National Distance

My mom had rescheduled her flight several time before the coronavirus took off and, in the end, we decided it would be best if she just canceled her visit to come out and see her granddaughter.

“Don’t worry, ma,” I told her. “We’ll come out and see you, instead.”

But I didn’t really have any plan in place for doing so other than a sudden opening my summer calendar where my trip to Glacier National Park had been canceled. United Airlines had given me a credit for $300 after I’d learned that most of the park wasn’t going to be open. I could’ve used the credit to buy tickets to Michigan. I had the money to make the trip and I had the time but I wasn’t sure I had the moral authority.

Where we live, up in sparsely-populated Humboldt County, we’ve been spared the brunt of the COVID pandemic. For one thing, there’s very little to do here indoors. Our usual recreation involves drifting down foggy morning beaches where the water is ice-cold, but the scenery is majestic or hiking through mountains which have no superlatives and are near no population centers but are, none-the-less inspiring and wild. That is, the whole point of living in a place like this is ‘getting-away’. No one comes here to stand in a crowd. Sure we’re lacking a bunch of amenities that you’d find in places with crowds, but it’s a trade-off and one that showed itself to be advantageous after the pandemic. They even had spots on the local radio stations comparing our county’s numbers with other counties across California ending in the suggestion to stay local for the summer because this place was so comparatively safe.

Unfortunately, I’ve always been lousy at heeding warnings. I’m restless and I guess I still have a little too much of that teenage feeling of invincibility. In May, after the semester ended, I furtively sneaked down to the Bay Area to camp for a night and go see a friend I hadn’t seen since Christmas. I spent a night in the city, but I didn’t feel guilty about it until I came back, wondering if I was carrying anything back up to the pristine redwoods. I felt like patient zero on the drive back. But I kept my distance in the grocery store and washed my hands a lot and the county’s numbers never started going up, so I felt like it’d been ok.

The greater challenge came when my mom started calling, barely managing to hide her urgent need to see her granddaughter. Since she’d canceled her flight, the need to connect seemed to have grown disproportionately. The time that had gone by compounded with the distance between us was beginning to tell on her. And, in truth, I couldn’t help but to feel like the Skype calls were becoming such a thin approximation for interacting with a toddler. I think the biggest blow came when my daughter started trying to offer my mom food and we had to explain to her that it couldn’t be passed through the computer screen. After that, she lost interest in talking with grandma and I think we all saw Skype for the interactive ruse it was.

Almost unwittingly, I started looking at tickets, much the way I look at home prices and available jobs. Such an activity is the internet’s substitute for contemplation. I don’t go for long walks and think about finding a home, I scroll through catalogs and let the possibilities present themselves, only then do I bother to think about whether anything I’ve found would be tenable. It’s as if everything has been reduced to list of items, a menu for life and we only need continually find something to select from this menu.

And select I did. One day I came across a reasonable direct flight. Covid had brought the prices way down and I had my credit to use. But rather than think about whether it was something I should do, I put the onus on my wife—as I usually do when faced with a burden either of thought or deed.

“Hey,” I yelled from the computer. My wife was in the other room trying to change our daughter’s diaper and at the same time attending a dinner cooking in the kitchen. I’d been on Duolingo—which had become some kind of important ‘work’ for me over the summer. “There’s a flight to Detroit for $250. Should I buy it?” I shouted, without even being sure I was being heard. When no one answered, I sighed heavily, as if I’d been put out and got up from my chair.

In the living room, my wife was wrestling with our 18-month-old daughter, trying to get her into a diaper while trying to get a large container of oats away from her that she’d managed to grab from the pantry when no one was looking. Instead of helping, I just repeated my question from the doorway, looking at the chaotic scene as if it were something totally removed from my life, like watching crows on a telephone wire or my neighbor mowing the lawn.

“Hey. There’s a flight to Detroit for only 250 bucks. Should I book it?”

My wife looked back, unbelieving that I’d be asking something so superfluous when whatever is in the kitchen was clearly starting to burn, but rather than chide me, she prepared to think over the logistics of the situation that I’d neglected in my impetuousness when the top suddenly came off the oats and they showered over the living room carpet, the couch, the rug and the children’s books scattered all over the floor.

“Sure.” She said, with a deadpan delivery. “Book it.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant it, but I went to book the flight anyway. $250 was just too good of a deal. I meant to help clean up the oatmeal, but by the time I finished with the booking, it was already done and dinner was on the table.

Gradually, I began to think about the trip. Between bouts of Duolingo, I had time to contemplate what flying would mean. With a toddler, we’d have a member of our traveling party not wearing a mask—there’s no way she would’ve kept one on for a minute let alone 6 hours—which would make my wife’s and my mask useless in avoiding contact since my daughter would be breathing all the sneezes and coughs of the plane’s passengers and when we got off she’d be breathing right into our faces and into the faces of my parents and my grandmother, who we were also planning on seeing. They were all healthy people, but I didn’t want to be the one to test their health. And what about my daughter? While babies were usually spared sever Covid symptoms, I was hearing more reports of the Multi-System Inflammatory Disease which was infecting children who’d been exposed. On top of that, there was the social question of travel. I couldn’t help but to notice that when I saw people obviously on vacation in my small community, I wanted to roll my eyes. Even up here in the rural redwoods where tourism is fairly important and it’s easy to stay away from people, I resented those who’d made the choice to drive here and have a look around when they obviously didn’t have to. I puzzled over how I could feel this way when I was planning on flying across the country to do something that a lot of people would probably consider even more indulgent than camping in the forests of northern California.

But that’s a big part of the way the world is now We’re willing to give ourselves a pass for reckless behavior because we know our reasons. But, for others, we’re inclined to assume the worst. I had to go back to Michigan because my folks were missing my daughter’s toddler-hood. The last time they’d seen her she’d been crawling and babbling and now she was running and sharing her food. If we waited until the end of the pandemic, who knows where she’d be developmentally. But when I saw the people with out-of-state plates, I assumed they were just taking a trip because they’d gotten bored. So with this selfish logic in place, I decided we had to go. My mom was calling almost daily asking what we wanted to eat while we were there and my dad was pulling all the old baby toys he could find out of the basement. They sent me pictures; the yard looked like playground. I told myself I was doing it for them. I told myself other people couldn’t understand—couldn’t judge—my motives and it was easier to live with the decision.

In the week leading up to our departure, I found myself avoiding mention of the trip to anyone I spoke to. I was frequently doing some syntactical juggling to avoid mentioning it. “Gonna take a little time off,” I told everyone at work when getting shifts covered. I even went so far as to tell a few people I was taking a camping trip, which was true in a way since I was doing a little camping before we left, but drawing these two days into nine was a pretty bold lie. Again, it came down to the personal reason I had for traveling, to allow my parents to see their granddaughter. This wasn’t something I felt I could expect anyone else to understand. Of course I realized that everyone would have some justifiable reason for travel like this and I began to wonder how many other people were creating reasons for themselves to get on a plane that they weren’t telling anyone else about?

I got my answer at the airport. Not in Humboldt, because this airport is tiny and under-funded, especially now that United has canceled about half their daily flights here. But at SFO, I guessed the numbers to be about half, or a little over half what they usually were. I could be way off here. Canceled flights could have artificially brought up the number of people in the airport or perhaps it was only in the domestic terminal and international flights were different, but seeing all these people at the airport made me feel better. I wasn’t the only one taking a risk here. Other families chased small, unmasked children through the terminals, young couples shared drinks in the airport bars—many incongruously still open—and harried professional in suits yammered into smart phones slightly louder through their masks while waiting in line for Starbucks. The scene in the airport was pretty much the same as it always was and seeing it, I couldn’t help but to wonder if this was part of the reason that COVID numbers in America were still rising. Perhaps it is not so much that we are selfish, freedom-obsessed dolts, but rather that we’re all able to find legitimate personal reasons for taking the risks when we dig deep enough and that, in the same way, we think we can be careful enough not to spread anything when we return.

Our flight schedule had been changed due to cancellations and we had to catch three, rather than two flights, which made for a slightly longer day, but our connections were smooth and short at each airport. We stopped at O’Hare to find the place looking as busy as ever, unlike SFO, it didn’t look affected at all. It probably would’ve been surreal to contemplate the sea of masked faces surging past us, but by then we’d become accustomed to it.

Despite the enforced social distancing, everyone in the airport seemed to share a kind of solidarity in finding themselves traveling during such a troubled time. My daughter, who’s spent most of her life walking rural roads and lingering near cow pastures, was overjoyed to see so many people and she ran around the airport waving at everyone who passed us. Most of these people eagerly waved back to her. Seeing this one innocent and unmasked face in amid the backdrop of anonymous rushed travel seemed to delight a great number of people and I couldn’t help but to feel proud of having such an enthusiastically happy daughter who found no difficulty in making strangers happy.

Of course, the people she made the happiest were my folks. When we arrived in Detroit, they were both obviously very glad to see her after so much time and remarked on how much she’d changed since they’d seen her last. Although they’d seen her on Skype almost weekly, they had very little idea what to expect in person and, like my ability to search homes and jobs without thinking of actually moving or taking a new job, my parents had been able to see their granddaughter without really being able to learn much about her. This is perhaps the problem with our information age in which ‘content’ has become a byword for ‘filler’. If the objective has been met, say in being able to converse with someone face-to-face, or walk around an old neighborhood using Google Maps’ street view, than we can consider the task fulfilled while, in reality, the heart of these interactions is based on ‘content’ not in the fulfillment of the object. In other words, it’s not enough to see. We must also feel and that’s something which is more more difficult to simulate.

We managed to stay pretty low key while in Michigan. I saw a couple of friends. We stayed outside, but the impulse to embrace after a long absence was too great. Again, I’m sure that most people are making this exception for the people they care about; it’s a very difficult temptation to resist.

Mostly, we hung out in my folks’ backyard. My dad had set a swing up for my daughter and she marveled at the possibility of having something only found in the park only for her personal use. It would’ve been difficult to get her away from it regardless of what was going on, but given the circumstances, we were happy she’d found something to distract her. The swing became the focal point of our visit. At any moment, someone was out there with her and everyone else was watching. There’s something healing in watching absolute contentment. My daughter could’ve stayed out there all day and she nearly did with everyone on shifts pushing her. Watching my mom push my daughter on the swing, such a simple thing, the reason for the risk seemed plain. We had to fulfill this human function. We had to see each other in person.

If the fault was anywhere, it was mine for moving across this vast country and having a daughter was has grandparents who live 3,000 miles from each other. Perhaps this pandemic will allow us to see that we have not yet conquered the spaces that separate us, though we have made a valiant effort with the mail, highways and internet. The space of America, after nearly 100 years, is once again proving to be something insurmountable. Many people of my generation, having lost their jobs in distant cities and worried about their aging parents are moving home again. Perhaps they, too have begun to feel all the space between families weighing upon them at night when they are lying in bed and tracing the steps of their lives.

…

Having already done it, traveling back felt much less risky. After just one trip, it felt routine and we slogged through the series of airports in reverse to arrive back home, no longer with the eager forward momentum of travelers, but with the perfunctory movements of someone making their way home again. I tried to read. My daughter slept on my lap and woke up and squirreled around before we landed back in SFO. At the gate for the last flight, they made an announcement about fog that could possible force the plane back. Even from the skies, the region where we live has an impenetrability about it, behind the coastal range, buried in the shadow of redwood slopes and the surging, tsunami-prone sea. As the last flight dropped down toward our tiny airport and entered a wave of wool-colored fog, I felt the traveler’s peace at returning home and the anxiety about leaving was gone. We had gone to challenge the space that both protects and alienates us: an American tradition and, like all traditions, one not easily subdued.

I’m still waiting for my test results, but already the distance that separates me from everyone else, from the rest of America, has begun to accumulate. At night I feel it weighing upon me and I watch the planes crossing the skies, knowing that everyone up there felt it, too and found a reason for defying it. I can only hope they all wash their hands as much as I did.

Petites Fleurs

In early spring the landlord asked if we were going to do a garden in the raised bed behind the house. He said this while we were standing in the backyard, looking at the patch of naked earth. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I picked up a dirt clod and let it fall from my hand. I told him we’d think about it.

The next day, after I’d forgotten all about it, he came over with a bundle of bamboo poles. “You can use these for the peas.” He said. “Sure,” I said, not quite sure what he was talking about. I left the bundle of bamboo poles leaning against the wall by the back door.

The poles stayed in their bundle for a few days until I crossed the small backyard one afternoon at midday and almost ran right into the landlord emerging from his garage, paint-spattered and in the rollicking good humor of someone who’s been getting things accomplished. I’d been inside trying to pull a composition class together on the computer all day.

“You want seeds to plant?” He asked after greeting my daughter who was also tottering around the backyard in equally good humor, despite her having accomplished nothing that day. “I’ve got plenty of seeds. I’ve decided I’m not going to mess with a garden this year, so I figured you guys could have my seeds…if you want ‘em.”

This was getting to be a bit much. So I worked myself up into a polite refusal, but my voice took on a discordant, complaining quality and I came off sounding like I was afraid of the work, rather than being too busy and just not interested—which, I guess is sort of the same thing. When the landlord tried to wear down my resistance—probably noting how easy it would be to do—so, I turned treacherous and told him to talk to my wife.

“Um, yeah, maybe,” I responded, edging toward the door. “Gina usually does the gardening. I’ve been pretty busy. I’m not sure when I’ll have time and she’s usually the one…I’ll ask her.”

All this awkward dithering really wasn’t my fault. It was the result of a communication problem that’s grown up between generations. My landlord’s generation seems to prefer the straightforward approach, where my generation seems to have developed a less-than-confrontational approach. It’s something you’d read in a sociology textbook. For example, how in some cultures, it’s considered rude to say ‘no’, how there are all these ways of ‘signaling’ a negative response without actually saying the word. Those familiar with the culture recognize the signs, while those who aren’t familiar with it will plow through until they get the word they’re looking for. I felt like I was being forced into a ‘no’ I didn’t want to say or couldn’t culturally, I mean.

Not that I cared about trying to do a garden. But the previous summer, the thing had been a hell of a flop. After we’d planted the seeds, I’d watered weeds for a few weeks before we pulled ‘em up and planted starters that reluctantly took off and then, overnight, went to seed and grew faster than the weeds had, hefty as they were with bitter herbs and greens and then we ended up eating these strange stews all winter trying to finish the stuff off.

I was also having a hard time working up an interest in a garden because I didn’t even know if we were going to stay. There was a good job in Ukraine that I’d been going back and forth on until I finally decided just to apply and then just to poke the right people for references and then just to do an interview and then just to answer some more essay questions and prepare for a second interview. I had been hoping, for my family’s sake, to sort of haphazardly stumble into this job and into a new life back overseas, but the process was getting so drawn out and all these doubts had begun to creep in and I’d had to keep talking about living in Kyiv, which was driving my wife crazy.

Every afternoon, when I’d finished administering life support to my online classes, I was taking marathon bike rides in attempt to clear my head and figure out if I should continue to pursue the job in Ukraine. I was becoming terrified of getting it and, at the same time terrified of refusing it for fear of turning down something so obviously ideal. I rode along the bay, out to Manila and past this wreck of a beach house that was for sale for an insanely low price. I’d get off my bike and go into the backyard and pretend I’d bought the place. I’d look out over the garden and imagine planting a garden my own way, with no landlord giving me bamboo poles. I saw myself building green houses to grow peppers and tomatoes and not having a plot bristling with nothing but tough and stringy dinosaur kale.

The beach house was dumpy enough, I could’ve afforded it. The roof sagged. The wall sockets all looked fried and it was in a tsunami zone that I think couldn’t be insured. Not that I was really planning on buying it, but thinking of buying it and all the work that would have to be done kept my mind off the Ukraine thing. It was nice to think of my daughter growing up close enough to the ocean to hear it when the tide was up.

After a month of long bike rides and indecision, I asked to withdraw my application for the job in Ukraine. I think the deciding factor was the idea that I was going to have to either sell or store the damn washing machine and dryer. For some reason, that detail, more than anything, made the potential move this awfully insurmountable thing. It wasn’t the corona virus or the idea that we’d move only to be quarantined somewhere else, or, worse yet, that we’d clear our home out and be told we couldn’t move—those things were secondary. Mainly, it was the damn washing machine. Just thinking of touching that thing made me feel tired and apathetic.

Probably the day after I withdrew my application, I came home and found Gina had gone ahead and started the garden. The soil had been drawn into rows, the hose was out and the box of seeds the landlord had brought over was in the grass next to a small gardening shovel and a couple of earthen pots that, at various times had furnished us with basil for a month or two before the plants died. The lawn smelled like cold water warming in the sun and my daughter was running around naked, her mouth lip-sticked with dirt.

I could’ve stayed to help, but I needed to reconcile myself to the Ukraine decision and I went camping for the night instead. I hoped that I’d be able to come back after a night in the woods with a better understanding of my own mind.

Of course, when I came home, the next afternoon, I still had no idea what my mind was nor about what I wanted, but the garden was fully underway and since I felt bad for shirking it for so long, I decided I’d try to put some work into it. I turned the hose on and stood there, watching the wind catch the spray and blow it against the house.

In case you’re keeping score, this is a full six weeks after the landlord had approached me and dropped off the bamboo poles. I couldn’t help but to think he was watching me from his window thinking “that man is either the stubbornest or the laziest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever met.”

Once I got started and avowed to make it a decent garden, there never seemed to be enough to do. Or maybe I never knew what to do. My friends who plant gardens talk of being in the garden all day. I imagined them on a Sunday, sun hat on, phone turned off, sun tea brewing in a glass decanter on the lawn, doubled over and grinning with the worthwhile exertion, ankle deep in dirt. But when I tried to emulate my friends’ assumed example, I’d roll up my sleeves only to pull up a few weed sprouts, spray the mess with a hose and look around and realize there was nothing left to do and I’d only been outside five minutes. I had to keep asking my wife “what now?” Until she finally just went out there with me, tired of being bothered.

When we were both looking at the pea sprouts and trying to figure out what the bamboo poles were for, my daughter ripped up all the mint we’d grown and ate the plants, stalks and all in great nervous gulps, the way a dog eats grass when it has a stomach ache. The mint was about the only thing that seemed to have been growing and now it was gone. We went back inside without determining what to do with the bamboo poles.

I can’t say I ever figured out what to do, but I began to appreciate the process of trying to figure it out. I’d go out, stare at the dirt, imagine things growing, wave the hose around, pull a few weeds and call it good. It gave me an excuse to stand around outside with my shoes off and lie down in the grass afterward, even if it didn’t look like much was happening.

That is, until this Mickey and the Beanstalk morning when I went out and found that the patch of dirt was turning into something resembling a garden. I half-considered going over to the landlord’s and asking him what he thought of my efforts, but then realized how obvious that would seem and decided to wait until we both happened to be in the backyard and then I’d very casually say something like “Yup, figured I might as well put those peas in the ground.”

Late May, it turns out, is a very fecund time. Only a day or two after the garden began to emerge, my wife decided to take a pregnancy test. Two blue lines, like filament, gradually bloomed over the paper in the plastic wand and, after that, I took my gardening duties more seriously. It was my only means of cultivating the spirit of things and preparing for the future.

Through May and into June, I weeded, unraveled the hose, and raveled it back up again; I even offered to mow the landlord’s lawn to extend the work that seemed to spill out of the garden right up to my door. I weeded areas in the yard that didn’t need weeding. I pulled up all the horsetails up by the driveway and I raked up the rhododendron blooms that had encrimsoned the yard. Some days, I just stood out there like a scarecrow, looking over everything, grasping the earth with my toes and sighing.

The winds over the ocean grew in constancy until the spring was being blown away by gusts in the afternoon and freshets all evening. Sometimes, at night, I could hear the ocean roaring even after the wind quieted down. It was hard not to think of those dark waves rolling out of the Pacific, swollen from the waters of the Yellow River, the Lop Nur, the Syr Darya, Volga and the Dnieper River running out of Ukraine, draining toward me. Something in that hollow booming of the tides resounded with the lives I had evaded to get to where I was.

I hadn’t been offered any work for the fall. The budget was being cut, classes were being reduced. The fall schedule came out without my name listed with a class. Had I given up a good opportunity to stay here with this billowing salt wind? This resting place of the world’s rivers and wind? As often happens in the summer, the landscape seemed to whither, the roads out of the area successfully closed off, blocked by wildfires and landslides. I stayed huddled near the garden in the daytime and went back to taking long bike rides in the evening. The derelict beach house had sold, or, more likely, had been repossessed by the bank. The ‘For Sale’ sign had been replaced with a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. I rode by without stopping, doing the whole circuit around the bay, just pedaling without trying to get anywhere.

One day, after a long bike ride, when my daughter was in bed, I went out to rake up the rhododendron blooms in the last hour of sunlight and found the bush was green and the blooms were gone. There were only a few left on the ground. Enough to pick up with my hand and throw over the fence and even that felt redundant.

I woke up the next morning and stared at the garden. There was nothing to do there, so, I took my daughter to the park. She likes the swing, so we hung out there. Every time I’d try to coax her into playing on something else, she’d shake her head and kick her feet until I thought “Why am I bothering her? She likes the swing. Let her stay on the swing.” I felt like such an adult, trying to coax her into my world of slides and jungle gyms, thinking there was something wrong with just staying on the swing. I didn’t want some communication problem to pile up between our generations.

While she swung, I let my mind wander around, out over the ocean, which was already starting to unravel a band of gauzy fog.

We walked home, stopping to pick and eat blackberries and wave to the cows lowing softly in the fields already covered in afternoon fog. I opened the door and heard my wife was sobbing. We came in the house and found her sitting on the border between the laundry room and the kitchen on the floor. My daughter ran up to hug her with blackberry-stained hands. I stood in the doorway with my head down, listening to the anguish in her tears, knowing and being unable to know what it felt like. I joined my daughter in hugging her, all of us sitting on the floor and holding each other. Above us, on top of the washing machine, there was a little packet of cloth, tied up like a package; a little bow.

It was dinner time, but we all just sat around the rickety table, prodding our food around like they do in TV shows after an emotional moment. I don’t remember the transition to bed time, it was like we all just lay down where we were and slept with the fog buffeting the windows like moths trying to get at the light.

That night, I lay awake listening to the ocean roaring and I imagined it overflowing with the waters of the rivers of the world, streaming over the beach on the other side of the dunes and coming up over the fields, like a second, darker horizon bearing dark alluvial soil from all the world.

In the morning, we took our coffee out to the garden and had a small burial in an empty patch behind the staked pea plants. We pushed a few stones into the soil as markers.

We took the morning off and went to the beach. My daughter pointed to the dogs and the starfish and made excited noises. My wife and I smiled sleepily. The wind was always easy in the morning and the tide was down.

I got an email a few days later. The college was going to offer me a class for the fall and maybe an opportunity to do some other work. I started getting things together and stopped thinking much about the garden. I felt good if I remembered to water it once a day. By now, everything looked like it could take care of itself.

A week or two went by and then, one morning, after watering, my wife came in and told me a cluster of flowers was breaking forth from where we’d pushed the stones into the soil behind the peas. I went to look and found them flowing out of the ground, defying the wind that swept the ground around them. Glowing with life.

While I stood there gazing at these small flower buds rapturously, with tears dangling from my eyelashes, the landlord came by and said “Hey, Jonny! The garden’s looking pretty good!”

Superman's Voicemail

When you wake up at 4am, any morning seems cold and rainy, but on cold and rainy mornings, the world looks doubly harsh and impersonal, especially when you commute by bike. But after a few warming sips of strong dark coffee and the application of a rainsuit, the resulting ride isn’t too bad. The streets are empty and the streetlights reflect in the puddles like pennies at the bottom of a fountain. The only rain I feel brushes off my face in a manner that is cooling and comfortable. Protected as I am from the rain, it no longer seems a harsh and vindictive thing bent on soaking me. It falls heedless of my presence. Almost musical.

...

The warmth from the coffee stayed with me even through the cold spray sent up by bike tires and the colder showers, running through tree branches and tapping the plastic hood and arms on my jacket. Even after my short ride, the water had pooled in every wrinkle. I dismounted to lock my bike up and a small cataract tumbled from my lap.

There was only one person at the bakery over on the production side. The area where the delivery drivers bag the bread was dark and rimed in cold flour, like attic dust. Once I began to move things around, this flour shook out of everything I touched and took to the air.

The other driver arrived after the air was saturated with flour and we began the arduous task of bagging bread for delivery, made especially arduous by the need to double bag each loaf with a protective plastic bag in response to the Corona Virus scare. Generally, for fresh baked bread, as near as I can tell, there’s some kind of rule about using plastic and one that I’m glad to follow. Most bread eaters feel an instinctual abhorrence of a baguette in plastic. Even in Southeast Asia, where bread is seldom eaten (outside Vietnam) and most food items regardless of size or temperature or consistency went into a plastic bag, yes, even in the land of hot soup in plastic bags, I don’t recall seeing baguettes in plastic. There’s just no cause for it.

But now there is, so we put the bread in plastic. It’s not so bad because the night crews baked it and it’s been out of the oven for a while, having long grown cold on the racks. While I was double bagging this bread for delivery, a worker on the production side came over and asked for help. I volunteered with alacrity, happy to take a break from all the bagging and rebagging.

I’d expected some kind of errand with a high shelf or a heavy bucket of dough, but I guess I should’ve known better. I did the production job once and I was utterly exhausted at the end of the shift. The people that work over there are tough. The shift starts at 3am. They scour huge vats of dough, they lift multiple 25 lb. bags of flour at once. They’re not the type of people who would need help lifting or lowering something, in fact this is mostly what their job is comprised of.

Some one else was over on the production side. I smelled him before I could see him, a boozy and bacterial breath was mixing with the sourdough starter and the place was fast taking on the scent of a pile of mildewed rags.

I came around the corner and found the culprit standing there, dripping with rain. His face slack and grayed, perhaps as a result of having been in the rain too long. He was shivering uncontrollably.

This happens often enough. Nothing else is open this early in the morning. And someone who’s been roving around all night alone finds something irresistible in the bakery’s warm beacon of light. Initially, they are drawn to it, probably meaning to do no more than look in the window or see if there’s a discarded loaf or two in the trash, but when they arrive, the quaint scene of dough being rolled on a long wooden table through the rustic, flour diffused light is simply too much for them. I imagine these people look in and see Christmas morning. The warm light and the smell of baking bread stirs some instinct among even the most wayward for homely comfort and stability. During the day, perhaps they would spurn this scene for other company, but at 5 in the morning, even the most unrepentant wanderer feels the need for some kind of warmth and companionship, especially under the dull but soaking rains of the pacific northwest. A glance back over the shoulder is sufficient to realize that the rest of the town is still asleep under the dark sheets of rain that have been falling through the night. There is no place for coffee. There is no one to bum a smoke from. There is only the coldest and darkest part of the night to wade through cold and alone. And here is a bastion of warmth and possibly companionship. Who could resist just peeking in the door and saying ‘hi’?

But as in other small and rural communities, methamphetamine has made inroads here and these heads that peek into the doors of the friendly night kitchen often have little idea how obviously the drug has affected them. They have been alone for many nights, kept awake by the drug and adverse sleeping conditions. As tired as everyone in the bakery is, no one is quite on par with the shaggy, tottering, skittish sleepwalkers who come to the door with all manner of unreasonable pleas. Some are sensibly asking for bread—still a request we can’t indulge— but others want the phone, others have a cart full of magpied items that are dropping all over the parking lot and want a piece of rope to tie it down and others are clearly in search of company, but a tight baking schedule, lack of room and, often, inability to understand the speaker, make this impossible. What others want is incomprehensible, perhaps even to themselves. Most of the requests are made politely, but in the strange over-politeness the seems indicative of use of the drug, as if being polite will somehow make up for the absurdity of the situation.

And the most jarring aspect for the bakers, is that these faces often appear out of nowhere. There you are measuring, kneading, shaping, deeply absorbed in your task when you feel a presence. The windows are dark. There’s no one around for miles. The stillness of the night reigns outside and, yet, something is different. The flour falls in a different way through the air. Follow its source, the eddy of a breeze and there, the door, the door is open and peeking through the seam is a face, one whose intentions in this still and otherwise undisturbed night are unknown. No one likes this kind of introduction. To be scared usually sets one person very quickly against another. Even if the scare occasioned was unintentional. The bakery worker assumes a stern air, both annoyed at being interrupted and bluffing in case there is some nefarious reason this person has come to the door in the middle of the night. While the face in the door may have had the most reasonable request, there are simply too many things going against them for that request to be considered. It doesn’t hurt that the excessive politeness often causes them to ask in a way that assumes a negative reply.

“Uh, I couldn’t use the bathroom, could I?”

“Of course not,” the production worker answers, thinking: ‘You scared me. You look haggard. I have a job to do. It’s 3:45 am and I’m alone in here.’

Of course, all the face in the door hears is another ‘no’. This one issued from the dreamy hearth of a night bakery, what looked like it might be a last refuge of kindness, but it’s not to be.

There is a too-long pause, but eventually the face pulls back into the night and for a while it will swim through the dark outside the bakery, surfacing near the glass like a shark in an aquarium and then, in a clatter it will go back into the night to await the same stages of rejection and disapproval in the morning, when the town wakes up and the face is inclined to go asking for other things, in other places in the same dejected tones which preclude negative answers.

But the man who stood at the door on this morning was different. His eyes weren’t quite so red. His attitude was more sullen than skittish and probably because the production worker wasn’t alone, she had let him in use the phone—usually something we frown upon, but, nonetheless a request that is granted by most employees who, perhaps at one time or another, have also needed to use the phone of a stranger. But the man was unable to use the phone, not because he was inebriated or uncertain how to go about it but because he was shivering so intensely he can’t hold the receiver to his ear. How he managed to press the buttons in this condition is a mystery.

This was where I walked over. The gray-faced man was spasmodically shivering, holding the receiver to his ear with his eyes opened to owl width, because he was surprised by something or because It kept the water dripping from his hat out of his eyes wasn’t clear. He looked like someone trying hard to stay awake on a long drive. Seeing this strange expression, I started into the “you can’t be in here” speech but stopped short when I saw the state of this guy. He was absolutely soaked and all he was wearing was a t-shirt which was wet enough to cling to him like milky shrink wrap. His back was muddy. Either he slipped or he’d been sleeping on the naked ground, which is something that anyone who’s ever spent a night outside knows is the best way to lose what little body heat you might still have with you. His baseball hat was dripping, oozing water from its twill like it’d been recently used to scoop water from a river.

“Damn.” I couldn’t help but to exclaim. “You’re soaked, man!”

The owl eyes regarded me and for a moment, I wondered whether he’d understood me, but it seemed he was only trying to coax out a response from his trembling lips.

“I’m t-t-trying to call my g-girlfriend” he managed to exclaim through teeth chattering so hard I thought they’d break. “We had a f-f-fight—Kimmy?!” He suddenly asked the phone, but it was just her voicemail and, from what I could tell, not the first time he’d reached it as the production worker had given me to think he’d been in there calling for a while already. But the way he’d said the name. It was obvious the guy was getting scared. He’d been literally left out in the rain and a night of drinking had rendered him incapable of forming a clear plan. He had nothing with him and I doubted he had any money. Everything was closed and, with shelter-in-place orders, even in the morning, nothing would open. I’d even read that the police were holding off on investigating a string of burglaries because they wanted to maintain social distancing. There was nowhere for this frozen guy to go. Even our homeless shelter didn’t keep regular hours. If anything, early morning was when it turned people out, rather than accepted them.

“Dude,” I began in the way of anyone trying to help, but not willing to commit to anything. “You’ve got to get warmed up. You’re hypothermic. You should let me call you an ambulance.”

He shook his head. He wanted none of this help.

“My g-g-g-girlfriend’s just s-sleeping. If I keep calling, m-maybe I can wake her up.”

The problem was he’d been drinking and judging by the smell, I’d say it was a lot. He was no longer drunk after his night in the rain, but if his girlfriend had been drinking anywhere as much as he’d been and was somewhere warm and dry, there was no way a ringing phone—one that was probably muffled by a purse or pair of jeans—was going to wake her up. He’d been in there calling for a while and his shivering was so violent, something else was called for.

I took him outside to the thrift store next door. I’d often seen donations dropped off after business hours and the resulting messes when people decided to rifle through them in the middle of the night. While we tried the area around the dumpster, to see if there was something dry this guy could put on. I continued calling the girlfriend on my cell. What was so exasperating and surreal was that the shivering man’s girlfriend had one of those outgoing ringtones, a snippet of a song that I could only imagine must’ve been maddening to him when normally calling her, to say nothing of how ironic it was now its impotence.

“...I’ll be here to saaave the daaay/ sUperman’s got no-thing on me/ I’ll be here to sav—Hi, this is Kimmy(!), I can’t get to the phon—”

I hung up. The rain had let up a little, but it was still steady and I was getting wet rummaging around in by the dumpsters listening to tinny snippets of bad pop songs.

“Look,” I told my friend, trying to make some kind of executive decision. “You’ve got to get out of the cold. We don’t have the ovens on in there” I said pointing back to the bakery and you need a heater and a change of clothes. I think your best bet is to go to the fire station. It’s right down this street.” I said gesturing down 10^th, not sure if that’s where it was, but knowing it was close.

But he was set on his course of action.

“She d-didn’t answer?” He almost seemed surprised, like he expected call number 8 to be the one she couldn’t refuse.

“No and she’s not going to. It’s late and she’s asleep. You need help now.” I said, using the kind of clipped sentences it seems first responders find so efficacious. “Go to the fire station. Ring the doorbell and ask if they have some way for you to warm up. If they don’t answer, there’s a shelter less than a block away. I don’t think they’re open, but by the time you get over there maybe they’ll be someone there to help you.”

“Can I call and leave a message?”

I started to sigh, but checked it, redialed, handed him my phone and waited, maybe a little too peevishly, while he called again. I could hear the strains of the ‘Superman’ issuing from around the folds of his wet ear. I made a mental note to wash my phone off when I got back inside.

The song abruptly ended, as if introducing Kimmie. Her peerky voice came on after the song like someone who’d made the resolution to never let anything bother her. No wonder it sounded like this, being beseeched as it was by a soaked and shivering man with terrible breath in an empty parking lot so early in the morning. For as far away as she was, and as nonresponsive, she might as well have been Superman. That was the impression I had at the moment, watching this guy patiently listening to the long-winded outgoing message He might as well have been asking for Superman’s intercession.

I gave him space to leave his message, but I couldn’t get far away enough to avoid hearing part of what he said. The ‘p-please’ and the ‘freezing’ and the ‘I love you’. It was every desperate phone ever made after a fight when, after the slamming doors and the callous words, one person finds that they are the loser in the ambiguous contest, that after the insults were exchanged, they are the one standing hungover in the five am parking lot with no idea what to do next. This is when they realize what it is that they need, that which they so easily take for granted.

He handed me back my phone and it was then that I noticed he had “Kimmie” tattooed in fairly fresh Spencerian script on his forearm. The letters were think, probably each about a ¼ inch across of blackish blue ink. I wondered if this was the result of another fight, the peace offering, a way to anchor the relationship against its tendency to slide into dispute, a reminder that, whatever the problem of the moment, the two were linked together, at least as far linked as the tattoo could make them. I’ve noticed it doesn’t take long before one ceases to see tattoos that are seen every day. Maybe Kimmie had already stopped seeing it and the endeavor had been in vain. It usually is when your actions belie your words. A tattoo is a mute appeal for character—imagine how absurd it would be to hold it up and point to it in an argument—and, as far as I know, as never counted for anything in a courtroom other than incrimination. No one, it seems, can write innocence onto their person, but we keep trying.

And having given me back my sodden phone, the hypothermic man in nothing but a soaked t-shirt and jeans receded from view behind mounting curtains of rain. In the vague direction of the fire station, but clearly hoping that Superman would save him the indignity presenting himself there as the wreck he was.

I walked back in, cleaned the phone off with rubbing alcohol and went back to getting the bread ready for delivery. As expected, I never received the panicked callback from Kimmie. Either she woke up and drove out to get him, or she was beyond the point of caring about his freezing. Even the mightiest of characters can only endure so many appeals before growing indifferent—something Superman would know well.

Coed-19

I was on my way to my Wednesday evening class when another instructor came into the associate faculty room. I stopped to greet her and she launched into a tirade.


“Well I hope you’re prepared to create an online class now.” She exclaimed, throwing her bag down on the desk. “Of course we’ve all got several class modalities to choose from.”


I was already a minute late, but I stopped just long enough to get the clarification. Spring break was being extended by a week so that we could prepare for the possibility remote instruction brough on by the Covid-19 outbreak—which of course, back in mid-March, seemed a ridiculous possibility.

Naturally, community college instructors complain about any such change to their schedule, even when it means an extra week off. We saw the week as an unnecessary infringement on our perfectly crafted schedules.


I was prepared for such changes and interruptions by years teaching overseas where classes are always subject to change. In other countries the heat cuts out, week-long storms flood the streets, kings die and classes must be cancelled, but in the US the only common unexpected break comes from the snow and only about half the country enjoys the possibility of this interruption.


I went to my class that evening and told my students that I’d have to cut the week of writing conferences I had planned; I was a little disappointed, but, as you can imagine, the students cheered at the news that they were going to have two weeks off and after thinking it over all day Thursday. I wasn’t so grieved at the news myself. I left campus with the general rush feeling confident about the loss of a week that was causing everyone else so much anxiety. Of course, restrictions were already being handed down in places like Seattle, but, not planning a trip there, I wasn’t too worried.


For spring break, my wife and I had planned a camping trip with our 16-month old daughter to Mendocino for a few days. We arrived on a clear Friday afternoon and left on a wet Saturday afternoon after the rain clouds moved in, our tent proved itself unworthy to weather any significant rainfall and our daughter decided that she wasn’t going to sleep in such a rude vessel and stayed awake at least half the night crying. I wasn’t upset about the unexpected end to our trip. I had a few days of paper grading to do, but then I’d have another week of a break and if nothing else I hoped to bike out to Patrick’s Point for one more night of camping before the end of the break.


Saturday morning, before we left town, we stopped into a café for some desperately needed coffee after our sleep deprived night. Back in civilization, I decided to check my email. It had only been a day, but the load of emails that had come in Friday evening and Saturday so overwhelmed me that I became one of those reprehensible guys you see seated across the table from a beautiful woman in a comfortable café on a drizzly Saturday morning, entirely oblivious to the potential of the moment around him to provide an even greater comfort that whatever the phone can furnish. You know what I mean. There’s this beautiful scene, steaming coffee, someone to share the table with, rain dripping down the windows and this guy, instead of languorously talking and letting the coffee steam bathe his face and feeling some real poetic quality happiness, is intent on his damn phone. I always imagined these callous bastards to be scrolling through their Facebook feeds. I never expected that they might be trying to digest reams of updates on potential school closures or trying to read through the lines of oblique but potentially startling news.


Shutting down for the rest of the semester? Was the administration really prepared to do such a thing? Weren’t they overreacting? Here I was in a beautiful café, ignoring my wife and my little girl. The place was full of contented people rustling newspapers, eating gigantic scones. Where was the panic? Where were the rubber gloves and masks? The hazmat suits that necessitated such an action as semester-long school closure? Everyone around me was perfectly relaxed. If they were battling thoughts of a pandemic, they were damn complacent about it. I stopped ignoring my wife long enough to tell her what I was reading. She was too busy wrangling our daughter away from other people’s precariously placed lattes to listen. “Oh?” Was all she said from across the café. ‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘That’s all the consideration this deserves.’ I turned off the damn alarmist phone and we went back out into the rain. For all its tininess, Fort Bragg has a lovely library.


Back at home on Sunday, I was still getting messages. Word was expected Monday about the move to remote instruction. And with the first official day of spring break came the directive that obliterated the rest of the break. ‘Transition to remote instruction’. I stared at those words for a while, blinking in disbelief. There was no ‘until’ given. Already it seemed as if this was poised to continue into the distant future. I dragged the computer out to the shed and started working like a battered correspondent trying to get a dispatch on the situation in Abkhazia ready for the telex when the line opened. That is, I was working against the clock, to try to maintain my class, but the entire time I was assailed with questions. Would my students still attend (remote) classes? What tasks could be salvaged and which needed to be scrapped? What would lectures look like? Would another directive come down—the situation at this time was beginning to worsen in Italy, the news was becoming slightly hysterical—would this this work become invalidated? But with so much to do and learn about online classes, I put my head down, ignored these questions and set about modifying, recording and changing due dates.


For me, the real distraction was the sudden inundation of emails offering varied help with creating online classes—emails, I’ll point out as of April 4, I’m still receiving. As classes across the country went online, representatives from various publishers, educational institutions and colleagues began offering tools to make the transition easier. But this wasn’t the hospital and we weren’t nurses in need of masks which were simply to be put on. Each webinar, each new gadget that could be added to our learning management systems required hours of preparation. And as the emails came in thick and fast, people doing their best to support the struggling teachers, the sense inferiority began to set in. If I wasn’t using such and such an app would my class suffer? Were text discussions enough or did I need to augment them with video? What the hell was 5HP and what did I need it for? I’m a teacher, but for the next week and a half, I became a website designer, as I suppose was all must, eventually. A crash course in such things is fine. And my college did a pretty good job of providing one, but at some point, instructors need to be allowed to continue with their work without continual advice on how to improve. Education, being an imperfect science, is already quite ‘improvement’-haunted.  

Luckily, I was slightly familiar with using my online learning management system. For many of my colleagues who weren’t, this must’ve been a hell of a ride. Receiving mountains of incredibly piecemeal information and then having to translate it for their classes’ needs, figure it out for their operating systems and syllabi and then spend all that anxious time copying and pasting ‘shared secrets’ and generated URLs hoping the apps would work. It was like being asked to program some immense VCR and being handed a stack of operating manuals from all the models in existence, excepting, of course, the one you have before you: an immense gleaning of information and ad hoc application with a looming deadline.


When I emerged from the shed a few days before the end of the deadline, I was dusty and my eyes were sore from trying to keep track of countless tabs and various functions. But, I’d created something. I had a class ready to go and I resolved not to bother with it again until classes began.

Of course this resolution died quickly in the continuing waves of doubt that usually lapped over me in the middle of the night, prodding for possible leaks and, after some reflection, there were many. I lugged the computer back into the shed and spent the last weekend patching, click-and-dragging and worrying.


Now, keep in mind how incredibly lucky I am to have had this shed. I put in some 11-hour days out there. If I had been continually distracted say by the normal occurrences of a household, these 11-hour days very easily could’ve become entire weeks of work. If it were necessary for me to play with my daughter or communicate with my wife on any kind of regular basis, I would probably still be working away. Luckily they permitted my absenteeism, provided it was on a limited basis, but consider the difference in this situation between those who own a house with a rumpus room and a backyard (for the kids to play in) and a computer room with a door (that locks!) as opposed to those who rent studio apartments that they share with two kids. The cafés and libraries that might have once equalized these disparate communities are now closed and, as we move into shelter in place, some instructors and teachers will have a much easier time than others. The shed, after all, wasn’t mine. I gave my landlord $60 bucks to use it for a week and now I count myself lucky to have a laundry room to work from, one albeit that doesn’t have a door that latches, let alone locks. So I am grading papers and listening to my daughter crash around in the kitchen while my wife—who’s already doing three or four things at once brought on, no doubt but my recent absenteeism—tries to keep her from ripping her books up or getting into the diaper pail…again.


In the evenings, before bed, often because I’ve had too much coffee and not gotten enough exercise to sleep, I’ve had some phone conversations that have revealed some people are bored or don’t know what to do with themselves now that everything is closed. They talk of reading War and Peace. They talk of finally getting down to writing that novel. I try to understand this reality, but then my computer dings. In the ten minutes I’ve been on the phone, I’ve received 5 questions from students, missed another Zoom meeting and my inbox has reached capacity with the latest batch of offers to help with webinars that are made to sound like something I would be remiss as an educator to not attend. Before I can consider any of this my daughter comes in waving Hop on Pop around with a ‘there you are!’ look on her face and I hear snores issuing from the living room, most likely from my wife who’s been trying to put the little girl to bed for the last hour. “I gotta’ go,” I tell my bored friend.


Finally, there is the inexhaustible topic of disappearing students, something that no amount of trainings or apps will correct. No matter how elaborate or interesting or easy we make our classes, the reality is that about 1/3 of students have ghosted their instructors and classmates for what are probably very valid reasons. Instructors have taken unprecedented approaches and begun digging through course information to find alternate emails and phone numbers for these students. After sending out 3 or 4 waves of emails with ‘Please Respond’ as the subject, I had to resort to making phone calls. I have now made contact with most of my students, but last night, between deleting emails and changing diapers, I managed to glean from my friend who teaches jr. high that he’s only heard from about 20% of his class. He’s resorted to all the efforts I’ve listed above, but there are going to be students that, for whatever reason will now disappear. Usually over the course of a semester, there are one or two. This year we’re going to have a lot more. Who knows maybe they don’t have sheds they can work from either and, once again we’re back to the revolutionary idea that teachers and students struggle with the same issues. One side struggles in designing the course, the other in consuming it, but the work required is really very similar, especially now that we’re all doing it amidst the same distractions.


With any luck, everyone else has a family member as captivating as my daughter. While I might not get as much done as I’d like, I’m glad to be spending more time with her and, in a way, I feel fortunate that this is happening now rather than, say, when she’s 15. For all the 15-year-olds and their parents, whether or not they are instructors in a community college, I can only say ‘good luck’ with this. I hope you had the foresight to build a shed (or partition off part of a studio apartment) before this happened. 

Most of the Time, There isn't a Meaning.

A few people waited in the chairs by the counter, a few others stood in line. The Arcata airport on a weekday afternoon is a desultory place. The travelers almost expect to be delayed, but I was too buoyed by the opportunity to take a trip. I was looking forward to going back to New Mexico. It had been over fifteen years since Mikey and I passed through Santa Fe and crashed at his uncle’s for a few days, barely noticing the charm of the city after a 14-hour drive from where we’d camped the night before in the middle of a Nebraska field. We were moving across the country, part of a crashing wave of early 2000’s Michigan Diaspora on the west coast. We had little more than a backpack’s load of stuff each and now here I was, heading back, waiting in line at the airport with a carseat on my back, a stroller and a playpen and a diaper bag scattered around me like the ramparts of parenthood.

At the ticket counter, everything went well. The great thing about traveling with toddlers is that they can’t charge you for all this extra crap somehow. One would think it would be in an airline’s best interest to charge double for toddler paraphernalia rather than to encourage these young and potentially obnoxious families to take flights. Imagine how much more crowded your flights are with tantruming two-year-olds because the parents realized they could get Jr. and all his crap on the plane for free. Even if he’s screaming the entire way, it’s still better than being in the car with the Raffi CD for 14 hours.


Of course, my daughter is nothing like this. I know every parent thinks this way, but really, she’s angelic, even on planes. We checked everything through at the counter and she was content to just hang out and patter around the airport while we waited to board. If anything, she helped me through the waiting. Normally, I’d’ve tried to read, but with a toddler you’ve got to be up and moving around, which, it turns out, is a much better way of dealing with the stress of travel (there’d been this whole thing about how we weren’t going to make our connecting flight—I’d briefly hallucinated the whole family bedding down at SFO for the night, all our oversized baby luggage spread out at the foot of an SFO escalator—and I was still a little shaky. Walking around with Esme was a hell of a lot more natural than sitting down and pretending to be entirely at ease. If only everyone had the means of wandering between the aisles of waiting passengers and not raised eyebrows. The only problem was that everyone else was trying to calm their anxiety—who knows maybe they’d all risked missed connections, too—with their various devices, which, to my daughter was like an invitation to pry into what was on each screen. Luckily, no one seemed too bothered by her tiny presence suddenly peeking over their knee, reading the contents of their texts, or tweets or whatever.


We landed in Albuquerque in the faded state of anyone who’s had to take more than one flight in the evening. There’s something disorienting about dropping into one city 100’s of miles away only to regard it from the windows of a sealed building briefly, like a painting in a museum and then jettison it a few moments later after takeoff, like it wasn’t the city you were looking for. I watched the familiar lights of San Fran, the city we’d rejected for our destination fade away after guessing at the bridges we were flying over and then we were out over the dark space of the Central Valley, the Sierras and the cold Nevada deserts.


Everything in the airport was closed, but we managed to make it out to the rental car place just before they closed for the night. We got some futuristic white SUV-thing— a “Diva” or a “Kivo” or something— no one wanted that made no sound when it started and seemed to burn gas in erratic bursts. The airport isn’t far outside Albuquerque and within an exit or two we were pulling off the sienna and turquoise-painted onramps, drifting into the garish glow of Route 66 neon and ornamental cactus beds. The motel, as I’d expected, was a dump—they always are, and we put the heater up so high in an effort to shut out the drafty desert night, I woke up around 3 feeling like someone had drained the rheum from my joints and the fluid from my eyes. It must’ve been over 100 with the thing set to high and the room sealed off like a bank vault. It took me a while to get back to sleep. The sheets were stretched too tight or something. I hate that about cheap motels. They pull the sheets tight to make them look crisp, when anyone can see they’ve got bleached blood stains and little cigarette pocks on them. The tightness does nothing but make them uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

In the morning, since we’d all slept so badly, we opened the door to the bright desert morning and coughed, yawned and shivered and all the other things one does when trying to shake the fatigue from themselves. My eyes were still sandy from the heater and Esme, who’d woken up three or four times during the night, was a little groggy, too. Gina, who’d been up more than either of us, was pulling the usual mom thing together and looking better than the rest of us.


When I checked out—I’d already paid online—the bastards charged me a five-dollar cleaning fee, maybe because they knew I’d left the heat up so high. I paid in cash and the three of us went scudding down the abandoned Sunday sidewalks in search of a place that sold darkroast coffee.

There was a rasp of sand under our feet and a turquoise sky overhead, but the sun was a cold, winter star, the color of a rain-soaked lemon growing on a stunted tree.


We found our café and tried to enjoy our coffee, but we’d forgotten Esme doesn’t think much of coffee or of enjoying things in the exasperating adult sense of just remaining still around them. Even the 3-dollar bagel we bought did little to assuage her from poking into everyone’s paper and netbook. In the airport, I’d enjoyed the chance to mingle, but so early in the day, after sleeping so poorly, I wasn’t in the mood to grin apologetically at strangers. We went outside so she could stretch her legs in a place where she couldn’t knock over anyone’s latte.


While there was a patio area, the coolness seemed to have taken it out of order. The chairs were stacked on top of each other and the tables were upside down. Esme and I went walking down the sidewalk. She, leading, shuffling her new fake Chuck Tailor’s with glitter on the toes engaged in her new favorite hobby, picking cigarette butts out for the sidewalk seams. I was a step behind, trying to drink my quickly cooling coffee from one of those café cups that’s always way too damn wide, like a soup bowl, or at least something that would comfortably accommodate several spoons. Why anyone would want to drink coffee out of anything with more than a 3-inch diameter is beyond me; I guess some people want to see their reflection in their coffee as they drink it. Maybe that’s what I was doing, checking out my coffee-gleam reflection, because I looked up to find my baby toppling ass-over-teakettle off the curb, which was one of the higher, squared-off city parking varieties. Shit.


I set the bowl of coffee down and jumped over, picking her up, thinking her fall hadn’t looked too bad, but she had a substantial scrape on her forehead and another on the side of her head. Understandably, she was crying her head off. I tried to comfort her, but out there in the cold, in a new place, away from mom, there was little I could do. I picked up my coffee—now ice cold from sitting on the sidewalk—and went back into the café to hand my tearful daughter off to her mother, who would take her into the bathroom and wash her cut out while I sat at the chair looking through the local paper like I was a regular customer whose daughter wasn’t the one screaming in the bathroom as a result of his negligence.


Luckily, Esme is resilient and within a few minutes, you could almost imagine there’d been no fall into the gutter, if it weren’t for the rapidly forming scab on her forehead. Later that day, while we were driving north into the mountains, she got to see snow and ice for the first time and while it doesn’t make up for my negligence, it at least made me feel better about dragging her 100s of miles away for no clear reason.


We’d only taken the trip because the flight had been cheap and because my brothers lived nearby, but after we’d arrived, and we’d all been through the stress of travel, I seemed like there was really very little benefit for Esme. Sure, she’d get to see her uncles in Colorado and her cousins, but the flights, the driving, the cold, the unfamiliar hotels, etc. etc. seemed like a lot to put her through for a visit. Maybe I just felt guilty about her fall, but I couldn’t help but to think that I was, once again, only doing what I’d wanted, chasing after the same intangible goal I’d come through here fifteen years before with Mikey looking to reach. If it wasn’t here then, what made me think I’d find it now, especially now that I had my life, my family and to some degree my future? Other than the cheap tickets, why had we really come?


We spent the rest of the trip going from place to place, eating lots of great food and having the short conversations you have with people when you’re traveling in a group, when all you really talk about are the other members of your family, saying things to strangers like ‘She’s 14 months’ or ‘yeah, she just started walking’ or ‘We know; she (pointing at my wife) used to live here’. But even that was over a decade ago and here we were, for no clear reason in this place, just sort of looking at it, smelling it, tasting it, like something one would expect a dog in a new place to do.

At last this was it, the vacation, in its purest form. After years and years of trying to inhabit the places I visited, to blend in and adapt, for once, I was just in a place by accident, telling everyone so, like I was trying to see if they thought it was as ridiculous as I did.


I knew that we’d succeeded in taking this idealized ‘vacation’ one morning in Santa Fe when an elderly man approached us while Esme was playing on the snow and asked where we were from. We answered with alacrity and talked with him about Santa Fe for a while to the point where I forgot his initial question, the weight of which didn’t sink in until he’d walked away and Gina asked “How the hell did he know we weren’t from here?” I guess it was obvious because we weren’t doing anything. If you live in a touristy place and you happen to look out your window and see this whole family just standing on the corner, playing in the snow, I guess most people who take one look and think ‘vacation’. It was something about all of us being together. Alone, excepting the people in the Hawaiian shirts or the people drinking umbrella’d daiquiris on the beach, no one looks like they’re vacationing  


By the time we flew back home, I had adapted to the cold, faded lemon sun and the sandy grit under my shoes, but it wasn’t familiar. It was just a place to hold one unique set of experiences away from all the others, a new backdrop for the pictures, a impression to store away until another fifteen years should pass and I begin to wonder if it still matches my memory of it. Invariably, we’ll go back, have another look and decide, yes, it does. The only difference, is that I won’t have the dirty, post-collegiate backpack of possessions nor the car seat. Next time who knows what any of us will be. I can only hope that, when we do go back, no one falls off the curb.

There are no Acts of Love, only Selves of Love

Her crying is wet, hiccuping; she stands at the bars of her crib and coughs out these glottal stops. Each one, another bubble of sadness floating out into the darkness. After a few minutes, the cries become more urgent, the sorrow more keen as if she is asking the dark ‘will no one come?’Her faith in us—the good forces in the world—rapidly ebbing. The screen on the baby monitor flickers on and subsides, flickers on again and, as the cries become a wail, stays on, filling the room with the garish color of periwinkles.

I roll over noisily to wake Gina. I tell myself I’d go in, but naturally moms are better at this sort of thing. She’s nurturing and calm. When I go in there, I only exacerbate the situation and then no one gets any sleep. This is what I tell myself anyway and I roll back over, sighing loudly and stretching. Gina wakes up all at once. She’s already been up twice and has just fallen asleep. It takes no more than a second for her to comprehend the scenario. The myrtle flower light of the monitor, the hiccuping wail, tinny through the monitor speaker, urgent through the walls and tremolo in the kitchen. She tosses back the blanket.

“Do you want me to go?” I ask in a bullshit way.

“No,” She responds, unmasking my bullshit by leaving the room before I have time to say anything else.

Her feet fall heavily across the small house. On the stove, the finger bowls of salt and pepper rattle a little. The candles and picture frames on the bookshelf knock together with a castanet clicking. I wonder if this is her way of letting our daughter know she’s coming. The wail does not diminish. If anything, it becomes even more urgent and then, after the door to the small bedroom with leopard removable wallpaper and a bookshelf full of board books about going to sleep opens, the wail goes back to a hiccuping cry and even from across the house, I can hear how she’s raised her little arms up in her crib to be lifted away from the dark sadness. And once she is lifted, her crying quiets and stops. She wants such a simple thing: to not be left alone because she is very small and unfamiliar with the learned response to solitude and quiet and darkness. For her I know each moment passing in the dark alone must feel impregnated with all of time itself. I remember, even at six or seven lying in my bed and thinking through the dark and quiet until it began to feel like everyone I loved was gone, that the dark had swallowed them and it felt so terrible tears would roll down my checks and I would think ‘my poor mom’ over and over, seeing her gone and then it would occur to me that if I went to her room and just saw she was still there, I wouldn’t have to worry and when I crossed the hall and saw her sleeping, I knew everything was fine, that tomorrow would come as sure as the previous day had. But what did I do before I could get up? Before I could move across the house and make sure my mom was still there? Did I lie there and cry and wail, bouncing up and down in my crib, waiting through dark hours for someone to come and prove the world was still there? What agony to be so long in suspense and then what torture to be so long certain.

The house has gone quiet and I roll back over and sleep. When Gina gets back into bed 10 minutes later, I don’t wake up. But when the cries start hiccuping again and the light of the monitor flares up, I wake up and become restless. I lie there listening, seeing my daughter’s tear-streaked face and her little hands clenching the top railing of the crib. I’m feeling more awake, even to be woken up three times and go back to sleep starts to compromise the quality of my rest, though I’m the lazy one. I pull my courage together and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

“I’ll go,” Gina says, coming up from the bed by straightening her arms, pushing down on the mattress.

“Are you sure?” I ask, already starting to swing my legs back into bed. And she goes, but this time I don’t fall asleep again. I lie there, listening to the cries mellow into quiet thinking about these two people I love, how they’re suffering for each other and how I don’t figure into the situation. How this is the role of dads everywhere, to go back to bed, to only emerge when the situation is resolved or has become completely untenable and no one can sleep. My family needs me and I’m just lying here, preserving myself for work, following the American mantra that doing is all that matters and my ‘doing’, as the man, is not here but at work.

I’m groggy, but no longer tired. It’s almost six. I get out of bed, go out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. In the living room, Gina is lying on the floor, half asleep and my daughter is in her room happily pulling all her books off the bookshelf, one at a time, throwing them behind her with no concern for where they land. I tell Gina to go to bed, to try to get a little sleep before the morning, although I know she won’t. It’s too late for that, but maybe next time I’ll get it together a little earlier.

My daughter hears me and drops her last book before crawling over in her quick and somewhat floppy way. I reach down and pick her up. The tears on her face have dried, but her eyes are still a little glassy and her palms are wet, though it’s difficult to tell if it’s tears or sweat that’s moistened them. Almost as soon as I pick her up, she starts wriggling to be put down and I follow her over to another pile of books she starts to go through. She throws them and laughs now that I’m watching.

Gina goes to bed and I pick my daughter up from her books and show her how to grind coffee and pour the hot water into the press. She watches with sleepy attention. Then we go back to the living room to read and watch the sun come up through the windows and as she turns the pages of the book we’re reading, I’m glad to have woken up, to be here for this moment of being, as spending time with my daughter, no matter how early in the morning, is the only part of my day this isn’t ‘doing’. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known that is fulfilling without an associated sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing to be ‘done’ we just ‘are’ together.

Maybe Gina and I are spoiling our daughter by getting up with her in the night and not letting her cry by herself in the dark hours that are so much darker and longer for her. Maybe we’re not properly preparing her for the rigors of life. For now, I am happy to make the sacrifice to spare her the discomfort of the sadness of being apart from the ones you love. It seems like too grievous a thing to be insisting a baby learn so young and she’s so happy now, playing with these books. How can I deny her when all she wants is to not be alone? Why does she need to learn this terribly American skill at all? Why do we place so much value on the individual? Because their support will one day fade away? Should we not love our daughter to the full extent of our ability because one day we will die and no longer be able to actively supply her with this love? No. Even if I can’t always get myself out of bed, I will always want to go to her, to alleviate her suffering. Nothing could change that. Nothing could undo it.

After an hour, Gina wakes up and in the roseate light of the early morning, the three of us ‘are’ together. We sit there, together, not entirely awake, and relish the opportunity to be without doing. Later the light will spread across the fields and make its customary demands for the day, but for now there’s nothing to accomplish, but so much to be.

Dark Streets, Bright Waters

The generator came on sometime in the middle of the night. Although the power had gone out for the rest of the area, our landlord’s foresight had saved us from sharing the darkness that swelled outward from the town. The bright gibbous moon made the sky brighter than the clusters of buildings and homes that seemed to absorb light without returning any, making the darkness we actually live under apparent. In the light of the moon, the dark buildings looked cold and hunched over.

In the morning, I woke up late and the sun was shining across the fields that can be seen from my bedroom window. The dew had dried up and the cows were tearing at the grasses.

PG&E said they turned the power off as a wilfire precaution in the severe winds. We turned on the radio and checked the local websites while we made coffee. The consensus was this was a quid pro quo with PG&E’s line being ‘You sue us for the fires last summer, we make sure it doesn’t happen again by shutting off the power. Sorry for the inconvenience.’

There was no inconvenience for me. In the middle of the week, I had the day off. I could relax, catch up on work and spend time with my family. After coffee, we set out toward downtown to see if anything was open.

More cars were on the streets than there would’ve been on an average Wednesday morning. There was at once a stillness and a hurried quality in the air, like the little whirs and hums all that electricity produces had to be replaced by something, so everyone got in their cars and started driving. But the noise wasn’t complete. It wasn’t the sound of a town, but more like a country field a tractor has just rolled through. Despite the drivers’ efforts, the silence seemed to be rising.

The first businesses on 11^th st. were closed, but when we rounded the corner to I st. we noticed the bagel shop was open. The wire bins, normally stocked with bagels were empty and the production area behind the counter was dim, the mixers and ovens still and cold. The only thing they seemed to be selling was coffee, but the people who’d bought some, didn’t look at all concerned by the lack of bagels and they sat on the front patio sipping their drinks contentedly and watching passersby with that kind of open, bovine way cafe patrons often do.

The Co-Op parking lot was full. Surprised to see it open, we headed for the door. The place was so dark, I expected to be turned back, but we walked in and were soon in conversation with a clerk who told us that they’d be open as long as there was daylight and that all the refrigerated stuff was all half off. The place was a little warmer and smellier than usual—especially near the cheese display—but no one seemed to mind and despite the empty shelves and dimness of the aisles, people shopped as they would on any other day. In the refrigerated section, realizing how cheap 50% off made everything, I complained about not having brought the car, with our generator, we really could’ve cashed in. But even then, I don’t know that I would’ve bought much more than I did. The ice cream was probably already pretty melty and I didn’t want to be the guy throwing panicked armloads of food into his cart, even if only to save money.

We bought enough for a nice breakfast and walked back home. The streets of town were cushioned with the quiet of a snowfall even in the radiance of the October sun. Many stores were open, only accepting cash and illuminated with daylight. I stopped into the bookstore and the dusty creak of the floorboards and the chill shadow at the back of the store where the light didn’t quite reach gave the impression of a dry goods store 100 years ago.

…

In the evening, I went for a bike ride to the next town over. I wanted to see what nightfall looked like when the lights over the car lots and the drive-throughs were all off.

I rode west out to the ocean and then returned east with the smoldering sun already under the horizon behind me and the stars beginning to shine over the mountains. The streetlights were off. The traffic lights were off; it looked like the whole town was camping. The usual amount of traffic was on the streets, but it was hard to imagine where anyone could be going. Nothing was open. I rode past homes to find most people sitting in their cars, the weird blue light of their phones coldly illuminating their faces. I didn’t see a single candle, nor a lantern. The houses were completely darkened except those—and they were rare—that had a noisy gas generator roaring in the front yard. It looked like some kind of exodus, like everyone had decided to take to their cars and give up their homes, but now that they’d done so, realized they had no where to go.

Noticing some cars in the Safeway parking lot, I turned in. There was only one feeble light radiating from just inside the propped open door, but people came and went as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The parking lot was so utterly steeped in darkness, it would’ve been possible to bump into someone before you saw them coming. Even the headlights of the entering/exiting cars did little to brighten the scene but, rather, seemed only to expose the profundity of the darkness.

Once again, I expected to be turned away at the door. Only one was open and an employee was standing there like a sentinel. I quickly walked in past the rows of checkout counters and found myself in thorough darkness. The shelved items blocking out most of the residual light from the front of the store. Shoppers walked around with the flashlights on their phones. Either they had over-flowing carts or carried only one or two items. There seemed to be only two classes of shoppers. Those who were there for novelty of shopping in the dark and those who were there to clean off the shelves. It would’ve been very easy to steal, but there was so much trust, so much goodwill in keeping your doors open after sundown and such a wholesome joy in the kids giggling and trying to scare each other it would’ve taken some extraordinary need to steal, perhaps Safeway was counting on this. As if to highlight this sense, the customer and the clerk in front of me were talking about little league baseball games and while I waited, I watched three or four families with five or six kids a piece come through the door like they were entering the doors of a fun house. The transformation of the ordinary was better than a spectacle that set out to be extravagant. Everyone, even the adults, seemed pleased with this result.

Back out on the street, the moon was up and, again, the town was darker than the mountains and the sky overhead that reflected the moon light more than the buildings and streets. I rode past a few more people sitting in their cars staring into the blue light of their phones, radios turned up against the silence. The brightness of the moon only increased as I rode back out toward the ocean, into the fields, away from the dark, furtive town.

I crossed the Mad River and, looking down in the moonlight, I saw three river otters, a family, unperturbed by the blackout, splashing in the silver moonlit waters, gleefully enjoying what, to them, was surely a very bright night. I watched them until they splashed up the river and out of sight and then continued riding back to the darkness on the horizon that marked the next town and my home.