tug it back down and, when I did this, it seemed the motion always caught someone’s attention. 

 

The president, who’d invited me, wasn’t in attendance and was meeting virtually. Without a familiar face and with the necessity of sitting through the beginning of the meeting my presentation seemed non sequitur, like I’d presentation-bombed this group with something radical and uncalled for. “The Peace Corps? Cultural Relativism? What is this shit?” It’d been a while since I’d stood in front of group of unmasked people. I struggled to make the lessons of life in Armenia interesting or relevant. I struggled to explain why the experience gave me my own sort of pledge of allegiance. Who knows what the Rotary Club got out of it, but they were polite and clapped and asked questions at the end. I hung around a second at the end, but it was apparent everyone was off to work. The room emptied out pretty quick. 

 

And yet, it felt like a success, no one had been wowed, but I’d gone in and done what had to be done and made it as interesting as I could. One guy had stuck around to ask me a few more questions and to chat a little. The president had now seen me “instruct” three very different rooms of people. Perhaps this presentation and my triumph over strangeness would count for something in consideration of the full-time position. 

 

This was back when all kinds of things seemed possible. 

 

Running with the advice I’d gotten to ‘apply for everything’ I’d spent the entire break working on applications. I’d met with a colleague to revise my CV. I’d sent my cover letter and teaching philosophy statement to a friend—also an English teacher—to review. Applying for teaching positions is a probing and exhaustive effort. It’s a bit like going to the dentist because you sit with yourself, mull over your thoughts, but while one part of you is perfectly at rest, another part is being strained to the limit. Instead of your teeth, it’s your experience, your value as an educator that’s being taxed. You are writing a letter of interest that responds to a college’s mission and values statements. You are writing a teaching philosophy that considers the course sequence of the college to which you are applying, and you are answering specific diversity questions that take into account the demographics of the institution’s area. Do most students speak Korean or Spanish as a first language? How does that factor into how you’d teach ESL 212 which focuses on authentic writing to prepare for English 101, which has course learning outcomes which focus on communication in meaningful context. Each application is like a separate research project. If you don’t show that you’ve dug deep into this institution and considered how your skills could be a fit for colleagues, students, program and institution than, well, let’s just say when you don’t get an interview, they don’t even bother to notify you.

 

So, day after day during the break, I sat in a café researching institutions and doing things like making audio recordings responding to specific questions about teaching at the institution on top of the CV, letter of interest, teaching philosophy, diversity statement and responses to specific questions. But, hell, I was happy that there were any positions at all, Covid had all but wiped out the possibility of any full-time work. I checked Higher Ed Jobs about once a day, and I hadn’t seen anything that wasn’t ‘adjunct’ in a couple of years and, suddenly, here were five positions, full-time and in places that I’d like to live. Usually when these positions come up there were in suburban New Jersey or Dallas. No offense to either, but I know no one who lives within 100 miles of either and, with two small children, well, it felt important that we only contemplate moves to places where we’d feel somewhat familiar and where we knew someone within half a day’s drive.  

 

But, well, I never expected to hear back from any of these places. I’d been applying to positions for about five years and in all that time, I’d gotten a single interview that was over almost as soon as it began. I hadn’t realized there was a format to answering interview questions for colleges. Until that interview, I’d always given honest answers, considering my experience which had been well-suited to the discussion-like format of the interviews. This had been enough for part-time, volunteer and fellowship positions, but I’d learned that full-time was an entirely different league where they gave you a battery of scripted questions—sometimes in advance, sometimes not—you prepared a teaching demonstration and none of this was discussed. The panel, after they gave the questions, said nothing, just made notes. So, to be successful, one had to have one’s lines down very well: you were expected to monologue meaningfully on your experience. 

 

I didn’t expect to hear from the other places I’d applied to, but I did hope to get an interview for the Adult Ed. / English position that I couldn’t help but to feel I’d had a hand in creating at the college where I worked. After the announcement about this position had gone out, a few people had even contacted me. “This was made for you!” they told me. “Well,” I couldn’t help but to think, “in a way, it was made by me.” 

 

I didn’t let this talk get to me, though; I didn’t want to take anything for granted. Yes, I’d been the only faculty member working in both departments. Yes, I’d done a lot to bring these departments together. Yes, this was all following recent legislation that the college wanted to show they were conforming to. And yes, I had numbers to demonstrate my success. Still, that didn’t mean I had any right to the position. I still had to prove this and luckily, in late February, I was told I’d be given a chance to do this. I’d gotten an interview.  

 

Happy as I was, I felt slightly conflicted about the interview. This was a career-level job. It would essentially cement my family to this place. There were pros and cons. We’d been trying to buy a house for years, unsuccessfully; the housing crisis in coastal California was about as pronounced as it got. Even with a better-paying job, I wasn’t sure we could afford a house with increasing prices. I’d also spent 2008-2016 moving to a new country every two years. I had grown accustomed to a more sedentary lifestyle since having kids, but being sedentary in the moment vs. being sedentary for the next twenty years or so were very, very different things. Although I knew we were fairly stable, I always felt the possibility that we could move if something came along. With a tenure-track full-time job, there’d be no reason to leave if I got it. We’d grow old here. But, of course, I’d be turning 39 in a month, I was already growing old.  

 

And there were the other jobs I’d applied to in places like Seattle, Portland and Santa Rosa. All of which felt like places I’d rather live in and places my wife also wouldn’t hate. She might not want to move, but, given the option between suburban New Jersey and Seattle, well, convincing her might be a little easier. What if I landed the job here and then got an interview for Seattle. Would I spend my life asking, “what if?”

 

But I couldn’t anticipate getting interviews for any of these positions. And I had an interview for this position. I also had a bit of home court advantage, so, I reasoned, it would be worth it to throw everything I had into this position. Maybe years down the road it would mean something else. But, for now, it was enough. Besides, we’d come to think of this place as home. My wife and both my kids were born here. Yes, it was expensive and the competition for non-descript, two-bedroom homes was at the level of over half a million dollars cash, but, people had been telling us for years that it was always possible some old hippy would want to sell to a young family regardless of price. Just because nothing of the kind had yet occurred didn’t mean it was impossible and maybe, with my salary doubling if I got the job, I could expand the search a little, too. 

 

The interview was scheduled for the first week of March, before spring break. If I passed muster, I’d move on to the second interview to be scheduled later. I got the questions in advance and spent an entire morning in the café writing essay-length responses to them and then printing these out and pouring over them, highlighting the most relevant parts of the responses and reading them out loud. I ended up with pages of highlighted text and about 300 ideas and concepts rattling around in my head. 

 

The problem was the only opening they had for an interview was right after my Monday morning class. I’m not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I’ve since realized that most interviews are scheduled for Monday morning, so there must be some logic in it. Mondays, I’m always a little slow to get started and right after class, I’m usually a little worn out and, well, brain-dead. I’ve noticed that it’s the time of the day when I’m most likely to stare blankly at the screen in front of me. 

 

But I continued practicing the questions right up until the day of the interview. Before class that fated Monday, I had an extra cup of coffee and felt like I was ready enough when the spinning Zoom wheel: “please wait for your host to begin the meeting” suddenly broke and six faces appeared before me, expectant, indifferent and, even, bored. Zoom. How can you tell what anyone is thinking on Zoom? And how can you talk when you don’t know what your audience is thinking?

 

What I’ve since learned to do is to focus on the most receptive face and ignore the others. In most interviews, one face is more ebullient than the others. When this face smiles and imperceptibly nods at your answers, you gain confidence, leading, hopefully, to more smiling and nodding. The challenge becomes: ‘please this face’ and this is a hell of a lot easier than explaining every conceivable facet of your experience in a 45–90-minute monologue. I was a radio station DJ as an undergraduate and the means of communication in each situation is comparable. It’s easy to talk yourself into a corner and it’s awkward to reset yourself when you do. In something as subjective as this type of interview, especially for a teacher—where communication is the lion’s share of what you do—I can’t imagine that talking yourself into a corner wouldn’t count against you. So, in a way, you’re being marked on oratory skills, as well as content knowledge.

 

That first interview, I felt encouraged. I saw a nodding face and I focused on sharing my knowledge and experience in a way that would make it nod and maybe even smile. Certain subjects seemed to cause the face consternation; I changed them in favor of those that brought the nods back. The other blank faces, some of them belonging to colleagues I never felt I’d been able to make an impression on for whatever the reason, were, frankly, terrifying, enough that just a glance at them confused my message. But the nodding face brought me back on track and worked up my passion. That’s the best advice I can give if you have a Zoom interview: find the most genial face, talk to it and ignore the others. 

 

I found out within a day or two that I had been selected for the second round of interviews to follow spring break, again on a Monday, but in two parts so that the first part would come before my class, early in the morning and second part would follow my class. This interview would also have questions which would not be given beforehand and a teaching presentation, thankfully not a teaching demonstration. It was a relief that I didn’t have to treat the faces on the Zoom interview panel as participants in a “mock lesson” but rather only had to present an assignment sequence to them. Looking back, I wonder if perhaps this would be one of the reasons I didn’t get the position.

 

Before the break, I created the presentation, bringing in student numbers, student learning objectives, authentic responses to assignments and language from assignments. It was like being audited on my instruction and I had to show all my receipts of students’ achievement. I went back and forth on the presentation. Having no questions to prepare for, I trimmed the presentation, added to it, trimmed it some more and finally just said, “all right, let’s just leave it for a while.” But I frankly had no idea how much information to give. I could justify every aspect of the sequence, but did I need to?

 

I needed a break, from all the strain of maintaining classes, preparing applications, readying for interviews, and watching blank faces on Zoom. We took a trip to Seattle to visit friends. I’d also applied to two schools up there, and, well, you never knew, maybe I’d still hear from one of those. If I did, it’d be nice to have recently taken a look around up there.

 

We came back five days later, full of vegan donuts and the cool humid air that soughs the pines of the Pacific Northwest. In a way, coming back confirmed my decision to focus on the interview for my college. I was happy to be home and realized that a move to Seattle might be a bit of a crazy idea, even if I had once preferred crazy ideas, I was less inclined to take them up now. Since having kids, my life had contracted around my family. I no longer cared much about the entertainment options that would’ve drawn me to a larger city. It was enough just to find some time to read and have a cup of coffee without interruption. 

 

I spent another couple of mornings after we’d returned looking over the presentation and reviewing a mammoth list of potential interview questions, but I found it hard to focus on so many ‘potential’ questions. Once I’d spent more than 15 minutes on an answer, I thought “well, who knows if they’re even going to ask this? I can’t spend too much time thinking about this.” I’d move onto the next question, but then I’d feel like the previous answer had been somehow incomplete. 

 

Mikey came up for a quick visit at the end of the week and we went bike camping Saturday night. I thought this would be just what I’d need to relax a little before the interview, but the cold and marauding raccoons had kept me up most of the night and the next night, Sunday, the night before the interview, I started to feel anxious. 

 

Since my daughter was born a few years ago, I’ve had anxiety-induced bouts of insomnia. It began, I think, with worrying about the new life I’d brought into the world; a life that was part of mine, but that was, improbably, sleeping in a bouncy chair on the floor (it was the only place she’d sleep; I should add that another factor was probably that she didn’t sleep much anyway, so I’d gotten somewhat accustomed to waking up at odd hours and my circadian rhythm became more like a circadian beat which varied greatly depending on the song being played.) My worry would wake me up in the night and I’d have to check and make sure she was still breathing, even if it meant waking her up. Even if I didn’t wake her up, after being flooded with the adrenalin of parental worry, I’d have a hard time falling back asleep.  

 

I must’ve gotten accustomed to the insomnia because it would periodically reemerge, even after my daughter had outgrown the possibility of SIDS and had become a healthy young child who could easily remove an errant blanket or pillow from her face in her sleep. It was usually the same scenario, I’d wake up after about two hours of sleep and starting mulling over some problem that would, in the dark, seem much, much worse than it had looked by the light of day. I know it’s cliché, but damn if the most mundane things don’t look terrifying when you think about them lying down. As the problem assumed titanic proportions, I’d become more awake and, within 10 minutes, I’d find myself wide awake. Reading could distract me, but it couldn’t bring sleep back and I’d watch the hours pass by until, usually about an hour before I had to wake up, I’d finally fall asleep.

 

Often, the problem that would begin to coalesce when I woke in the middle of the night was only that of sleep itself. I’d immediately think “shit, I’m awake; I should be asleep. I need rest!” and this thought would be enough to drive sleep away for the rest of the night, especially because due to all the interruptions of a toddler and an infant (we’d since had another kid), my circadian beat had become more of a circadian murmur. No matter how little sleep I got, when something woke me up, I never felt that teenage desire for just one more minute. When I was up, I was up like a dog who goes from whimpering in his sleep to bolting out of the door after a squirrel. 

 

So, Sunday night, after not sleeping much the night before on the camping trip, when I woke up after about an hour, I knew what I was in for. Lying awake, when I had any thought, any thought at all, I imagined a stop sign—trying to block the possibility of thought. I lay there thinking about stop signs until about 2 am, when I finally had to go to the living room to read and change my environment. It felt like a great achievement when I feel asleep about two and half hours before I had to get up. I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep, but I’d beat the insomnia and managed not to stay up all night; that’s what I’d been most afraid of. It’s the worst when you’re still awake and your alarm goes off. At least I’d gotten a transition.  

 

However, this meant I’d only had about five or six hours of sleep combined in the last two nights. My thoughts were sluggish, even in conversation with my wife before I went off to work and my interviews, I was stumbling over my words. 

 

The first part of the interview was just a conversation with the VP of Instruction—it was pretty informal and, when she revealed the only question she really had was “well, why do you want the job?” I loosened up quite a bit; perhaps this would go alright. 

 

After class, I went back to the familiar Zoom room, seeing the familiar faces. The questions would come first and then the presentation portion. Again, I focused on the nodding head in the grid of otherwise unresponsive heads, but, when I started giving answers, instead of eliciting nods, I seemed to be gradually raising the eyebrows and even turning down the corners of the mouth on the face I was focused on. ‘Dammit, change focus, answer this question with a different experience, with another lesson,’ my mind screamed while I talked and smiled, but no, the face had become frozen in a mask of perplexity. I shuddered to think what the other faces were doing, probably all but frowning and tsk-tsking at my ignorance. 

 

The worst thing that happens when an interview doesn’t go well is that you begin to feel like you’re wasting everyone’s time. You’ve bombed. They’ve all made up their minds already, but, improbably, you’ve got 45 minutes left of talking to do. Once this thought presents itself, you lose heart, you babble with a big fake smile. Two decades of experience teaching leaks out your ears and you become a random person stopped on the street and asked a complex and specific question that you feel you must attempt to answer while having no knowledge of the subject. You become, effectively, a bullshitter, and everyone knows it.   

 

I may have gotten a few theoretical punches in, but the bulk of the Q and A consisted of such bullshitting alternated with rambling. Once I was knocked down, the lack of sleep, made it difficult to get back up again. Then, horribly, that expressionless grid of faces announced they were giving me five minutes to prepare my presentation after the questions were done. I had to turn off my screen and be utterly alone with myself after the half-answered questions and stuttering replies. It was terrible, I couldn’t see my presentation—which I had open on the desktop— I only saw my own miserable face reflected back in the screen and then, one by one, the boxes came to life again, the expectant faces had returned. I took a deep breath and began again. There was a lot of information on the screen; too much, it turned out. 

 

The next two weeks were agonizing. When I’d finished the first interview, I hadn’t even thought about the results, but I’d swiftly been invited to the second round. Now that things hadn’t gone well, but without an answer or an objective assessment of the interview, I was riddled with superstition, seeing portents and prognostications in everything. Everything in the universe strained toward a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ orientation and each of these, for me, were related to whether I’d gotten the job. The most agonizing thing was that I knew that immediately following the interview, the decision had been made, if not formally at least in the minds of the interview panel, but I’d have to wait weeks before I’d hear it. 

 

From one hour to the next, I’d convince myself that I’d either bombed the interview or had done alright. According to the moment, these both seemed like totally probable results. Yet, an ominous silence was growing and, at times, while I tried to go through my daily routine, it seemed to almost rise up and choke everything around me until I felt like calling HR and pleading with them just to tell me something and rid me of the terrible suspense made all the more terrible because it was false suspense; I knew the answer in my heart, but then, I’d see a leaf fall off a tree in a certain way and think “well, perhaps I’m wrong—maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. That leaf is pointing to letter ‘H’ on the sidewalk. In Armenian, ‘yes’ is ‘ha’. Therefore, blah, blah blah.” It was both ridiculous and agonizing, like something out of Kafka.  

 

In this nightmare, however, there was a flicker of hope. The day after the second interview, when I was feeling absolutely horrible, I missed a call from a college in Seattle. “Could I call back to schedule an interview?” The message asked. It was only the second interview I’d ever had with an institution that I’d had no previous contact with. My sense of dread dissipated a little, but, still, I knew now there were no guarantees and I felt it was ridiculous to throw over the position I’d been so close to in favor of such an unknown where I stood much less of a chance. But, it was something that offered affirmation and a second chance when I so desperately needed it. 

 

I couldn’t focus at work. I checked my email twice an hour, at a minimum. I didn’t have reception on my phone in the office where I worked, so I made an excuse to step outside every chance I could. Again, the silence swelled and grew portentous and burdensome until it began to feel as though I were constantly soaked by a cold rain one from which I could neither extricate myself nor become inured to as one sometimes does in a cold drizzle. The not knowing about something that would so clearly alter the course of my life, was maddening, and it wasn’t so much not knowing, as the incessant guessing my mind wouldn’t stop doing. Every day, after 5pm, when there would be no response, I’d sink into a blank torpor, only to begin again when anxiety woke me up at 5 am. 

 

After a week, I did contact HR. I tried to be tactful. They told me an answer would be coming soon. Probably early this week. Probably. No one knew anything concretely. Why all the mystery? Why couldn’t they just say a time when I would know? Why couldn’t the process be more transparent and predictable? Why did I feel like I’d given up my rights to any agency in life after I’d subjected myself to the scrutiny of an interview? 

 

All day Monday and all day Tuesday, I checked my phone and email like a teenager who has just offered a declaration of love over voicemail and awaits a reply. It was a sickeningly familiar feeling, but one with new stakes and a much less mercurial judgement. In the back of my mind, when rejected for dates in high school, I’d always acknowledged that each person had personal tastes and that a rejection didn’t necessarily comment on my character. I knew I’d rejected people who had been perfectly good human beings it’s just that there wasn’t a spark as I saw it. No matter how much I liked someone, I understood that if the feeling wasn’t reciprocated, it wasn’t because I was imperfect, but while I tried to tell myself the same about the interview, well, it was an interview, and they were experts. If I didn’t get the job, it was because I wasn’t good enough. Period. No amount of consoling would convince me otherwise. 

 

And that’s the awful thing; they’ll try to console you anyway. They tell you their applicant pool was exceptionally strong, that they had a lot of applicants and that they were, frankly, surprised by the exceptional quality of all the candidates, that you were a strong contender, but all this is worthless palaver. The message is clear. We chose the best. You weren’t the best. Our judgement was sound and unbiased and objective. You, objectively, were not the best candidate, making you less than ideal. Try to reason out of that. You can’t. It’s like when a court has made a decision. It can be overturned, but the language on job applications asks “have you ever been convicted?”. Regardless of what was overturned later, you were convicted; you are marked; you are changed. Again with the Kafka. 

 

Wednesday afternoon and still no word. My class ended at 12:20 and my tutoring session in the library started at 2:00. I finished sending messages out to the students and preparing for next week (as best as I could with my seriously compromised attention) when I started across campus to the library. Still nothing on my phone when I walked back into the service area. 

 

At the door of the library, I thought… was it? Was that the Dean? He’d been on the interview panel. I didn’t know if I should make eye contact. He was talking to someone. I would have to walk right under his nose, but I was uncertain, not wanting to interrupt, I gave a half-hearted wave and nod, about to slip into the doors. God, my heart speeds up just thinking about it. 

 

“Jonny,” the dean turned from his conversation, and I saw it on his face right away. You’d think after all the waiting there’d be some modicum of relief, but it still come as stomach-bottoming out disappointment. In the moment, you’d gladly return to the agony of not knowing, if only for another moment of staving the irreversible moment off. But, even after his face has said it all, he most give it words. 

 

“I’m sorry, man. The pool of applicants was …” But all I hear is ‘I’m sorry’ echoing on and on. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” We are done. This is all there is to the message. There’s no going back. I go back over the history: October (meeting about positions), November (position approved), December (work on application) and on through, what is this, April? Jesus. Just let the ground swallow me. I have deluded myself. I have flown too high. 

 

I try to be bright in my response “hey, no big deal,” but this is such bullshit, that I change mid-sentence to just saying “thanks”. It’s the only honest thing I can say that doesn’t end with me wringing my hands. 

 

Thankfully, our engagement was very brief, and it was busy in the tutoring center. I worked with a student on a Spanish assignment, which almost never happened. But, still, what was I doing here? I wasn’t first pick. Was I even second? Did I belong here?

 

I guess this is an especially poignant question because teachers, in their position of authority on a subject, often doubt themselves, especially as the application of that knowledge isn’t objectively clear and relies, to a large extent, on the individual student’s engagement. What is a good teacher to one, might not be to another. I don’t build homes that stand the test of time. I don’t complete surgeries that restore the patient’s health; I don’t create software that does aggregates information in a useful way. I profess to explain writing and language and to offer supported practice with new concepts in a way that leads to understanding and a personally valuable practice. Hell yes, I doubt that I am good at that. Every day I doubt that I am good at something so difficult to quantify, especially when I hear my colleagues talking about how difficult it is to quantify it. Then I really wonder about what I am doing. So, when a panel of tenured English faculty, the position I aspire to, declare that I’m not their first pick, well, there’s some tacit acknowledgment that, by extension, I’m not very good at this at all. 

 

…

 

For a few days, I avoided eye contact with people. Not only people I didn’t know well, but even my wife. Somehow when anyone addressed me, my instinct was to turn away, as if I was constantly expecting more bad news; another rejection, perhaps. And all this turning away, made me feel resentful, as if the people I were conversing with were somehow getting me to turn away on purpose, as if they were commanding me to avert my gaze. I felt sick with bitterness but lacking anyone to heap it on, I choked on it and seethed with it.  

 

And each night, I’d wake up around 2 or 3. Maybe it would be my infant son crying, but most of the time, I’d just find myself inexplicably awake, looking around the dark room thinking “it’s over; you ruined it; you botched it. You can’t get it back.” At least before the interviews, there’d still been some kind of hope, but I couldn’t expect that the committee would call me out of the blue and say they’d made a mistake. There was no going back.

 

Throughout this, if you remember, there was the interview for the school in Seattle. I may have missed my opportunity here, but I had a shot at once elsewhere. The interview wasn’t scheduled until the end of April, so I had plenty of time to prepare. I tried not to feel to hopeful, but it was nice to have something to look forward to.

 

And then, in early April, I got an email with “congratulations” in the subject heading from Santa Rosa Junior College; I’d been accepted for an interview there as well. A week or so later, Portland Community College sent me a similar email. After years of myriad applications and no response, my fortunes changed. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to stay where I was anyway. I’d long been wanting to relocate, to move closer to a large airport to make travel back to see my family easier and while I’d become comfortable where I lived, I found myself feeling excited over the prospect of moving to a big city with more amenities. A library that was open on Sundays, for example, museums. I knew from experience how challenging these interviews were and that they all had multiple stages, but I’d really hedged my bets. With three of them, how could I lose? For a while, my failure seemed insignificant, a step along the way to a greater success. 

 

Throughout April, I purged myself of the botched interview with new interview preparation. I researched programs, created mock classes to present, completed “interview homework”—one college had assigned homework in addition to the teaching demonstration—I revisited everything I’d done for the first interview and tried to do it better. But, despite having gone through all the preparation, once already, I wasn’t able to cull any valuable lessons from it because each institution was so different and, predictably, their interviews were similarly different. 

 

The stock response candidates give when they don’t get the job is that it was a “learning experience”. They explain that going through the whole process revealed certain things about the way it worked. Well, either I was incredibly dense or this was fragrantly untrue. As far as I could see, there was no single way to do this and be successful. The panel would be made up of people and, people being people, responded differently to different things, regardless of the rubric in front of them. For example, Portland Community College mentioned their emphasis in creativity in the interview, seeming to encourage a creative response, while one of the Seattle colleges, had a large and well-regarded international studies program as well as refugee students, so, a varied demographic the needed addressing. So, instead of drawing from any particular lesson from my failed attempt, I spent all my time crafting specific responses for each school.   

 

…

 

The night before the first interview, plagued with memories from the last interview, I couldn’t sleep, but I managed to get about five hours in. The interview was on my birthday and I thought this might help me to feel a little more confident about it. If there was ever a day for narcissism, it was one’s birthday and interviews, more or less, invite narcissism. Also, I figured a good interview could be a gift to myself. My wife and I planned to go out to eat after the late-afternoon interview and, in the meantime, I spent the day reading and rereading the notecards I’d written, pacing around, writing the notecards over again in better handwriting and then writing the primary points from them again. 

Just before the interview, my wife took the kids to the park and I went skating to clear my mind of all the nervous energy I’d been accumulating throughout the day. I skated for maybe 20 minutes, but couldn’t stop checking the time; I finally decided it was close enough to the time to begin and bounded back into the house, air punching and jumping up and down like an athlete before some big time trial. I’m embarrassed to recount this, but after the recent failure, I felt incredibly anxious of botching an answer early in the interview, and I knew how important it was to start the meeting with a grin and an effortless correct answer. The physical warm-up helped me to feel a little calmer, even if it did look incredibly stupid. Luckily, no one was home. 

 

I logged into Zoom. The spinning wheel turned benignly on the screen. “ESL Full-Time Preliminary Interviews 1 hr. Check Audio.” The time for the interview arrived and still the wheel spun. A minute passed. 5:01 I took a deep breath. 5:02. I smiled. Told myself it would be fine and then the wheel paused and six faces rose up on the screen. They introduced themselves. Gave me a moment to introduce myself and then, the scripted questions began. 

 

I’d seen these questions beforehand, so I had been able to, more-or-less memorize fairly elaborate responses. But they didn’t come out wooden or list-like. I found myself recounting them. Telling what my experiences had been. The interview panel became a group of like-minded colleagues. There were no follow-up questions or commentary, so it was just the prepared questions and my responses, but somehow I felt like I’d created a sense of dialogue with my responses. I felt good about this, it was encouraging. There was also that lone smiling and nodding head in my view that I was able to focus on and speak to. I was encouraged and supported. I elaborated my responses. I made my points clearly and when it was over and I said good bye and thank you to the faces I’d just poured myself out to, I jumped up and yelled. I’d done it! It had gone well! My self-confidence had been restored. I wasn’t an imposter; I knew my stuff! I ran out the door to my birthday dinner, beaming, thrilled to face the future again. 

 

I won’t detail the second season of rise and fall that followed, needless to say, it was much like the first. I went through three more preliminary interviews, two teaching demonstrations, a finalist interview and, in the end, was awarded no job. I had labored intensely from October to May and, in the end, I was no better off. Nothing I’d done could be used again, none of the interviews would qualify me for another position. No group of superiors had noted my accomplishments and contribution. Or, if they had, it hadn’t mattered. 

 

I got the final “Sorry, really competitive pool of applicants” call during finals week and what is usually the most jubilant and exciting time of year for me collapsed into a week-long rumination on my failures. Was it enough that I’d been considered at all? Or had my CV and application materials merely belied something that I wasn’t able to live up to in person? The only thing I’d taken from the experience was the realization that applying and interviewing—if I wanted a full-time position in higher ed –would have to become part of my job. I’d have to cultivate an understanding of it the way I’d cultivated an understanding of my subject knowledge and then cultivated a way of explaining what I knew to students in a way they would benefit from and make personal After this fashion, I’d have to cultivate a way to talk about my own experience with these things. I thought I was able to do this already, but, it seemed there was more to it. 

 

I don’t feel any more familiar or comfortable with the process than I did back in March when I had the first interview. I can’t say I’ve appreciated the experience because there was so much back and forth in it, so much celebrating what I knew to be my best work and best portrayal of my abilities in an awkward and staid situation, followed by what felt to be a very situational and subjective dismissal of this. This would send me in a tailspin of self-doubt that I’d have to pull myself out of before the next interview and, again, I’d ride a wave of self-confidence until I was shot down. 

 

The question after things like this is usually “would you do it all again?” In this case, the question is altered slightly to “are you going to do it all again? Put yourself through all the ups and downs, all the suspense, the blows to your self-confidence?” Well, it seems the only way to justify all the work I’ve done so far is to keep doing it, to keep applying, interviewing and hope for the chance alignment of institutional need with my unique experience. There’s little else to do but feel sorry for myself, and the summer is simply not the time for such behavior. It helps greatly to have kids who consistently remind you that you’re perhaps taking the whole thing a bit too seriously anyway. After all, if Kafka taught us anything, it’s that this hole is self-imposed and entirely imagined and the only way to avoid living in it is to stop digging. Once again, I lie awake at night, imagining stop signs and, for now, it seems to be working. 

Ensnared in Language

Sunday morning, I wake up with everyone in one bed. My daughter came in sometime last night after midnight and my wife has fallen asleep while my son was nursing. There’s no way I could get out of here without waking everyone up.

 

The cloudy morning light is coming in through the blinds. We sleep with them down now, which seems anathema to me after a lifetime of sleeping next to windows, positioning my bed as close to them as possible to look up into the sky before sleeping. Now the room is nightly closed off against the clank of the dumpsters and the glare of the streetlights outside and then sealed over in the sound of rain from the computer: an unbelievable sound which becomes static after a few moments---like how even the best cup of coffee loses its flavor and becomes hot liquid after the first few sips. 

 

It must be about 7 when everyone wakes up. I could probably stay, but I’ve got a few things I’d like to get out of the way. My wife is disappointed; once again, she’s got a morning of watching two kids who need constant attention. She probably doesn’t even taste the first sip of coffee. Besides, it’s hard keeping a hot cup away from kids’ hands; her coffee tends to get cold in out-of-reach places. 

 

I ride up the hill. Still continuing the obnoxious habit I started a few days ago of thinking of homes that were for sale last year, or the year before, and their prices. All of them seemingly affordable now; all of them eminently livable and beyond reach. 

 

The part of the ride down Bay Side Rd. is a reprieve. No houses have ever been for sale on this road and everything is in bloom. A doe out eating the blossoms stretches herself languorously across the road with tentative hooves for the macadam. Even through my stuffed nose, I can make out the apple blossoms: the smell of a cloudy day. 

 

As I coast down the hill, I think of the conversation my wife and I had the night before. For months the information has been piling up, accounts coming in, that our daughter doesn’t speak as she’s supposed to. The way she drops ‘S’s and ‘F’s, it turns out, is not some quaint idiosyncrasy of development, something to be worked out later, but rather potentially indicative of a problem. 

 

I hadn’t given any credence to this idea. She’s my little girl. She speaks the charming way she does. She—like all children—is perfect. I also didn’t want to open the box on potential problems that tends to spill out from getting oneself involved in systems. Any system is a sleeping giant. Kafka tried to explain this to us. You wake one up—even unintentionally—and you become ensnared. A system ensnared my family when I was a child. It bound them to the working definitions of autism, even though the system had no understanding of autism—but, like all systems, it is incapable of professing ignorance or even being ignorant. 

 

The thought of those interminable institutional corridors, those bureaucrats, councilors and functionaries wrapping around my little girl, making decisions for my family is really more than I can handle. So, I tell myself she’s fine. Her speech is her own and it’s fine. 

Still coasting down the hill, I think how paranoid this all seems. I tell myself to lighten up and to stay open. Systems are often benign if not completely ineffective, and of course, I start thinking about the near-impossibility of communicating effectively within them, much less to them. Sleeping giants, indeed. The greatest people must be the Quixotes who try to change the systems, the Sisyphuses who put their shoulders to these rock-like systems. 

 

She articulates complex thoughts; she responds in novel ways. She’s creative in her speech. There may not be an ‘S’s or ‘F’s and even some consonant clusters are difficult, but there’s no reason to subject ourselves to something fraught with danger. Oh! I’m going back and forth on this again! 

 

…

 

My sister didn’t make eye contact as a child. She didn’t talk. In her early development, she might have said a few words, but these seem to come almost unbidden, as if they surprised even her when uttered.

 

One such instance I can’t forget was her use of the word ‘bubble’. We must’ve been very young because we were in the bath together. She looked off into the space where she was so comfortable resting her gaze, away from everyone and everything, and named the frothy soap around us. The two sounds of ‘bubble’ are the only intentional syllables I ever heard my sister use; they were just as ephemeral as the object itself. Nothing led away from this utterance. When she said it, she returned to her customary silence, though both my mother and I shouted encouragement. After such a performance, it was hard not to. 

 

Now I understand that it may have been this encouragement that disallowed for further speech, even stopped it up. Maybe it was hard for her to repeat the performance. Maybe she didn’t say the word for us. 

 

…

 

I go into the café. There’s frost on the window panes, but the sun is already starting to warm them and to cast long shadows from the rhododendron bushes up the walls. I sit down to work and immediately start to think of what’s happening at home. I see my wife, her coffee cold, picking up one kid and putting another down. I see my son, belly down on the floor, pumping his arms like a bird, smiling with the half-dazed look of infants, but I don’t see my daughter so much as I hear her. It’s something that’s been playing over and over in my head: the memory of her introducing herself to a kid at the park. 

 

“My name e eme”

 

“Huh?” the kid replies and looks confused. She repeats it, but the kid doesn’t understand, shrugs his shoulders and runs off to play with someone else. She watches him run, but stays rooted to the spot. 

 

…

 

A week later. My son wakes up at six and I take him for a walk after I’ve made coffee. The sun is coming up through the clouds. I’m walking north, but each time I come to a cross street, I see the pink and orange skies between the buildings. There’s no one out and the birds aren’t singing so much as they’re muttering to each other. Sleepy chirpings. 

 

We leave all five blocks of downtown behind and climb up the slight hill on the north side of 11^th Street. It’s not much of a rise, but it’s sufficient to get above the 1 and 2 story buildings and see the Bay reflecting the rest of the calm sunrise. The clouds have given the light a syrupy quality and it runs in channels of color from the east and disappears in the Bay. Over the water the sky is a tarnished mirror, oval and silver-gray.

 

My son is quiet the entire walk. There’s a frost on the ground so his little hands, dangling from the carrier are cold. I take them in my hands and warm them. He glances at me and returns to looking around. From his stationary position in the carrier, he watches the hedges march past, the parked cars drift by, the buildings float by like clouds. We walk for over an hour, from end to end of this tiny town and he doesn’t make a sound. His observant role doesn’t require commentary. I listen to his silence and think how often what we say only muddles what we feel. How there are seldom right words and a right occasion. To some degree, our talking is all so much problem-making. Our struggle to name, describe and critique what’s around us only gets us lost in our phrasing: the limitations of our language. As language results from experience, what leverage can it possibly offer for escaping that experience? Perhaps it is only setting up and tearing down the same structure over and over. 

 

Listening to the silence around me; speaking to my son in this silence, it seems utterly absurd that I should ever ask anyone to teach my daughter to speak when she is the only one who can define her experience in words. 

 

Walking back down the hill, I long to bring her this news. I want to tell my wife, too. We don’t need to worry! Words are only a great piling up of history and rules and the perspectives of the past. We’re making our own language, the record our own experience. But, then I come down among the buildings and see the letters, the words, the names and see how it’s another system and one that we’re all hopelessly ensnared in, one in which the expression “my name e eme” falls on deaf ears. 

 

 

 

 

Shared Humanity and Isolated Reality

I’ve been riding out to the discount grocery store the next town over. A sentence, I admit, that sounds quite odd, but after you have kids, you need to find practical ways of entertaining yourself. So, I can’t write “I’ve been going to this new bar” or even “I’ve been taking a lot of walks lately”. Today, I woke up at 4am; my daughter couldn’t sleep and I lay on her floor patting her and soothing her. After all, she’s not even three yet. I had a Zoom meeting at 6am. And plenty of classes to plan for next semester. After all that, at the end of the day, when the kids go to sleep, you don’t do anything that’s going to rob you of your own sleep. You do something practical; you take a bike ride to pick up some groceries. 

Luckily, it’s an interesting ride this time of year. To avoid the highway that connects these two towns, I have to take a backroute through a part of town called ‘The Bottoms’ which is the flat, treeless expanse that leads up to the ocean. In my heart I call it “los fondos” in Spanish. I’m not sure why. There’s nothing Spanish about the place.

Los fondos are not as scenic as it may sound with ‘ocean’ in the description. They look like flat fields would anywhere else. There’s a bit of salt in the breeze and when the ocean really gets going in the winter, you can occasionally hear it over the relentless wind, but it sounds more like a washing machine or something.

The fondos are downright drab, but the sky is wide, wide open above them and there’s an old trestle bridge that spans the Mad River right before it dumps into the ocean. From the bridge, I’ve seen seals in the river even though it’s probably close to a mile from the mouth where the bridge crosses it. They seem so out of place surrounded by flat grassy fields, munched by cows and low mountains reflected in their shallows, but the seals are not infrequent in the river. Ever curious, they’ll watch you crossing over them, giving the impression that you’re the one out of your element, which, of course, is true.

From here, the route goes over a hill and then into the next town which is what you’d expect of a small town surrounded by such tenacious wilderness: well-forested mountains on one side and crashing ocean surmounted by rhododendron thickets on the other. There are little patches of grayish beach along the river and, on the other side, a long isthmus of sand that recedes as the mouth of the river changes.

The area is pleasant to ride through because there is very little traffic. Sometimes I can make my way through all the fondos without seeing a single car. Of course, it’s very dark and on moonless nights, I’d be lost without a light. I’ve come home with a load of groceries and found myself following a roving pancake-size light all the way through acres of wind-swept darkness back home. It’s a humbling experience and one relevant to what follows. 

…

A week before Halloween, I managed to get my daughter to sleep before it was too late and I realized I had time to make it to the grocery store. The ride takes about 40 minutes one way, so there’s a cut-off for when I can leave. 

The night was warm with the coming rains and the humidity seemed to keep the wind down. I coasted through the streets of town, and within a few blocks, I was past the point of streetlights—little good they do here. Even downtown, the redwood forests seem to send down an impressive shadow, against which illumination is practically worthless. Here and there are a few dingy globes which serve to brighten nothing save the air and insects immediately about them. All the light is converted into glare in the humidity. There’s more light reflected from the wet streets than actual illumination. Imagine Christmas tree lights garlanded on a dark, damp, shaggy spruce in the middle of a forest at night and you have an idea of what the streetlights look like around here. 

There’s always a little wind in the fondos, even when it’s perfectly still in town. All that flat ocean beyond with nothing but a little cusp of dunes to break the unimpeded movement of air all the way from Japan, Taiwan and the Kamchatka. There’s something almost lonesome about the place when the wind isn’t raging, like the movements of a very tired, but indefatigable vagabond. One imagines the smells of hibiscus, kvass, ice and all sorts of strange things as this vagabond wind blows over the wet pasture land. 

Ah yes, the pasture. I’d be remiss if I left the cows out, for they are an important presence in the fondos where the ground is too swampy to build, the earth too salty to foster growth, and too valuable to wallow. Everywhere in the bottoms, cows shift in the muck, their hooves pound out of the soft ground. Their quarter-size bovine eyes glow in the range of my bike light like flashes from Charon’s fares, still held in their customary place. 

That last one may have been too much, but your imagination can get away from you out here. Also, keep in mind, it was just before Halloween, there are a few pumpkin patches out in the fondos, a corn maze and not a few creaky old farmhouses standing apart from their neighbors, the dilapidated barns. 

It’s a great autumn landscape and the broken macadam that wraps the parcels into acreage is often crossed and recrossed by skunks, racoons, foxes and, in one particular area, peacocks. All of them have appeared out-of-the-darkness in the plate-like beam of my bike light and then disappeared back to the dark periphery. Most of the time, I’ve seen them all on a single trip. Raiding the farms for the most part, I imagine, but perhaps also lured by the same restlessness that brought us to the end of the continent. Those skunks and racoons might bump up against the ocean at night and think “now what the hell is this?”

There are owls, too. Great silent shadows, even in the darkness. They’ll fly right over the top of you, encouraging some primal fear to leak from your scalp. It’s like they’re flaunting my inability to have any interaction with them. Something like watching sharks swim through the ocean, unmindful and almost dispassioned by human presence. 

I cross the bridge, led to it by a rhododendron tunnel where a bush has trellised a chain link fence and in the wet darkness creates a cave that frames the craggy stanchions of the bridge.  

The moon ripples in the river like the stove light’s reflection in a cup of coffee before anyone is awake. The kind of light that disappears when there’s no one to observe it. 

After the bridge, I’m in another town, a town with a main street and little else. It’s a wonder a place could be bordered by the ocean and redwood mountains and manage to be this dull, but it is. It’s a place of rugged pickup cruising suburban streets. The kind of weird rural/urban overlap that reminds me a bit of southern Michigan. The kind of place where you see cars with deer tied to the hoods cruising through a factory district in a town of over 100,000. 

But McKinleyville is, in reality, an actual rural place belied with a street of car dealerships and fast-food outlets. It’s much smaller than 100,000 souls, the kind of town you see all over California that seems to have been created without a center in mind, the kind of place that went up so quickly there was no nucleus to grow from. One street has stores, all of them new, all of them pre-fab-looking, and, in the root system of streets that feed into this one, there are homes. Living here, I can’t imagine what there would be to do other than drive away from it. 

I’m sure I’ve seen McKinleyville in the sun, but there’s some incongruency with the image in my memory and so the default appearance of the place is damp, huddled together under dingy, impenetrable clouds churned out by the mountains. But at night, all towns are gray, and I make my way through the root system to the main street to the grocery store. 

Ever since I lost feeling in my arm after carrying groceries over seven miles in my messenger bag, I use a larger, two-strap backpack which serves its purpose quite well with reinforced straps and plenty of padding. I’ve developed a rough idea of what a full bag looks like as individual purchases in a shopping cart, but I usually head home with the bag piled pretty high. 

I rode out into the night with a substantial stack of groceries in the roll-down bag, which was now unrolled just about all the way allowing from the ice cream, hummus and other prepared foods I’ve been trying to stop buying but, when confronted with such low, low prices, my resolve weakens and I buy all kinds of stuff I don’t really need which is invariably packaged in plastic. 

I’ve got this mountain of stuff lashed to my back, but the bag centers it pretty well and I’m quite conditioned to getting it all back home. The food—if it can be called that—is a source of motivation. When I get home, I’ll be hungry and there will be plenty of options. 

But for now, there’s this hill to bomb down and this podcast in my headphones which I’m paying peripheral attention to when a truck goes by and something sails over the top of my head. I feel the wind of it, I feel its force flatten the air that’s moving over me for a moment. It’s a killing sound, that sudden silence, something like the owl flying over. Then, in the wake of the silence, the truck guns it, rips ahead down the wet street. 

When you ride through the night, it’s fairly common that people will mess with you, but, luckily, throwing heavy objects at you is less common. I watch the red lights of the truck disappear down the road. There are no obstacles, no stop signs between the truck and the highway onramp about a quarter mile ahead. I’d never catch it, but, quickly, as if to avoid being seen, the truck makes a left into an area, where I can’t remember there being anything but a couple of driveways. 

Shit. Are they coming back? Are they turning around?

Unfortunately, being attacked on a bike is something of a crime of opportunity. Bored people who have a hard time recognizing the humanity of others are often driving around both angry and bored and the pathetic figure of someone struggling to rock a narrow two-wheeled machine up a small grade must fill them with some kind of dull ire. They yell. They lay on the horn. They drive as close as possible without hitting you, but they usually keep going. On a dark night, with no other traffic around, when someone turns around to come back, they’ve gone beyond taking advantage of the opportunity and they’re displaying some substantially sociopathic tendencies. Best to get out of the way.

Still, adrenaline kicked in and all I could think was “maybe I can catch up to them before they drive away.” I raced down the hill toward where I’d seen the truck disappear. 

Sure enough, the same truck sat there, facing me, idling, lights glaring at me from the base of a driveway. I threw up my arms in the universal “what the fuck?” gesture and stood before the truck. There was no movement. No yelling. No revving. Why had this guy pulled in here? I motioned for someone to get out of the truck. Nothing. A minute passed and it was getting spooky staring down these headlights and this low growling engine. I slowly moved out of the way, realizing that I was blocking the truck’s egress and I didn’t want it to suddenly decide to break for it and run me over. 

Yeah, “it”. Looking into the truck’s lights, I was starting to see it in a Stephen King kind of way. Was anyone even in there? What the hell was going on here?

There was more than one house back here and, from another channel of this driveway system, a car came rocking up behind the truck. It crept around it and toward me. I stopped it and went over to the window.

“Who’s in the truck?” I demanded of the sleepy-looking driver. 

“Huh?”

“Someone threw something at me. Someone in that truck threw something. Who’s in there?”

“I don’t know, man.” Sleepy answered. “This is a shared driveway.”

I let him drive out, but this emboldened me a little. At least someone else had seen us. At least there were other people around. I put a little more emphasis in it and angerly waved the truck toward me. 

There was a lurch as if the driver was visibly hesitating and then the truck slowly rolled toward me. I stayed in front of it, hoping to not be run down, holding my bike out a little like a matador’s cape. 

The window came down. Who would it be? Scarface? A burley construction worker? A barrel of a gun? I was thinking these things and, at the same time, still pissed off enough to not be thinking of them. I was totally vulnerable in my indignation. This is an easy place to find yourself on a bike. No one cares about your indignation in the dark, on a country road. The world doesn’t owe you anything but chaos and old night. And, for a moment, I saw that as the window came down.

A face, the green glare of the instrument panel reflected on skin. Smooth skin. Uncertain expression. A kid. A fucking kid! 

“Sorry, man. I didn’t throw it. It was my friend. He’s really drunk.”

But rather than raise my indignation, the sight of the kid mollified it. I sighed. “What’s your friend’s name? Is this his house?”

“Yeah. He’s Dylan. I don’t know what he was doing, man”

“You could kill someone throwing things like that.” I sounded like a dad. Hell, I thought, I am a dad! A dad who almost didn’t make it home to his kids because ‘Dylan’ wanted to screw around.

“What did he throw?”

“A water bottle. I think he thought you were a tweaker.”

A tweaker. I’ve got this before. This awful excuse that because you might be a drug addict, homeless, or both, you’re somehow fair game for a braining. It’s the worst thing to say. ‘sorry, man. I didn’t see you as a contributing member of society, so I thought I’d knock ya’ one fer fun.’ Ugh. 

“Where’s Dylan? In the house?” I tried not to sound too exasperated. 

“He’s calling right now” The kid answered his phone and talked to Dylan who clearly knew I was waiting for him. “Yeah….he’s out he— Yeah. He wants to talk to you. Yeah, dude. Come out.” He hung up. “He’s on his way out.”

When I saw Dylan walking out sheepishly, I stepped aside and let the driver go, thinking, as the car drove off of all that I’d stood in front of it imagining it could be. Imagining, before the window went down all the ways that truck in the dark, headlights blaring, could’ve been my grave or at least my hospital bill. 

I talked to Dylan and, eventually his dad a while. The dad was a country guy. Asking me if I wanted to press charges. Someone they both managed to really evade much of an apology. Dylan even offered the tweaker excuse again. “If I’d known you had humanity I never would’ve thrown anything at you,” he seemed to say. “Sorry, humanity is a difficult thing for me to pin down and, sometimes, I just throw things.”

With the dad standing there, I found my remonstrances seemed redundant. I didn’t smell any booze on the kid that his friend said was “really drunk”, but I stood there feeling like a tattletale and started dismissing my complaint before it was even out of my mouth, knocking it down to a “just be careful” which sounded cloying and kind of stupid, but I was tired. Too tired to champion punishment on a grand scale and I bade Dylan and father a good night before riding back toward the ocean shaking my head, riding back to my sleeping house beyond the muddy fields and the little swinging light at the head of my bike like a spotlight being dragged across the crumpled country roads where, luckily, there was almost no traffic at night. 

 

  

Masks and Mouths

 

We’d been in class a couple of weeks before I saw one of my student’s faces. Until this point, everyone had been following the mask protocol pretty well. I can’t remember who it was anymore, but they brought out a bottle of water or something, slipped the mask down and completely changed my perception of what they looked like. Under the mask: that knot of a nose, that burgeoning mustache, writhing lips over a chin looking like an elbow, something to be drawn into a shirtsleeve, not something to be loosed and wagged around. Everything below the mask had an underdone quality to it. This may have been the result of faithful covering or just the way we look. And then there were the teeth, askew, clawing at the air as if trying to find purchase on the emptiness that surrounds us all. Just as I was about to gasp, the mask went back up and the vision reconciled itself to the person I knew who sat in front of me twice a week from 10-12. That is, the student turned back into attentive, sleepy or furtive eyes. Without a face.

Later that week, I took my students from another class outside on a bold pretense, considering I teach English and there’s no reason to go outside that’s not flimsy or back-to-land sounding. But I’d convinced myself and, most of the time, that’s the only authority in need of convincing. We went out into the rawness of the afternoon sun and a student asked about masks. Here we were, six feet apart and outside. We could take them off right? Right, was my reply and, for most of the students, they came down. There were a few stragglers, but suddenly, I was looking at the chewing, cheeking, lisping humanity of my students. But rather than have another Poe-like epiphany when I was paralyzed by the moist gnashings of unmasked speech and riveted to the singular disturbing feature of what amounts to a hole in the head, I had a single impression: “my god, they’re all babies”, I thought. And I felt a sudden need to protect them or at least to treat them with all my kindness and patience. Their mouths, perhaps underused and silent, seem to speak their inexperience without moving.

The eyes have a deceit—it’s not intentional—but they are capable of holding back truths that the jaw and the mouth reveal in their nervous or flustered ruminating. They are also usually quite symmetrical—being mirrored by each other—and the mind naturally continues this symmetry all the way down the face as an assumption. But, in almost every case, the mouth acts against this symmetry. It might be that a mouth just isn’t symmetrically linked with the eyes or that mouths are just harder to balance, maybe because there’s only one. Whatever the case, the mouth, rather than the eyes, seems the vessel of our shared humanity. Perhaps this is why we kiss, rather than touch eyes. We carry around who we are like dogs carrying ravaged sticks. It may be that the eyes will give away a lie, but the mouth is where the lie will remain long after it’s told, sagging, pursing and drooling.

These students were people beyond the subdued expressions of their eyes. Their mouths suddenly began to twitch to life to communicate this; I think they were too polite to comment on everyone’s sudden change of appearance, but, thankfully, at least one observation was lobbed to me.

“Professor, you have a beard?!”

How incomparably older I must’ve seemed to them. Not of their fecundity, pale shoots stirring under the soil, but like something aged. What do they bury to age? Cheese? Wine? Certainly not pretty images, but I imagine they were just as vulnerable. I saw in the students, inexperience and eagerness, they saw in me—pirate bearded, crooked toothed, chapped—old indulgences, fatigue and sun ravaged skin. I’m sure they inwardly recoiled a little before remembering the archetype other teachers established before me: we are an ugly, time-ravaged lot. Often teachers are the first to give this impression to the youth. Their parents’ faces are too familiar to reveal it. Besides, unconsciously, they retain the memory of their parents’ faces from birth when they were still hale and, in the case of the mother, quite flushed with youth and purpose. I remember, in elementary school, musing on the ugliness of at least a few of my teachers. And here I was, equally aged and ugly before my own students, giving off faint fumes of stale coffee and out-of-country dental work, cheeks creased by lack of sleep and stress, shaven in strange places. And yet, this must’ve been expected in fact, if anything, I think it made me less intimidating for, suddenly, they all began to talk at once. It was as if the extra moisture from their mouths had pushed the saturation over the limit in the clouds above and it started to pour language, unimpeded, sighing, clicking, lingual, soft-palated language. For a moment, I left my mask dangling on my ear and then took it off. If nothing else, I was damn tired of breathing my own smell.    

Twilights

 

The sun has been worn down to a flat disk of copper, like a relic of an ancient civilization. That dull light that spins from the star is metallic and, one can almost believe, filigreed and intentional. We’re positioned between the coppersmith and his forge. To the east, the fires are mounting to the skies and plumes of ash roll into the morning fog. The sun comes up with a hissing sputter. The light is brazen and crepuscular.

I go up the hill to look at the house. 300,000 dollars too much and the carport is shared with the neighbors, making a bizarre continuous construction; the two houses like a very, very long double wide. 390,000 dollars with an old roof a 70’s brown carpeting to match the copper sun that hangs in the window. The mountains march right down into the backyard;  however, and when I leave, I see a pack of grey canines down under the shoulder of the road that are somewhere between foxes and coyotes. They came crawling out of an aqueduct that passed under the road, stopped to look up at me, the sky and the tangles of fruiting blackberry, and ran off.

It's hard to imagine that coyotes or foxes don’t have some kind of atavistic response to the firelight. They must know that it’s not really twilight all the time. But me, I just want to sleep all day and when I get up, I feel anxious, too alert.

I took my son to see the house. He hadn’t been napping, so I knew he’d sleep for the whole walk in the carrier. Initially, he’d cried and flailed his head, but when I cradled him and walked up the hill with deliberate, flipflop steps, he dozed off.

When I got to the house, I went up to look in the front windows. A battered washing machine and a utility sink in the converted garage. They should’ve left it a garage. But imagine it as a place to play or to work and it looks fine. The connected carport bothered me less. The neighbors had a bumper sticker “How Swede it is!” This superimposed on a Swedish flag. Scandinavians, even American Scandinavians probably keep to themselves. I remember the anecdote about the most popular television in Sweden (or maybe Norway) show being footage of a train passing through the country. No narrative, no music, no characters (other than the train). I imagine the neighbors—elderly—watching that nightly in their house, cozy, hyyge.

I went into the backyard. I figured that baby strapped to me would make my intentions clear or at least less minatory. Recently poured concrete. I could hear the realtor focusing in on that, as if a flat slab of concrete had any potential or meant anything more than being able to charge an extra 20,000 for backyard with slightly more order imposed on it. Another look in the windows, the bedrooms are small, wooden and frayed at the ends. Bare feet have stuck to these floors in weather less warm than in this late afternoon. Behind my reflection, the sun is like a lamp turned on inside with no apparatus, just a light, like the glare on a picture frame or the ghost of the flash in a pre-digital photo. There was a movement and I looked down, into the carrier. My son’s eyes are almost indifferent to color. They could be brown, blue, gray, green, but they have none of the haunting scowl so many babies affect. His eyes are lustrous and patient. They are open and easy to love, like the smiling babies on diaper packages.  

…

We were in Sacramento, on vacation, when the doctor called. She didn’t know what the lump is; neither did anyone else, so she’d made an appointment at UCSF. A rare thing to have gotten us in so early, so, at the end of the vacation, I drove my daughter the 300 miles home. Slept, dropped her off at my in-laws, and drove back 300 miles. I taught my class from the garage of my sister-in-law’s place in the morning and then drove to the Bay.

I was so anxious about being late, that we got into the city too early, let our guard down and went to 24^th Street to get burritos and coffee—the essence of the city to me, but I found I no longer knew the places for them. The server was nice at the taqueria, but I apologized to my wife for the burrito. The only thing I could taste was onion and unsalted tortilla. The coffee was dull and too strong, lulling and overstimulating, leaving us to miscalculate and race to our appointment, frantic before the doors of the hospital, running back and forth to the parking garage for things we’d forgotten.

I took it as a good sign that my daughter should be in the waiting room. It wasn’t her, but a girl wearing her pajamas, about her age and size with her same sleep-puffed face and tousled dirty blonde hair. My wife and I spoke to each other about her, using terms of endearment for our daughter but changing them slightly to fit this girl who was unaware of us as she played slowly by the fish tank, like she was the one under water and the fish were swimming around the chairs and magazines.  

The girl left and I quelled the returning anxiety by answering work emails from my phone. My wife bounced our sleeping son in the carrier. The room was quiet. One Russian mother called to her daughter who had a large hemangioma on her arm and seemed not to see the chairs placed in front of her, so close did she get to them before dramatically reeling back. Perhaps it’s a Russian trait, some kind of folk game.

While I held my phone and watched the girl step toward and away from the chairs, they called our son’s name, putting a long question mark after it. It was gratifying to hear it said aloud like that, a confirmation that we’d named him the right thing. Soon after we’d been processed, the doctor came into the small examination room. She gave our son a few palpitations, a few frisks, dandles, whatever. She commented on his size—big!—and then asked to see the lump. I appreciated that she admitted almost right away that she didn’t know what it was. It was like *touch*, *poke*, “Nope. I have no idea what that is.” She was aware that her knowledge had limits, a sign of being knowledgeable, strangely. But the others did the same. The next doctor invited in had curly hair and the air of being fun and communicative; someone you’d be glad to see at a conference or a crowded cafeteria. Maybe she reminded me of my friend Rebecca and I was projecting all these traits.   

The fun, Rebecca doctor was more animated and more intentional with her prodding. She gave blow by blow descriptions of what she was feeling, but couldn’t tell us anything new. “It’s squishy, but defined. It’s not hard but…It moves.” I was waiting for these descriptors to reach a critical mass of symptoms which would yield a diagnosis, but they just floated out, one by one, unattached, meaningless. “Consistent, lumpy, smallish…” It could’ve been charades of adjectives. She went out to get someone else.

A third doctor came in, and this one was the sage. She wore her lab coat loosely, like a scarf worn for panache. Her hair was salt and pepper and she wore a serious expression that had no need for pedantry. Without being told anything, she opened her hands like she like someone going to catch an easy pass. She laid them on my son’s back and closed her eyes. Nothing. She just shook her head.

How could this be so baffling?

“Should we get it biopsied?” One of the doctors asked. The others seemed to agree to this without inculpating themselves. There were no ‘yes’s, no ‘no’s. Just a miasma of suggestion. A few calls were placed down to the Mission Bay campus and, through connections, we got into the fine needle aspiration clinic at 4pm on Friday.

We left still feeling pretty hopeful. We talked about meeting Mikey or maybe getting something to eat later. The firelight hadn’t come down to the Bay and the late afternoon sky was open and blue between the cornices of Victorian gingerbread, the banks of a river. We drove down Divisidero, then to Hayes Valley, then around Potero, then the parking lot confines of Mission Bay and the UCSF buildings that no one who lives here ever has to pass by, new and out-of-the-way as they are.

“Do we take babies?” The receptionist asked another receptionist, who, in turn, came over to ask us to repeat why we were there. The temperature takers at the door swiveled around to see us, the anomaly. The ones with the baby. The first receptionist made a call. It was quick. He said no more into the receiver than “Do you have a kid?” and then “Yeah; OK.” He turned to us. “Yeah, they’re waiting for you. 2^nd floor.”

I can’t go much beyond this hospital and this floor because the narrative stalls there. The Trinty and Shasta forests caught on fire. The cinders exploded into the air, cooled to ash and muted the light. The Delta variant cases kept going up. Mandates came back. Everything crept back up to the edge of closing down and hovered there, just before quarantine. I still feel like I’m still standing in that second examination room because I haven’t really moved in time since then. Leaning against the wall, useless, worse than useless, in the way as the door opened and I had to move to avoid the pathologist. He had been sad to see us. I remembered this from when my daughter had to have her blood drawn; no one wants to do babies. I forgot how much you don’t want them to be hurt, that useless urge to protect them. We must’ve talked for half an hour before he tried to get the tissue he needed and got none or maybe next to none: not enough. The pathologist, who told us he had small kids of his own, who said one had something like this and he hadn’t even taken him in for it, had me hold alcohol pads while he tried to mark the lump with a blurring marker, marked and remarked as the lump floated under the surface of the skin. He tried again. My son with the lustrous, uncolored eyes cried his hiccupping baby cries and the needle pumped up and down. Enough gore to paint all five of the slides laid out. But it wasn’t enough. He looked through the microscope there in the room, wheeled the lens up and down and explained that he didn’t know what it was. There wasn’t enough tissue to really know. But, he’d take a look and get back to us or maybe I should call him. Yeah, in fact, call him.

I left a message days ago.

…

I completed my circuit around the house, passing through the carport, patting my son’s back. I stood there a moment, under the long, adjoining roof to take him out of the hazy light, hoping the enforced dimness would put him back to sleep. I looked down again and his eyes were closed, his forehead back against me. I kept patting and walked out into the red-golden light and down the driveway, back to the eucalyptus swale where I’d seen the fox-coyotes. On someone’s lawn, there was a fawn, still with the spots, browsing in the wildflowers. I stopped patting and watched her knobby walk into the forest. She must have way of knowing that the light won’t stay like this. All these animals, they must already be used to these things we just can’t accept.      

Fathers Day

 

My son turned one month old today, on Fathers’ Day. At home there’s been a lot of noise and figuring out who is doing what. Often my wife and I are trying to do the same task while another, more pressing one, goes unaddressed. We’re in the kitchen, say, and a pot starts to boil over, but a diaper needs changing. While Gina is taking off the diaper, I’ll start looking around frantically for wipes. Of course, the pot, meanwhile is overflowing copiously, snuffing out the flame. Unlit gas is spraying into the apartment. Either that, or we’re both going for the diaper or the burner at the same time and, for some reason when I get to it, I find I’m reluctant to relinquish the task I’ve chosen for myself. Stubbornly, I continue reaching for the burner knob even after I’ve seen that Gina’s going to get to it first. Meanwhile baby wails are filling the house. It’s always something.

So, I go to the library. It seems easier to leave the house, to thoroughly divide the household tasks which result entirely from our children. If I take my daughter to the library, for a moment I only have one responsibility and, alone, there’s no risk that I’ll run into anyone when attending to this responsibility. I won’t have to share it. That’s not to say we don’t get into trouble at the library. I’ve got to order another copy of Chicka Chicka 123 because my daughter tore half a page out of it. She’s also doing this thing where she loves to rub the pages excessively between her thumb and forefinger as she turns them. Not only is the resulting rubbing noise annoying—especially on the heavy, glossy paper they print kids’ books on—but it crumples the paper something awful. I have to smooth everything back out before we return the books and some of them still look like something that’s been relegated to the back of a fifth-grader’s desk for an entire school year.

The best course of action is to get the books and get out; then we go read them in a neutral zone: a place with nothing else to rip or crumple. We live next to a plaza with grass and benches which affords a pretty nice place to read. Sure, there’s usually someone swearing very loudly to themselves lying prone on the grass nearby and there’s all kinds of gnarly things to be found among the stalks of the ornamental plants, but I figure exposure to that sort of thing is just part of growing up and learning about the lousier aspects of existence. So, we sit there, on the decrepit bench, reading our haul from the library book-by-book, my daughter picking out the ones she wants to read first. As I read, I imagine my wife at home happily feeding our infant son and perhaps reading a New Yorker (I brought back a few throw-away copies the last time I was at the library). The reality may be quite different, but it’s got to be easier for her without the two extra toddlers banging around the place: my daughter and me.

I find that when I get into the plaza to read with my daughter, I’m inclined to read the whole pile. Eight, nine, ten books. I’m happy to sit and read with her as long as I can because the primary thing I miss as the parent of two young children is being able to do one thing at a time. Every morning, I wake up at 5 so I can try to focus on one task, namely preparing for the coming semester, before everyone else wakes up and the crying, feeding, changing, meal preparing, deciding what to do, packing up the car, remembering to bring the 300 things we need to leave the house, making sure everyone is changed/used the bathroom, etc. etc. routine can begin. You can’t call that routine; it’s just treading water. The issue is that I’ve defined work my entire life as something done with dedication. A project with a start and finish with maybe a little flow between. From the first book over 200 pages I read as a kid, to the papers I wrote for graduate school and hiking the Appalachian Trail, all of these things required that I focus on them and tune out distraction. I got pretty good at that and the result seems to be that I can sit—without moving anything but my fingers—in front of a computer and work for hours on end, or, at least, I could. With one kid, I was still able to sneak out the back and go to work for the day. When my daughter was an infant, there wasn’t much I could do to feed her, so I assumed the ‘breadwinner’ role, coming home late from night classes and basically rolling into bed after looking in on her sleeping form. For weeks, I barely saw her awake. And when I went to work? You guessed it, I sat down and plowed through the tasks without interruption. But now with two kids—God, how would a single mother do this? You’ve got one who doesn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time and when she gets up, if unsupervised, some kind of substantial mess is going to result. The other one, needs not only constant attention, but constant holding, comforting, rocking, swaddling, changing and nursing. When he does go to sleep, it’s for 20 minutes, and that’s usually only when you’ve got him strapped to you, so you have to move in this very awkward way to keep him steady—yeah, there’s that, too, his neck doesn’t actually support his head, so you’ve even got to constantly provide the support. Again, that’s fine on its own, but with a two-year-old it becomes a totally different ask.

I can’t sneak away from this. I’d be terrified of what I’d come home to. It’s summer vacation. I couldn’t have planned it better to be in a position to help as much as possible. A few hours to work every morning will eventually see the completion of the three classes I’ve got to plan, but, what’s beginning to happen with never being able to commit to a single activity and stay with it is a sort of erosion of interest and, even, of personality. I find that I’m having to reconsider who I am in a way I haven’t had to do since I first left home.

I know that sounds dramatic, but think about it, we base who we are on the things we’ve done, the things we want to do and the way we react to what’s happening in between—also known as the present. When you’re constantly switching from one short task to another (there is something Sisyphean in changing a diaper that, before being completed is soiled and, thus, needs to be changed again) you don’t have time to remember the past—not 10 years ago, but that morning— and you don’t have time to contemplate the future. For example, I think about what I used to do when preparing to travel to a new country. I’d buy the guidebook, maybe the most well-known national writer in translation and get reading, annotating and anticipating. Before visiting Romania, I must’ve read three or four books about the place. Now, if it were possible to go somewhere, as soon as I opened the Wikitravel page, I’d have to leave it to go attend to something, by the time I got back to it at night, I’d be too tired to care. Which brings me to the present. I know that important things are probably still happening in the world right now, but nothing seems relevant to me—none of it even seems to concern me. It’s like it’s all just going over my head. My reality is these two kids. Their demands are what I need to do, all day, every day.  

I like sitting in the park and reading kids’ books because that’s attending to what is needed of me. Listening to the news so I can offer my commentary on Armenia’s recent election is something I do to please myself. It’s not required of me, therefore, I don’t have the time for it. The only thing I’m able to react to is the crying at my ear, the picked up band aid that is approaching a mouth, the overflowing trash (mostly dirty diapers) and the sink that’s always full of dirty dishes.

Of course, dirty dishes give you nothing to talk about with anyone—hell, even other parents don’t want to hear about this stuff; they’ve either lived it or they’re living it and no one wants a reminder. Meanwhile, I’m not cultivating any new interests. I’m not learning anything new. I’m forgetting things I did know because my brain has been reduced to a state of distraction, constantly anticipating the next interruption as it is. At the end of the day, when there’s a rare moment with both kids are asleep and I try to talk to my wife, I find I have nothing more to say other than “uuuugggh”—which doesn’t make for scintillating conversation, so I close my eyes, finish my beer and try to remember something about what it was like before. It’s difficult to settle on any particular memory, but I remember that I used to be able to think about what I was going to do with a Saturday afternoon—I mean, I really used to be able to entertain ideas. Quite incredible really. Given that know, just to have the time to remember these things is almost more than I can muster.

I didn’t see how far removed I’d become from my early thirties persona until my daughter picked up a comic book my wife and I had been gifted about a young couple in love (I think perhaps the young couple was supposed to be something like us, but I can’t recognize either of us in their naïve simplicity). In the comic, the whippersnappers are going through their daily routines and, in doing so, express their love for each other in simple, indirect ways. Reading the book now, I don’t pay any attention to this, but rather to the fact that these people are able to do so many elective things with a single day. On some pages, they read, go out to eat and watch a movie all in the same day. Being able to do even one of those things would feel like I’d entered the twilight zone.

Right after I’d had this realization, I started to look for more profound meaning in other quotidian things I find myself reading—since I’m now limited to the quotidian medium, lacking the brain power to read anything else in 3-minute spurts (I’ve been reading a history of Byzantium for about six months now). Invariably, this should come full-circle and find something quite relevant and earth-shaking from my daily forays in the library with my daughter. The book was in the Arthur series. In it, Arthur, an unidentified and somewhat androgenous animal (a rodent, maybe?), finishes a school year and goes on vacation with his family. It rains the whole time the family is on vacation, but they manage to have fun despite this. Or rather I should say, Arthur and his sister DW have fun because… his parents? They don’t matter at all. They’re not even stock characters with predictable “parental” lines and dad jokes. They’re only there to make the business of going on vacation believable for a ten-year-old audience. They’re a requirement. They’re only there because other kids have parents that are also always heaving in and out of the fog of domesticity like something so staid and predictable it’s ceased to have any meaning independent of what you’re willing to grant it. The parents in this book were horrifying because, in a dramatic way, they had no agency. Arthur and DW had more interaction with the scenery than with these parents. The parents were more like the car that took them on vacation, necessary to mention, but nothing more. The teacher who appears only on the first page of the story has a name. The parents are never more than “mom” and “dad”: archetypes hollowed out by time. Reading this, I saw that I, too was fading into this level of existence that is far too concerned with just being and cares very little for becoming, in fact has no capacity for such concerns. There is no time to become anything other than what I’ve already committed to—the parent of these children and I can see how, in the future, to them I will take on the same inevitable and furniture-like qualities I guess all parents eventually take on.        

Is there a way to prevent this? Is there a way to imbue myself with a more profound personality? One that can withstand the onslaught of raising children? Maybe, but I have to ask myself if it’s worth pursuing at this point. It would be like so many other projects I’ve nearly taken on since my daughter was born and, in the end, had to ditch because I realized (as I always do) that my role is no longer at the center of the stage. The most noble thing I can do, is to step back and focus on equipping my kids with what they need to grow up to make their own impact on the world and, hopefully, have their own kids so that they can realize one day just how profoundly they took their parents—especially me— for granted. Indeed, I think the only way I ever would’ve understood what my parents did for me was to have kids of my own and read them Arthur books. But that’s the wrong view, anyway. I should be thinking about it from my daughter’s perspective and all I can tell you is that she loves that Arthur book and I don’t think it’s because of the parents’ diminished roles. She likes it because she likes Arthur, because the story arc has some tension and because I read it to her. I’m the one that makes that book stand up and talk and, maybe that’s better than all the other things I could be committing myself to. Scattered as raising two kids may be, it certainly feels more important than any other project I’ve ever embarked on.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to write this, and that’s something a two-dimensional, static book character probably couldn’t manage. Although, all the credit goes to my wife who nursed the baby, did the dishes, folded the laundry, bathed and got the baby to bed in the span of time it took me to write this—and dammit I wrote fast! 

Dream Reading

 

I wade into the white noise blaring from the computer in the evening. The room has an infant scent that’s like Halloween candy—sweet, waxy, new. Even though I make no noise, there’s a mewling coming from the cradle. My son, two weeks old, is on the verge of waking up in there and I tiptoe over to my side of the bed and wince each time undressing makes the slightest sound. I make it into bed without waking him. My wife’s asleep. My son’s asleep and, the next room over, my daughter’s asleep. I close my eyes and stare at the back of my eyelids in the dark and listen to everyone’s breathing as best as I can through the white noise.

When an hour has gone by and I still haven’t gone to sleep, I try to copy my wife’s breathing. At first, it’s lulling to know that I’m breathing as one would who is in such a deep state of sleep as she appears to be, then I remember that our bodies are different and that her breathing is matched to her, not me. I stop and my thoughts go back to the approaching fall semester and all I have to do to prepare. Great ideas occur to me on the improvements of my classes, but I don’t write them down; I don’t even get up because to do so would break the spell of this strange anesthesia I’m under, like the original twilight sleep. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness, but neither am I fully awake.

Sometimes, when I’m very tired and I try to read, I fall asleep knowing I’m holding the book, but, asleep, I know I’m holding the book and I have reading dreams. That is, the content of my dreams comes to me as strange things I’m reading. These dreams have no visual element other than text, but the text somehow creates pictureless ideas.

The sleep I’m having now feels like one of those reading dreams, but I’m reading the room, hearing the sounds of it, even looking at it as I remember it when I closed my eyes. The computer screen shows a waterfall. This accompanies the roaring sound I’m hearing. The computer light is periwinkle and electric, like static popping under a blanket. The corners of the room lie in shadow. I feel the weight of the blanket on me. My legs are warm; I move them apart from each other. I begin to hear strange things in the repeating white noise. The falling water has begun to sonically blur. It sounds like the rush of wind heard when biking down a steep hill and then it turns into a hiss, sort of like static but without seamlessness of static. I hear it stop and start. It’s a sound I’ve seen before when watching falling water. If you focus on one part of a waterfall, the whole thing looks like it’s falling in jerky stop motion. The sound is like that and, if I could look up at the screen, I bet I’d see that now, too. But even dream reading the screen feels like too much work and I continue not to focus on anything in particular until gradually, a sound shapes itself from the distance: an opening, a throat clearing, an “ahem”. It clarifies. The first few hiccupping sounds of my daughter’s crying. Am I dream reading this, too? I strain my ears for it. A loud car growls by outside. When it’s passed, I can clearly discern the cries that are punctuated by a taking in of air and sound, mostly, like letting it out through the glottis, like a swallow in reverse.

I realize that I’m completely awake and I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Getting up after just lying there for hours comes as something of a relief. As least now, I have something to do. I wade out of one white noise soundscape and into another. When I open my daughter’s door, the sound of pouring rain runs out and bifurcates with the waterfall sound in my bedroom everyone else is asleep in. There’s a lambent night light, like a small church candle in a monastery niche, more revealing the darkness than relieving it. Another hiccupping cry. I shut the door after me and close myself into the sound of crying rain.

“What’s wrong?” I ask my daughter, standing at the railing of the crib, her hands tightly wrapped around it. She doesn’t answer, but when I reach down, she releases the railing and allows herself to be carried upward. I bring her to my shoulder and her thirty pounds rests squarely against me, like a backpack swung around to the front.

I lean back into the rocking chair, but I’m too tired to sing, really too tired to hum, so I just rock and feel drowsy. I rock and after a while I’m dream reading again and it’s like my daughter is the one rocking me, she’s just doing it backwards. This is a strange feeling and it makes me feel like I’m not holding her tightly enough, so I force myself a little more awake. I open my eyes and see that she’s wide awake. Her eyes are taking in everything, although she’s perfectly still. It’s strange that she doesn’t talk to me. She just stares, like she’s trying hard to remember something.

I try a few songs. Eventually, they become half-hearted humming and when, after 20 minutes her eyelids haven’t even begun to close, I tell her I’ll lie down next to her. She tenses, but lets me put her back in the crib. Lying down, she keeps her eyes open. I pull over a beanbag to rest my head on and, from the small foam pad by her bed, I push my arm through the slats of the crib and gently pat her on the back. My arm is somewhat cinched in, but it’s not completely uncomfortable: I’m still lying down; I’m not holding her anymore, I can even pat without too much discomfort. I close my eyes and the sound and the dull golden light of the nightlight seem to wash over me—only they are much more soporific this time. The room has a close humidity, that isn’t dampness—it’s the kind of summer night I remember from June in Michigan when the air is totally still and the stars and fireflies are all hung together in the motionless air and there’s a kind of sublimination that seems to happen between the body and the air. It’s not sweating but the gradual turning into the same languid night air the surrounds one.

I realize I’m falling asleep. I open my eyes and see that my daughter is still awake. I wonder if she’s forming the kind of memories that I’m tapping into right now. I wonder if in the future when she’s unable to sleep, if she’ll lean into this memory, into this room and, thinking of what she’ll think of in the future for a sleep mnemonic, I fall asleep.

I wake up with the dust motes rising from the carpet into the morning light. I feel better rested, having slept on the floor than I would’ve if I’d slept alone in a comfortable bed and I find myself looking forward to the day as I once did when I was young and it was summer. My daughter is still asleep and the white noise is still going in each room, though now this hiss of the falling water sounds a bit primitive in the daylight.