Conference Persona

 When visiting a few weeks ago, my mom commented on our kid’s routines. “Wow, you really keep them on a schedule!” She had said, or something to that effect. Praising my wife and I for being diligent about things like brushing teeth and bedtime—which I’ll admit fluctuates pretty wildly despite my wife’s best efforts. When I come home and haven’t seen anyone all day, I tend to want to draw things out and sometimes, bless her, she’s too tired to keep reminding me that 7:30 passed half an hour ago. For my part, I always assume each night that we’ve decided (tacitly, of course) to do things differently. I don’t know why I always think this. 

But, thankfully, I’m not writing about children’s bedtimes, or even the importance of keeping children on a schedule. I’m writing from LA, while at a conference, and completely off my routine (for adults, we call a schedule a routine to take away the aspect of volition). Before I left, I looked forward to the casting off the mundane and doing something different in a different place. And while I haven’t been entirely disappointed with the trip, it’s made me incredibly aware of how important my own routine (or schedule) has become to me. 

First of all, eating. My family helps to keep me in check with regular eating habits. When I’m on my own, I will delay meals all day, especially when I’m not in a place where I can get something I want, or if the price is too high. For example, breakfast is being offered at the hotel right now, but I can’t bring myself to go down and eat the lukewarm potatoes or the sugary instant oatmeal packets. I probably should, I have an all-day conference, ahead of me, but I think they will serve lunch. Which reminds me, I need to find the tickets they gave us for that. 

Second, there is sleeping. Without kids to put to bed, hell, without the whole usual bustle of the day behind me, sleep, especially in a hotel room, feels pretty arbitrary. Sure, I feel tired, but when I’m in the room getting ready for bed, I feel just as much like I could put my clothes back on and start the day as I do to get in bed. When I am in bed, I read. Normally, I read a page or two and I can’t keep my eyes open, but in the hotel, pages become chapters, and chapters accumulate into those all-night reading session I used to do in the 24-hour diner when I was in college. I think almost excitedly “maybe I’ll read the whole book tonight!” but since I am now biologically incapable of sleeping in past 6am (even with the hotel blackout curtain down), this is not a good idea. So, I reluctantly turn off the light and put my book down. Sometimes, with the whole family in a small hotel room, I’ll admit it gets warm, and there are the various sounds of everyone sleeping and, on hotel beds, my kids tend to want to sleep sideways for some reason, so I often have a pair of feet pushed against my back, sometimes kicking. But these things, I don’t know, they add to the soporific quality of the night; it’s hard to resist their inducement to sleep, and even if I wake up several times in the night, I usually have no trouble falling asleep. When I am in the hotel room alone, however, I put the book down and hear the hotel through the walls. I hear the murmurs and booms of conversation, I hear the freight train whistle outside, I hear the air conditioner kick back on. So, I put my ear plugs back in, but sleeping on my side, one of them is mashed between the pillow and my ear canal. I am aware of the pressure and discomfort and most of the conversation next door (or above me?) still filters through. I think of nothing and go into something like a self-induced daze. It is not sleep, but it makes the time go by quickly on the clock. In the morning, I am not sure if I have woken up, or only decided to leave the bed. Either way, I am very tired. 

The conference itself is completely out of my routine. I am not accustomed to being around such large numbers of wideawake and made-up people. They seem to strut and do everything in a way that, at once, draws attention to themselves and away from me. As one in the crowd, I feel my sense of individuality threatened, and, to mollify it, I find someone who seems amenable and begin to talk their ear off, until they have to politely remind me that we are not there to talk, but to go to sessions to listen to others talk. Oh yes, I nearly forgot. The reason I am here, a proposal I sent in over six months ago. A proposal that was accepted, and then planned into a 45-90 minute workshop session, but when I inquired about length was given a scant 15 minutes, actually ten, as five should be reserved for questions. 

I race off to find the room where I am to present, someone else is in there presenting, I try to listen, but when they offer a QR code on screen for the presentation slides, I hold up my phone only pretending to scan the code. I am waiting for my chance to speak, hoping I will have an audience more attentive than I was in this presentation. 

At the computer to get set up, there is a tangle of what are called dongles, but none of them seem to offer an old-fashioned USB port. The CPU is, of course, behind lock and key, so there will be no getting to that. I attempt to use one of the armory of dongles to plug my computer directly in, but nothing comes up. Meanwhile, people are coming into room and greeting me, asking which session is this. Is it “Advancing Learners’ Understanding with Motivation, etc. etc.?” I proposed the name of the session six months ago when I was sitting in a café 800 miles from here. I do not know the name of my own session. I tell the woman “yes”, then “no”, and then, to avoid further embarrassment, I turn my attention back to the computer, hoping someone else can tell her what session she is in. 

The interesting thing here is that I used to do this sort of thing—conference presentations, that is—all the time. For years, such presentations where a very regular part of my life. Sometimes I led two or three different workshops in a single week. But since returning to the States and having kids, I propose sessions mainly to stay connected to the world that was once so much a part of my life. However, I have forgotten how to interact with it in the same way, and nothing seems capable of bringing it back. 

Certainly not the presenting itself. I admit, I did a better job today than I did last August at a conference in Berkeley where I was possibly even more exhausted, but, as before, there were only about 10 people in the room, and I can’t be sure how much I was able to reach them with my message. And then my time is up, it’s someone else’s turn to figure out the dongles, and I disappear back into the crowd. 

That afternoon, for lunch, I eat the complementary salad in the sun, but the afternoon, for LA, is cold. I have made the mistake of so many tourists in San Francisco. Hearing “California” and imagining that palms only grow where the temperature is regularly in the 80s, they fail to bring layers. Of course, this is the sunny, palmy part of California, but, in such a dense mass of urbanity, one forgets the ocean is so near with its upwelling of great amounts of cold water and that, after all, it is still November in the northern hemisphere. 

In the evening, I go back to my room and I transfer my attention from the conference app on my phone to the map app where I look for a place to eat. When I get back in the rental car—a necessary choice in LA despite what everyone says about difficult parking and availability of Ubers, etc.—I turn on the directions app and the cold voice directs me through neighborhoods, highways, and warehouse areas where coyotes trot without concern for the barrage of traffic. After I eat and wander around, meet up with old friends, I consider going somewhere else; it is still early, but, there is still more conference tomorrow and all this phone use makes me feel drained in the way that sitting in the car all day makes one feel like sitting down the moment you exit the car. I go back to the room and begin reading, only to find (am I doing this on purpose?) another reason to pick up my phone. God help the single urban dweller in this era, there is no sufficient reason to ever put the phone down!

The most difficult adjustment to being on the conference schedule is that I can’t seem to accommodate a good cup of coffee into the morning routine. The first session is at 8:45. I am about a 15-minute drive away, but my hotel is in the middle of a vast medical campus. I try the hotel coffee—terrible. It is watery and tastes dried out. I arrive at the conference early the first day so to take advantage of the breakfast offering. There are casks of “French Roast”, and I can’t help but to hope, but, again, watery. After two kids, and, thus, a great deal of time spent at home in the morning, my coffee brewing methods have moved away from the American copious-amounts-of-watery-coffee to a more European (or so I imagine) single-cup-of-strong-coffee. I like to be able to taste the coffee and while my sense of taste may have atrophied in my advanced age, I don’t think it’s gotten too bad. Rather, I think many people—in this age of energy drinks—who brew coffee, don’t drink it themselves, hence the wateriness, the rest of us are forced to sip and sigh. Another cup of watery diner coffee. At least its hot.  

My second morning of the conference, I am resolved to have a good cup of coffee. Given my isolated location—despite being in the middle of the city—this will have to mean Starbucks. I have already used the map application on the phone several times to see my options and without getting in the car and driving 20 minutes in any direction, Starbucks is my only option. The map shows three within walking distance. 

The first of them is practically across the street. They open at 6am. It’s already almost 7, so I throw on a sweatshirt and head out into the brisk LA morning. On this medical campus, the Starbucks is not a standalone affair, but something buried within a hospital building. On the street closest to where it is shown, there is no entrance to the building, just the corner of an imposing parking garage. I walk up the block and eventually find three entrances. I select the one closest to where the Starbucks icon was shown on the map. There is a courtyard with picnic tables—a good sign—and among these tables, a sandwich board announcing the proximity of the Starbucks. On the ground are arrows with Starbucks logos—this is the second time while in LA I have found myself following such arrows. Not a good sign. 

The arrows lean to a door which is locked (there’s a trashcan placed directly in front of it). However, from the vantage by this door, I can see another courtyard below and, bizarrely, a pylon for the parking garage with a Starbucks logo on it which gives the impression the Starbucks is, perhaps, in the parking garage. Seeing no other option, and assuming I just need to get to a ground floor somehow, I go into the parking garage where hospital workers are streaming out toward the medical campus all of them in maroon scrubs. I am the only one in street clothing and walking against their flow, I can feel their practiced avoidance of encounter with someone unknown and out-of-step. Despite all the people around, no one makes eye contact. It would be pointless to ask for directions. In the bowels of the parking garage, I find a custodian who seem more approachable. He tells me I need to go out the exit and says something else about a little door or something. I take this to mean that I’m close and head for the parking garage exit. 

I come out at the base of the building where the Starbucks, presumably, is. The logoed pylon is directly above me, but it is a maintenance area. I am surrounded by trash cans, and such. All the doors are flat gray utility, the type that only open from the inside. I exit this utility courtyard and I am back where I started. Alright, the hell with this, I think, I’ll get in the car and drive somewhere. 

The windows are fogged, the sun is coming up and glaring on the windshield, I’m driving up a steep hill with the car directly facing the sun and I haven’t had any coffee. I can hear my wife’s voice telling me not to be frantic. “I’m not being frantic” I respond out loud to the imagined voice. “I’m merely trying to get some coffee!” This is beginning to get ridiculous. 

The medical campus extends for blocks and blocks and is bordered by a highway and train tracks. There is a kind of civilization in the campus area, but it differs from the typical commercial American landscape. Hospitals are supposed to obfuscate. They offer passive, sculpted fronts to the street while, inside, there are bodily fluids, there is pain, and even death. The taboo nature of the purpose of a hospital in our culture renders it blank and sterile and makes it reluctant to offer coffee to those outside its walls. The coffee is only available to the initiated and, most likely, is watery anyway. 

Once again, I scrounge my way deep into a courtyard in search of the icon on my phone and following another custodian’s directions. There is a cold and dark Panda Express and the trashcans have Starbucks logos on them. But, again, doors are locked and, on a Saturday, the courtyard is empty. No workers in scrubs here. I check my phone. This location is closed until Monday. Damn. 

I’ve now been awake for over an hour and have not had coffee. I contemplate just compromising with some hotel coffee. But after all this, it is difficult to resign myself to watery, flavorless coffee. And after all, there, on the fringes of the campus, in a small slice of civilization between the highway, the medical campus on the forested hill from which issue one, two, three coyotes, there is a stand-alone, un-obfuscated Starbucks! I can see it, the logo proudly pronouncing the bounty of steaming hot, obsidian, smoky, cozy warmth. I pilot the foggy car toward the beacon, but the small parking lot is full, the drive-through snakes out into the street and there is no street parking in the small neighborhood this early in the morning on Saturday. I go around the block and contemplate throwing on the hazard lights in a red curb area, but this is a city and in cities, cars can be towed at a moment’s notice, even on a Saturday. 

After circling the block, I notice that in the parking lot, someone has sort of double parked behind the parking spaces and in front of the drive through line (to picture this, just imagine a chaotic mess of cars squeezed into a very small area). I manage to turn the car around in the street and back into the parking lot between parking blocks, light poles, other cars, etc. and put my car next to the other one in an area that almost looks like it could be used for parking. 

The place is busy for a Saturday. I guess it’s the effect of the “coffee desert” which everyone in this area must be subject to, at least those without a means of coffee preparation wherever they are staying. The drive-through is getting priority, mobile orders are second to be considered. I stand there watching employees prepare drinks for people who are not even there, calling out names, and setting them on the counter where they begin to get cold. No one pays attention to me. I’m trying not to feel impatient, but I notice the someone driving a very large van parked in the handicapped spot has gone out to the parking lot. “Am I blocking that van?” I think and begin to feel anxious despite the total lack of caffeine, or perhaps because of it. I continually swivel my head back and forth between the employees who are still ignoring me and the parking lot. A line begins to form behind me. Where these other people have come from, I can’t fathom. There’s certainly nowhere for them to park, and, being LA, I can’t imagine they have walked. 

At last, someone comes to the counter and takes my order. Sometimes, you are lucky when only ordering drip coffee and the person taking your order will get it for you. When you are unlucky, they print a sticker for your drink as if you had ordered a matcha latte with cold foam and sprinkles. Your coffee must wait its turn behind all the other concoctions. I was not lucky, and I watched my plain cup take its place in a long line of cups. But then, miracle of miracles, another employee, or perhaps an angel, emerges from the back room, sees my forlorn and humble cup sitting there with those ready to be plied with syrups, swirls and all kinds of candies, love letters and small messages that the consumer is indeed special. The employee whisks my cup away, fills it with coffee and comes to the counter saying my name not as a question but as a statement, a glorious affirmation that, at long last, I have earned my coffee. 

I cradle its munificent warmth, stride to the car (the van is gone, looks like he managed to get out), and take a drink. It is every bit as watery as the hotel and conference coffee, maybe even more so because of all I have gone through to get it. I laugh to myself and realize that, some mornings, one is just fated to watery coffee. However, tomorrow, my last day in conference land, I am going to get here earlier and I will put my drink in line with the others and request that multiple shots of espresso be dumped in, then I will get back on a plane and return to my family and my comfortable routine, largely free of apps, people wearing perfume, and poorly brewed coffee. 

 

 

Remapping Desire Lines

  

I wrote to a friend recently that, after having kids, we allow someone else to take our outward-facing position on the world. 

At the time I wrote this, I was just thinking of a way to explain to my friend, who has no kids, who is traveling the world working on his PhD dissertation, what my world is like these days. I should also mention that he and I met while working with a traveling acting troupe in Argentina and I’ve only seen him once, and very briefly, since those halcyon days which, it would seem, he is still living. I was also trying to be succinct given that I was working on a hand-written letter, and I knew if I didn’t finish it soon, I’d never get it in the mail. 

But the phrase keeps coming back to me, keeps demanding that I consider what it means: “our kids become the part of ourselves that faces the world”. 

When I was young, I sought out new experiences from an early age, not because I was adventurous, but because I was never comfortable in a routine. In kindergarten, I was fine independently playing, but I would cry when I was asked to do something specific, no matter how fun. There was something about having to do something, the request, which is actually a command. I didn’t like the necessity of it. 

Which is not to say I was a brat who answered every request with a grating “no!”. I was almost the opposite, a gentle kid (I think) fairly lost in lala land. When my mom asked me to come in for dinner, or get ready for a bath, I assented, usually. 

But at school, I had trouble with the mundane tasks I was asked to do. I had trouble getting started with them, and once started, unless I could find some personal reason for completing them, I had trouble staying on task. However, this was in the early years of school and there were kids with worse attention problems than mine. I was also a decent reader (living in a house where books were more prominently placed that the TV), so my lack of attention was balanced by my ability to score well on standardized tests, and my teachers left me alone.

However, once I discovered that I could get out of my seat and go talk to other people, my relationship with my teachers became more antagonistic. They wanted me to get back in my seat, and I responded with calling their bluff on the value of the work we were doing. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I spent a lot of energy on what could’ve been put toward trying to learn on basically being a jerk in class because I couldn’t find any personal value in the work we were doing.

It was just me. I had some lousy teachers, too. People who saw nothing but the problem in me and focused their energy (which could’ve been spent thinking of new ways to present stale material) on punishment. Detentions, notes sent home, and red marks indicating disappointment on my papers became the basis of my academic experience. This was balanced with my creativity if play both with friends at recess and when at home—when I wasn’t sulking in my room after bringing home another bad report.  

When I got older, and the world began to open, I rushed at any opportunity to explore it. I was still pretty young when I circumnavigated the busy road I lived on by bushwacking through the woods that surrounded our suburban neighborhood to get to the nearest shopping center. I was amazed at finding myself in the real world alone. I was free to roam through the grocery store, the video rental store and even the parking lot; there was no timeline, no need to get into a car and rush off to the next place. 

I walked through every aisle of the once-mundane grocery store, feeling like each product, each box on the shelves had been remade. The lines painted in the parking lot, the jangle of the bells on the door of the video store, the warmth of the sun. Getting there on my own, the world was transformed from background to opportunity, and it fairly radiated with possibility. 

As I got older, I began to push hard on the parent- and school-imposed limits of my world. I stopped bothering to go surreptitiously through the woods and just biked down the busy road with no shoulder to get to the shopping center. I went against traffic figuring that way I could at least see the car before it hit me. Eventually, my friend Eric and I began to ride to the malls and downtown, which was relatively empty following the economic depression of America’s Rust Belt of the 1980s and early 1990s and very fun to explore. These places amazed me with the wealth of experience they offered and at that point in my life—probably about 13—I became enamored with “place”.

If you know me, and even if you don’t, you know what’s coming, by 19 or 20, I was frequently bouncing between Chicago, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh. Even without a car, I found ways to go to new places, and when I got there, my favorite thing to do was walk around.

I could never understand why friends of mine was so reluctant to take these marathon walks from one end of a city to another. Walking was the best way to meet a place and to see the ephemera which are so crucial to understanding a place. From the window of a car, every place looks very similar, from the sidewalk in Albuquerque, you can see the sand of the desert, in suburban Sacramento, fertilizer grains from the over-watered lawns, iron pieces in the sidewalk bleed a rusty excretion, and blacktop forms waves and ripples in the summer under the weight of truck traffic. 

My perambulatory way of life reached its zenith when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and I spent all my free time wandering around the eminently walkable Armenian countryside. Armenia was probably the best place to make use of my passion for walking, maybe the only place (other than the Appalachian Trail a few years later) where the interest could actually be used as a skill. Through walking, I was seeing differently, and I began to write about what I saw and process the information in a new way. The more I wrote, I could see that these walking forays were an important way of understanding not only landscape, but people, culture, and life. I’m not sure if I wouldn’t been able to see that in my own country in quite the same way.

In the years that followed, my walking efforts were supported by my wife Gina who walked with me through Abasto in Buenos Aires, Barrio San Jeronimo in Asuncion, across the jungle in the middle of Ko Tao, and down Clement Avenue in San Francisco—to name a few. 

Today, we have a catalog of experiences to share, organizable by place, by walks, by wanderings. We found starfruit trees, hilltop views, hidden beaches, giant lizards, and libraries surrounded by parks; we found such wonderful things. We were great partners in this exploration. I still count myself incredibly lucky to have found someone who seemed to appreciate wandering and walking as much as I did. A lot of people like to walk, but they don’t want to spend Sunday walking through miles of concrete, under the unrelenting tropical sun, only to wander through the aisles of an out-of-the-way grocery store.

Before our daughter was born, we returned to California to make a place for her. For a while, we were still able to walk and wander. Initially, she didn’t like to be in her baby carrier, and she’d cry until we forced to return home. Gina and I were ecstatic when, at only three months old, she finally allowed us to walk from one neighborhood to the next. It had felt like an eternity since we’d taken a real walk! I think most people wouldn’t have cared much about this, but to us, it was a major victory to maintain an important part of our lives which we had previously faced leaving behind. 

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was still wandering, still taking bike rides around the bay, still riding out to the small town of Blue Lake, still taking biweekly rides to a grocery store the next town over, all while Gina stayed home with our baby girl. For time’s sake, I shifted to bike riding, but I was still all over the place, when I should’ve been learning to stay home. 

My big transition came when our son was born a little over two years later. For a while, I tried to keep rambling around after bedtime, or during nap time, but, often, before I left the house, someone would wake up, or I’d get home late and find Gina trying to manage an infant and a toddler, and I had to admit to myself that I would find this difficult and exhausting if I were in her place, and so I needed to take some responsibility and stop taking every little opportunity to leave the house and expanding it into permission to take a three-hour bike ride. It took me a while to see that this is what was required of me. 

I think this is where a lot of men, especially younger men, can go wrong. I can almost state as a fact that, had my daughter been born before I scrambled down the goatpaths of Armenia, before I climbed the wall up from the Bay of Kotor on a rainy night, before I lived in a tent for four months, never sleeping in the same place twice in the same amount of time; if I hadn’t found scorpions crawling over rocks, and signs for landmined areas at the edge of the path I was on, and had knives and guns flashed at me, I wouldn’t have been able to settle into my responsibility as a parent. The absence of the memory of these things would’ve tugged at me mercilessly—as mercilessly as the need to find them tugged at me in the first place.

I’d like to say that having children has quieted the impulse to explore the world to its battered fringes, but it hasn’t. I know that, were it possible, I would still pursue a path into unknown, and I’d bring my family with me. As a new dad, I tried to do this many times. I applied for jobs in Armenia, Ukraine, North Carolina, and Colorado without thinking much of the consequences if I were to take these jobs, that is, what it would cost to upend everything and move away from California; I only scented more adventure, more exploration, and I couldn’t resist it. But each time, I had to realize that I couldn’t follow the impulse to any kind of outcome. And every time, I found myself in an agonizing situation of having to turn down the opportunity, and after a while, I persuaded myself it would be best to stop wearing everyone down by embarking on what, by now, were pointless endeavors over and over. It was a lesson that took a long time to learn, about as long as it had taken me to find the value in the work we were doing in school and use that—rather than the requirement, or the grade—as motivation for doing quality work. 

Eventually, I did become comfortable in school, but I had to do it on my terms. I had to mix the assignments with what I was learning of the world through my personal exploration. Simply, I usually had to find my own reason for completing the assignment. A grade, or approbation were never enough for me. It was only when I learned that I could use my understanding (burgeoning as it may have been) to explore a concept, did I begin to enjoy it. In AP English in high school, you read 1984 thinking about the proles’ neighborhood as being like the streets you wander with your friends, away from the school and home and the watchful eye of Big Brother; you read No Exit in college thinking about how everyone on campus is trying to simultaneously impress and give the impression that that are not trying to impress, how each one of us is trying to be a beacon for the others; in graduate school, you read Classical Rhetoric and you think how the words we use are capable of multiple meanings and that this is what creates problems when texting, the affect necessary to completely decode short messages is missing. When I saw the value which resulted from laying critical concepts over my daily life, I was intrigued with what I read, and what I’d been assigned. 

I like to think the lessons I have learned are something like desire lines, the paths we create, often shortcuts, between established paths, when landscapers fail to anticipate (or ignore) how people will move when they plan a park, or college campus. The grass will eventually be worn down, then killed and replaced with dusty, single-file paths. The more we walk them, the wider, the more entrenched they become. When we make discoveries about what works for us— such as walking to discover or applying personal experience to assignments—we begin to create these desire lines in our minds.

But because we have worn down these pathways doesn’t mean that they need to be paved over, or that we need to eschew the sidewalks altogether in their favor. After having kids, I tried for years to maintain my desire lines, until. I realized that I was no longer moving in the same direction, and treading them, though they were familiar and reassuring, was taking me in a direction no longer aligned with my destination.  

It may be cliché, but it’s true that nothing can prepare one for having children, unless, of course, you are the type of person who has long anticipated having children, in which case, you will probably find all you have been anticipating to be true. For those of us, who act more impulsively, who never planned on having children, but one day awoke to realize we wanted to hold a little hand when crossing the street, or share the things we love with someone who might do something novel with them, having children has consequences which reach until the end of life and there is no way to anticipate the ability of another human being, one who is part you, to continue to influence and effect your life. You can have one, or nine, having kids guarantees that your life will never again be your own in the same way that it was. 

I have been continually readjusting myself and my orientation to the world to accommodate my kids, and, I have found that the purpose of this is to move them to the foreground, while I move myself to the background. This realization began when I started to think twice about taking that evening bike ride, so I’d be there to help with bedtime, and when I started turning down overseas jobs, so that we could stay in less stressful place to provide a more nurturing home. As my children moved to the fore of my mind (where they probably should’ve been all along), I changed my way of expecting, and the world I had built up, a tapestry of exploration, shrunk down to something more manageable to mete out to my kids piece by piece, thread by thread. 

This is not to say that I stopped doing things for the sole reason that I wanted to do them. I don’t want this to read like admonishment for anyone who has kids who still pursues their own interests. No, it is only that I had to reconsider the outcomes for my impulses and, yes, sometimes, I had to check these and rethink them because some of them would benefit only me and, in that sense, would become problematic for everyone, me included. 

The walks I take are shorter now, but I still take them, pushing a stroller wagon, loading up on books from Little Free Libraries, eating borage flowers growing in people’s front yards and arriving at a playground. It is the same walk taken at home, in San Francisco, or Victoria, BC because it’s the walk that benefits everyone, doesn’t mean we don’t still find new things along our route. And, the things we find, well, they allow us to start crafting new desire lines, crossing from the well-traveled sidewalks down to the swales and swards in between where we find our own reasons for being there.

I no longer face out, because I am no longer the one determining where we go. Sure, I pick the time to leave (well, sorta’), I pick the destination, but when the way, the pace, and discoveries that lie along the path belong to my kids, I have to admit, despite the agency I may feel, my role is not the same as it was six years ago. 

Before having kids, I would’ve lamented this change, and I don’t know that I ever would’ve willingly chosen it, but now that I am experiencing it, like so many other changes in life, it is both inevitable and wonderful. The only experience better than figuring out how to make sense of the world you’ve been handed, is watching someone else, watching your children, do this over and over. And, one day, when the time is right, perhaps we will move overseas again, because that, too, could be part of my kids’ pathmaking, given who their parents are.

 

 

 

Memento Vivere or "Listen: Jonny Maiullo Has Come Unstuck in Time"

for Gina 

My computer still remembers the wifi password here, but the people have forgotten me. 

It wasn’t too long ago that I used to come to this café every morning and stay for hours to work on my classes. No one minded much and, once, when I apologized for always being here, sitting for hours over a single coffee, one of the baristas told me they liked having me there; I was kind of a fixture, part of the day’s routine. There’s some comfort in being consistent I suppose. 

But then I changed jobs. I was no longer adjunct faculty with no office, doing my best to keep my classes fresh and engaging from the corner of a café. I moved over to the office side of the college. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of moving to a 9-5 schedule, but after working so many Sundays, and having to go into the café for “just a minute” and then being there for four hours, I was ready for a change. Especially as, like so many other things I do, I needed a lot more time to complete my work that other people. I was well over 40 hours a week for which, in terms of pay, is supposed to be a part-time job. Ever semester there was always so much I wanted to change about my classes to make them more effective. I like to think I was a good teacher, but this was at the cost of my family time.

The low pay wasn’t much of an issue; somehow, we made this work. I guess the kids were still babies, and we weren’t doing too much that caused us to spend money. The real difficulty lay in the time commitment. I just couldn’t seem to stick to a schedule of time off. Every time I’d declared, hand over my heart, that this Thursday or Monday, I’d make up for the extra time I’d been at the café working. I nearly always had to retract my promise to get in some emergency class support work, or something to reconfigure the lesson that I preemptively decided was problematic. And then there were the paper-grading marathons when I’d sit at the computer for 8 hours without breaking, for days on end, trying to get through all the essays, leaving way too much feedback—again, trying to be helpful. 

Even when I wasn’t at work, I would be thinking about it. On the beach, on a walk, playing with my kids when they were babies, I’d be in the café in my mind.    

My wife Gina hated this schedule. She never knew when I’d be home. (“When I’m finished,” I told her). She never knew when I’d suddenly have to go into work. For having a pretty prosaic job, we were living the lives of a family with an ER doc as head of household. Even the summers weren’t sacred, if I didn’t have summer classes, then I’d have a new class to prepare for the fall. And sometimes, this was the most stressful thing of all. My first semester teaching poetry, for example, I wanted to make sure I got it right; I spent 100s of hours between May and August creating and revising readings and materials, and, of course, I did the same thing while the class was going on that fall as well.  

So, while I had no idea what I was doing when I applied to the office position, I gave it a shot because it was time for something new. It was also a lot easier to apply to and get than the four full-time faculty interviews I’d had been through over the previous year. And yet, the pay was comparable, and it was benefitted.

Initially, I was worried that a 9-5 would be boring, but soon the director left and, with no replacement forthcoming, I started doing a lot of the work for the department. It was just like it was when I was associate faculty. Only now, everyone recognized me; everyone saw that I was doing this “extra-mile” type work. The amount of recognition from higher-ups and peers was very gratifying, especially as, to me, the workload was lighter than it had been when I was faculty. I no longer took my work home and with a set schedule, Gina knew when I’d be home and when I wouldn’t. 

I shaped the job for myself in that period, recklessly crossing the line between director and advisor on a daily basis: hiring new instructors, helping other navigate hurdles, all while working with students, promoting classes, and getting reports sent in. 

Then we got a director, and, now, for weeks on end, I’ve been getting “cease and desist” emails because I’m still crossing the line back into director territory without realizing it. When I was still figuring out my job, I was absorbing so much of this work; my position has grown up around the work of trying to expand the department to offer students new opportunities. Now when I try to do things that once resulted in kudos, I get scolding emails. I get in trouble. I’ve gone from rising star to “problematic colleague” overnight.

I could ask to be retrained, and to learn my job from the beginning, but, in truth, after doing the job I loved for the last few years, I don’t know if this is what I want. It would be a very lateral move to learn what I’m already doing. I also have a feeling that the official version of this job would be much less creative (read: boring). 

So, to reclaim my creative right in my work, it looks like the best option would be to go back to teaching where, while I may have not earned much money, and my schedule was erratic, at least I had control over the lessons I prepared for my students and, if nothing else, my hard work was rewarded with many of them saying “you’re a really good teacher” at the end of the semester. 

…

The place where I created this problematic persona, where I became someone who works too long on simple projects and tasks, and pursues creative solutions that aren’t always in line with official channels, where I learned to enjoy my work, no longer exists. 

As a junior in college, I changed my major for the third time and found myself a student of the humanities, studying language and literature. Every weeknight, Sunday, and even some Saturdays, I installed myself in a booth at Theios Diner in Lansing, Michigan to study.

At Theios, I learned to focus on my labors, and to appreciate study for study’s sake. I transformed writing assignments, to creative writing experiments. I changed the memorization of Italian verb conjugations into the entrance into another way of thinking. I learned to converse with the characters in literature rather than just reading them. 

I have spent my professional life, trying my utmost to translate this process for my students.

My college experience had almost nothing to do with the campus, or the events put on by Student Activities, it all happened in that diner. And after graduating, I studied for the GRE in the smoky embrace of Theios, I applied to graduate schools and opened letters of acceptance and rejection there. I had the conversation with Mikey about the move to San Francisco and, when we left, the waitresses came to our going away party. 

When they tore down Theios, I understood where Vonnegut came up with the phrase “unstuck in time”. Theios had been a kind of personal figurehead, a shrine, and a home, and then it was just gone. I was also in Surat Thani, Thailand, the other side of the world, when I received the news, only adding to the disassociative quality of it. Even when I finally returned to stand on the empty concrete pad—in Michigan, at least, they still knock things down without building anything new—there was something unreal about its absence. It was too much a part of me to be gone, or, maybe, if it was gone, then part of me was too. 

And where did that put the persona I’d developed there? Perhaps it too was now ready for a demolition?

…

Two weeks ago, I was coming home from work after another day when I screwed up on something and overstepped, and I noticed they were taking down the bridge where Gina and I had gone the night we first met. 

I had only just returned to town from the Peace Corps, and, not knowing anyone, and still being a few weeks out from the start of my final semester as a graduate student, I decided to read my book after work in a bar to avoid going “home” to my rented room with nothing but a sleeping bag and a few books stacked on the floor.

I was reading Prelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; she was reading the newspaper and, although evening, it was technically still New Year’s Day. It wasn’t too hard to get a conversation going. We were the only people at the bar, and she was beautiful. 

Our conversation went beyond the bar, and Gina agreed to take a walk with me. We went to the Arcata Marsh and, upon crossing the bridge I mentioned earlier, I said something about how ghosts can’t cross running water and there we stood, frozen forever in my memory two 20-somethings telling ghost stories in the middle of a weeknight, that is, until I went by and saw they were taking down the bridge. 

What they don’t tell you when you’re younger, or what I guess you don’t care about, is that you’ll erect all these little personal plaques all over. You’ll stake certain memories to physical places, and that these places become especially important as you age and the memories, so many times reimagined, revisited and, thus, altered, start to fade. It is calming to stand on the bridge and say, “this was a turning point; this was a Moment.” Because the bridge still exists, the memory still inhabits the real world, in a way, and assures, or at least validates one’s place in the world. 

But when they take down the bridge, the moment loses the physical sign, and shrinks entirely into the abstract, especially as so much time has passed, and I’ve remembered it—and thus altered the memory—so many times. In reality, I have very little idea what happened on that bridge and, while I still could, it was enough to stand on it and say to myself, “this is where it happened.” The place was the memory. 

And then, just after I’d seen they were tearing down the bridge, the word came that the bar where we’d met that New Year’s Day eve was also closing. The bar we’d long held as the center of our relationship, our instant anniversary the moment we met there. Where our minds go when we think of being young and in love, or the magic giddiness of our early relationship. And for me, it also doubles as the place where I was able to transition from being homesick for Armenia to returning to America. The bar was like a major fissure running through the middle of my lifeline, where two moments were brought together and, the rest of my life came flooding out like so much water from the rock. 

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my kids owe their existence to that bar. The reason I’m a dad and husband now came from that instant when I set my book down next to my beer glass and asked, “So what’d you do last night?” And until last week, I was able to go back and revisit this instant in its physical form. Sure, the bar had changed a little, but my little plaque was still there, bright and polished, maybe the most significant of my entire life. 

I know this is stereotypical pining for the world that was that can’t be returned to. That, to be comfortable, we have to embrace change, but I see the paradox my parents faced now: “how can one embrace that change that seems to efface one’s one existence? How can one find comfort in what seems to be actively excluding, what is made over your memories?”

Maybe the secret is that the changes are to prompt us to make new plaques, to reform ourselves and imprint moments on the present instead of revering to the ones of the past. And, yet, there are some memories so golden, and so once-in-a-lifetime, I don’t want to lose them, and I know that I couldn’t remake them if I tried. Even if I did, the old memory would live beneath it, giving significance to it, being part of it, breathing all over it. We’re all collections of these memories, and when their signifiers go away, we become less physical—I guess there’s something very intentional in that design, but I’d rather not probe that too much. 

Fatalistic as they may seem, I do see the hope in these moments of effacement. They remind me of the impermanence of the present which, at times, can seem so imperturbable and inescapable. Both the buildings where we fall in love and the ones where we suffer failures will eventually be shuttered, turned into something else, and, be torn down. 

So, on Monday, when I walk into work, whatever happens, it will be remade. And all my plaques will be removed to make room for my children’s plaques, and it be enough for me to read, and try to understand these, than to be continually polishing my own, and Theios, and the bar where Gina and I met, and the bridge where our ancestors looked down on us and smiled at our youthful naiveté, they will be reduced and illuminated as clusters of brain cells, that will be clouded over and fade, but nonetheless be kept in us. 

 

Through the Murk of Winter Coastal Rain

 By Thursday, I was doing that thing at work where I was opening four different windows on the computer at once, each with a different process to go through, and then just looking at them for a minute to decide which to do. 

 

I was tired enough to be doing everything in such an erratic manner, and even my conversation felt flushed and hectic. It was time for a break. Luckily, since I’ve gone down to only teaching one class in addition to my advisor job, every weekend, my break is all-consuming. Instead of a tepid and watery two days off, with at least half of one spent grading. I now enjoy three full days of being at home, drinking coffee with the light of dawn washing over the still sleeping house, and hanging out at the park all afternoon making up monster voices and new games with my kids. Sometimes, I even get to watch a movie in the evening, if my wife can stay awake. 

 

But, at work, I was feeling burnt out enough even to want to leave all of that behind. 

 

My wife and I first met when I came back from the Peace Corps and, thus, was in a very peregrinatory, rootless mode of life. I think we’d been together about two or three months when I told her I was applying to a job in Mexico. When I didn’t get it, I told her I was planning on moving to Argentina. Luckily, she agreed to come with me.  

 

After Argentina, we went all over for several years, living in a far-flung place and making it our base to explore the area and the larger region. In periods between work, we took trips that sometimes lasted for months, stopping through places like Bolivia, Kosovo, and Myanmar. 

 

I know this sounds insufferable. I’m not bragging. We lived very, very frugally most of the time. Instead of internet at home, instead of owning a car, instead of new clothes, we travelled. To us, it was the best use of our time and money. Without kids, pets, or ailing relatives, this sort of life is really just a matter of acclimation: not wealth, as many think.  

 

And, once acclimated, it’s a hard lifestyle to leave. Just as those living in the suburbs can find living in an apartment with no kitchen and mattresses on the floor in Thailand incredible, so those living abroad with all their possessions in a backpack find the move to the suburbs equally difficult to attain. But, after about five years, we have kids and a house, and a car, etc. Opportunities to travel don’t come up as much as they once did when we lived in Paraguay. And yet, the impulse to travel remains, even though it looks very different than the kind of all-night-bus-ride variety it once was. Now, I have no interest in getting on a plane, or sleeping in a dirty motel, or trying to rush anything. We’ve tried these things with kids. They don’t work the same way. They aren’t fun in the same way.   

 

Fortunately, the kids have met us halfway and enjoy our adapted mode of travel. They often show more outward excitement about trips than we do. I’m not sure what travel means to them other than looking out the window, eating more junk than usual, and getting to swim in a pool, but whatever it is, they seem to like it quite a bit. Maybe they just pick up on our interest, but at the same time, I’ve learned to not show your kids you want something, not to seem over-eager, which usually has the opposite effect of turning them against your proposal, so maybe I try not to care about travel as much these days.  

 

I’m not going to spend time questioning it how it’s happened. I love that my kids are happy to pile into the car for five hours, and hardly make a peep while my wife and I are in the front drinking coffee and philosophizing like in the old days—well, when she’s awake. 

So, feeling burnt out at work, I was happy to have a trip planned for the weekend. A small one, but still enough to give structure and purpose to the weekend. Sometimes I feel a sense of urgency on Saturday to not let the weekend pass me by just doing the same old things, to go out and create some kind of spectacular memory, but these generally aren’t the kind of things one can plan. They just have to happen. But they tend to happen much easier when one is in a different place. 

 

…

It was a cloudy day on the coast when we left, and there was rain scheduled for the weekend, but I took solace in the fact that we were heading inland where we’d be near the mountains, and the slightly clearer air, and drier climate. Plus, the town we were heading to has a great café with great coffee that I looked forward to stumbling toward in the cold and colorful mountain dawn and then collecting myself with. And, of course, the hotel had the requisite pool. 

 

After checking in, swimming, and going out for a beer and an $18 pretzel, we brought some snacks back to the room and promptly passed out. One of the most beautiful things about vacationing with little kids is that everyone just falls asleep together, like practically in an heap. It can still be a bit of a struggle to get everyone ready for bed, but the bedtime routine is not so protracted when everyone is going to sleep at the same time. 

 

I always wake up a little earlier than everyone else, and usually this is when I slip out for a coffee and an hour or so of vacation reading. But we weren’t in the Bay, so I didn’t have the luxury of going to a café at 5:30am. I had to wait until 7, and so, when I woke up, I checked the time on my phone, knowing that I’d have a while to lie there. 

 

I had a text message from my father-in-law. There’d been a landslide on the narrow, precarious coastal highway that we’d taken to get to our destination. There were videos showing tree after tree toppling over like a river of forest pouring down over the road. The videos were taken in the dark and punctuated with the red lights of heavy equipment running in the night and the whole thing had kind of a sinister air, especially considering we’d only driven through there a few hours before and the other side of the road is a cliff dropping into the ocean.

 

My wife was already awake in the next bed, and I told her that our way home was blocked by a landslide. She reached for her phone and we lie there reading the same thing while the kids woke up and started squirreling around in the beds. It was still too early to begin a conversation about alternatives, but I couldn’t help myself. The shortest way around would be the mountain highway (only an extra hour), but the traffic camera showed a fair amount of snow, plus temperatures (on the passes) were to be in the mid-30s with like 90% precipitation expected. No way was I going to drive our Toyota through that. So, the only other option would be to drive about four hours south. Stop and sleep and then wake up and drive another five and a half hours way the hell around the mountains, and despite my zeal for adventure and travel, I wasn’t looking forward to that at all. It would turn our trip into little more than a few stopovers over the course of a marathon drive.

 

We left it up in the air, and I went out to get my coffee, but I was distracted. Now the drive ahead of us seemed like a task, and I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to see if we could cancel our next night and leave later that day. I knew my wife, more sensibly, wanted to give ourselves a day and just hang out as we had planned.But there seemed little point in this when we were going to have to drive 11 hours anyway. “Might as well get it over with and still have a full day to recuperate,” I reasoned in typical forty-year-old male fashion. “Might as well get this started,” seems to be my mantra these days. 

 

However, as always ends up happening in these situations, I convinced my wife and she convinced me. When I got back from the café, she was convinced we should just get going, and I was thinking maybe a day to take it easy wouldn’t be so bad. After all, what was the rush? The weather was holding, the kids and I were having fun in the pool. But after swimming for two hours, I think we all felt like we’d gotten what we’d needed from the experience and decided to leave, especially as the hotel was good enough to cancel our reservation for the second night  

 

After the morning in the pool, I started to feel a little optimistic. It would be a long drive, but at least I’d go through a section of northern California I hadn’t seen in a very long time. For a few months, I’d be wanting to visit Mt. Shasta, and now we’d get to go right past it. The weather would be a bit overcast, but mountains make their own weather as the saying goes. And maybe the mountain would break through the clouds for us. 

 

We got out of the hotel right before checkout and we stopped for brunch at the Coop. While in the bathroom with my son, I decided to do some more road condition/weather doom scrolling and discovered that the landslide had been partially cleared and was now open to one-way traffic. However, the forecast showed steady rain on the coast and, considering that, I couldn’t help but to wonder how long it could hold. Should we risk it and head back through the hazardous area which would shave about six hours off our drive? Could we get out of yet another hotel reservation (we’d already made a reservation for a place four hours south)? While we pondered these things, our kids ran around the Coop parking lot like it was a playground, and we looked like the kind of negligent parents who are totally absorbed in their phones, rather than their children. Something to keep in mind the next time you see people zombie to their phones—you never know what their using their phones to try and resolve.

 

My wife called the place she’d booked down south to see if she could cancel and apparently got someone willing to make the cancellation although she was reminded it was “against the rules”. Whatever, we cancelled and then delved profoundly into our personal anxieties while trying to enjoy a few more hours in town. In Lithia Park, where they have the Shakespeare Festival, there is a great playground, a little river for throwing rocks, and the whole place is admirably landscaped with the long-needled conifers that like the dry, clear air of the mountains. The kids had fun climbing, sliding, leaping, and doing the things kids like to do to better acquaint themselves with a new landscape, but all I could think about was whether we would get through the area of the slide before the rain wiped it out again. After the fires, and the wet winter, the whole area seemed a bit unstable before, but now I felt acute anxiety about driving back under all the dripping cliffs we’d gone under on the way up. How many others were on the verge of collapse. I pushed my son on the swing and shuddered thinking about the red-lit video of the trees collapsing in a sylvian tide. Was there one of those likewise shuddering and loosening now? 

 

And even if we made it past the cliffs of burnt trees and dripping mud, what if the slide broke through whatever they had restrained it with? The area had been closed to two-way traffic for nine years and shortly after it opened again, this happened. Would it hold out?

 

My wife and I discussed whether it was better to leave and race for the affected area to get through before further closures, or if we should just let fate take its course and enjoy the day. Soon the decision was made for us. The kids got ice cream and then passed out in the back of the car, and as we drove west into the rain, we had no desire to stop. Back in the pacific northwestern winter, the trip already felt over. This was all just prologue. 

 

We talked about fate, and our lives, and our decisions, while the ice cream and pool-satiated kids snoozed in their car seats, doing that disconcerting thing where their heads slump forward and they look like they’re going to choke or something, but if you push their heads back, they just sort of topple forward again and it seems like a valuable parenting lesson to just leave them alone and let them sleep, regardless of appearances. 

 

We drove through the wet wreckage of southern Oregon and into the river valleys that allow winter passage through the coastal range. Small waterfalls were raging all around us, reminding me of the indominable strength of nature and our cosmic unimportance as we drove along. But, other than a few small stones, nothing fell. And for as precarious as it all looked under the sheets of running white water, the valley walls held, even as the road we drove over was pitted with the divots of falling rocks and heavy equipment tread from fire season. 

 

Last Chance Grade, where the slide had been, was awash in rain and coastal fog, but the river of trees from the video has been cleared away and we only had to wait about five minutes for oncoming traffic to wend its way by so we could continue down the cliff, right down to the beach where the ocean was snarling with 20-foot swells and gray winter spray, and before long, we were home all wrapped up again in the coastal drizzle, waiting for another week of work and spring to return. 

Flavor is Mostly Memory

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Dad Brain

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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