Screen Door on a Battleship

 I have no acumen for mechanical labor. It’s strange to say, but I don’t have the patience for it. With written work, I find it easy to get started with a cup of coffee and start writing, reading, revising—and I enjoy using my own language no matter how dull the nature of the work. Even work reports can shine with unique phrasings, or even adroitly used punctuation. And at the end, you have something you feel a certain pride in, something which is representative of your ability. 

But working with gears, hinges, drills, drywall, and nails gives me anxiety. When the desired outcome isn’t achieved instantaneously, I resort to forcing things. I meet resistance and I keep pushing, which, of course, is how things get broken. And when the thing is broken, you’re worse off than before. Not only is the drawer, door, or light fixture still non-functioning, but now something new, something expensive, is lodged in there as well. 

Maturity has managed to curb most of my frantic impulses, but with kids, I know not to leave a job incomplete—as my wife often urges me to do. With the door still off the track, the screen still not in the window, the faucet still in pieces, I can’t pack up the tools and leave one more mess, one more incomplete in this house of incompletes. At any moment, there is laundry to put away, trash to take out, dishes to unload, toys, strewn around the backyard, art supplies dribbling down the sides of the table, and there’s no food to make dinner, there’s also no room in the kitchen to make dinner; it’s been taken over by unpaid bills and other random junk that’s arrived in the mail and hasn’t made it to the trash which, again, is overflowing. 

In this situation, to leave something undone, something I’ve probably been looking at all week, is the most obnoxious of failures. Even if I am only trying to leave it undone for a moment to collect my thoughts, the moment I leave the task, my son will look at me with his big eyes and ask, ‘now can we play superheroes?’ A simple request I’ve been flatly refusing while I went to the store to buy the required items, cleared the area for work, and got all the tools out (often in several trips because I never know what I need). I can’t bear to refuse such an earnest request again. Who knows how many more times I will be asked before an assumption is forged by my repeated refusal—an assumption that I am perpetually unavailable. Even if this assumption isn’t formed, how many more times will my kids even be interested in playing with their dad who lives in a different world than theirs?

So, the grout, the dining room table, the toilet tank must be repaired NOW, while everything is out, while there is opportunity to clear one space in the larger chaos of this house, while it’s so damn close to being fixed if I could just get this little plastic thing to move oh-so-slightly to the right *snap!* Dammit!

…

Yesterday, I hadn’t worked on my new bike yet, so I was a little anxious about changing out the tires—the back wheel has an extra chain tightening bolt I’ve never had before—but after eons of fixing flats at the side of the damn roaring highway in the dark—the tires of a bike are one mechanical thing I’ve become pretty comfortable with, and I was almost impressed by how quickly I got the job done with everything fitting back on right, with just the improvement I’d been hoping for. But then, there was the screen door. 

Doors—what is it with doors? I’ve only owned a house for about two and a half years and I’ve replaced everything with a hinge in the place excepting—thank, god!—the garage door and probably only because we never use it. The knobs on all the doors have been replaced, they’ve been locked from the inside and had to be picked open with a bent paperclip more than once; my son, when he was a toddler, locked himself in his bedroom and the door had to be smashed down to get it open and, most recently, the locking mechanism froze on the front door. I had almost got the thing off the hinges when I realized a could just break the old lock out. 

Every one of these repairs was an anxiety-inducing mixture of children barely restrained from the working area, tools, small, loseable pieces, vague printed instructions and Youtube videos on a grease-smeared phone screen which showed the whole job coming out easily simply because of one small difference. How anyone could enjoy this kind of work is utterly beyond me, but then again, people like to take things apart to see how they work—the very idea gives me acute anxiety. If it’s still working, I don’t even want to see where the batteries are let alone start pulling out the guts of the thing. 

When we moved in, we had a screen door on the sliding glass door to the deck. It was rattley and bent, and it didn’t move as smoothly as I would’ve liked, but it was fine. Then, as with all screen doors, one evening, when visibility was low, someone tried to walk right through it, mistaking the light through the reticulate network for the real, unadulterated thing. The door was so badly bent, so rattley stuck that the best course of action was to pull it off and toss it. I had to bend it up something fierce to get it to fit in the trash for weekly pick up. 

When you break something in your house, you have the idea that a newer, nicer screen will someday replace it, something shining and even noble, bravely sliding along its hinges to slam the aperture closed; you don’t expect to spent $100 to secure a similarly rattling, stuck, flimsy-looking screen, but that’s what you’ll get. At least if you’re me. 

And it’s a process to get to that undesirable point: pack the reluctant kids into the car, stand around the hardware store looking for someone, feel overwhelmed not by the selection, but the lack of selection—why not order it online? My god, is there anything I’d have less desire to do than spend an hour or two searching for screen doors that fit my frame online!? So, I take a gamble and just buy one. We forgot rope, so we throw down another $10 to buy some and, of course, it turns out to be much easier to just put it in the car and balance it on our heads. The whole family driving around town and running other errands, lifting the screen door up each time and positioning it just so, like a jerry can being balanced for the walk home in Africa.

Back home, the screen door is carried to the backyard while children run around and through my legs. The door is balanced against the sliding glass door for about five seconds before it’s knocked over when someone mistakes it for a functioning door and tries to open it and nearly crushes the blueberry bush which has already lost several branches to errant footballs and other backyard missiles.

The written instructions seem to basically say that the door should just be put in top-first and that the wheels which guide the door along the track will sink into the door until they’ve cleared the jamb. Maybe it’s just wishful reading, but it looks like I just need to force the thing in here. From the top, I can’t see what’s going on the bottom. I try to use my foot. Ha! I call my wife, who’s inside feeding our infant daughter. The previously eating baby goes into a chair and, deprived of her nourishment for so inessential a task begins, rightfully, to squall. The other children, attracted by the commotion, come over and peer directly into our fitful struggles to get the wheels up into the door to clear the track. Despite all the encouragement, no amount of force seems to want to move the wheel over the tiny groove in the door and, possibly to cheer us on, my son starts pressing the “radio” button on his electric motorcycle which plays the same obnoxious faux-pop sample over and over. So, there’s a crying baby, tinny ambient “kid’s” music, directions, questions, and a feeling of failure all competing for my attention.  

In my frustration, I slap my hand down on the deck, and my son asks, “why did dad slam the floor?” and, of course, I feel like a total idiot for not being able to hold back my frustration for one more crucial second because, after my wife shepherds all the kids upstairs and I am left alone to think, the wheel easily pops into place. However, perhaps as punishment for my outburst, no amount of screwing with the door (literally unscrewing, moving, and screwing the screws which control the track portion) will induce it to roll smoothly along the track. It bucks, it jerks, it teeters nearly as much as the previous broken door and, of course, this reveals to me just how cheap and flimsy the thing looks, skittering along its track, much like the door we’d intentionally ripped out and stuck in the trash months before only to squander $100 to reinstate. 

In the end, I just spray the hell out of the door with WD-40, roll it back and forth a bunch of times, and hope that repeated use will erode whatever is making it stick like that, but, very likely, it won’t be long before, some warm evening, when the sun is setting at just the right angle, and the crepuscular world is twittering with bird song, and releasing the perfume of the lavender which is all but taking over out there, someone will be too overcome by the beauty of such a world to heed the flimsy impediment of the screen door, or perhaps will unconsciously choose this moment to topple the artificial barrier between themselves and such a harmonious scene. Either way, it won’t take much to render the door unserviceable given that it wasn’t put on correctly in the first place. Then, with the bent door removed, all of us with sigh with relief and not having to jerk an extra door open every time we want to duck outside and escape the chaos within. In this moment, the cycle will begin again. We’ll spend six months talking about getting a screen door, and then a precious six minutes cramming the thing onto the track to solve the problem and hold one small aspect of the chaos at bay, if only for a moment. What else can we ask for?

YA Fiction for Forty Year Olds

  

Yesterday, while I was out, my wife asked my kids what they wanted to do tomorrow. My daughter was excited about a treasure hunt, but my son proclaimed, and I can only imagine loudly, “play with dad!”

I don’t know what I’ve done to merit this interest. I’m lousy at playing. When I’m not losing interest in the game and bugging the kids to do something else, I’m having to cut short the game, or pause it to make a cup of coffee or something. 

I enjoy playing with my kids—I’m glad that my son has picked up on this—but I don’t think I’m good at it, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this realization hits. But reading with them? With enough library books, I could do that all day. 

As a reader, as an English major, I’ve been into reading with my kids since they were babies. From repetitive board books to the present-day YA graphic novels, there is nothing so enjoyable to me as coming home from the library, settling into the couch to explore new stories and characters together. 

My kids, unaccustomed to iPads or even much television, enjoy reading (or being read to), as well. For six and four, their endurance to listen to their dad narrate book and after book is impressive. They can sit there for hours just listening. And when I finish a book, they hand me the next one eagerly asking, “can we read this one now?”

When I go into the bookstore, even if I can sneak away for a moment, I don’t even bother looking at the rest of the store, I just hang out in the kids’ section, helping to steer the purchases into things I want to read as well. When we go to the library, I’m the one making almost all the selections, saying things like, “hey, look, the author of Smile has another book!” or “all right, a new Babysitter’s Club!”—Books which would’ve been anathema to me when I was my kids’ age have been transmuted into exciting worlds I may have missed out on earlier but I’m still able to catch up on. 

The sole catch is that the most common moral of these stories doesn’t have the same urgency or even relevancy for me. A surprising amount of these stories develop a sense of inferiority in the protagonist which is resolved in one of two ways. 1. They eventually discover what they good at (usually with the help of supportive peers). Or, 2, they have a glimpse of a talent, a heretofore unconsidered ability, that helps them understand that they are still developing; they have time to figure it out. 

I’m 42 years old. The idea that some unexpected talent should suddenly manifest itself is a bit ridiculous even at my most optimistic. Especially given that I consider myself a fairly adventurous person. It’s not like—as so often happens in the books—there is something I enjoy doing that I’ve never allowed myself to fully explore. Everything I’ve ever had the slightest inkling in, I’ve had a period in my life where I’ve gone after with unadulterated attention—like a dog chasing a ball. 

When I first discovered that I could bike across town at about 13 or 14, and that I enjoyed it, I started doing it all the time. For the rest of my young adult life, I eschewed cars and rode a bike everywhere. When I discovered I liked long-distance hiking. I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. When I discovered I liked reading books, I switched my major to English and spent countless hours in diners and cafes late at night poring over 19^th century novels, making all kinds of senseless annotations in the margins. When I discovered I was interested in other cultures, languages, modes of living, I lived abroad for several years, and, really, I thought I would for the rest of my life. Sometimes, it still seems odd, accidental, that I live in the US now. I was never “good” at any of these things in the sense they present abilities and talents in books, but I enjoyed doing them, and I wonder now if that was enough. 

Simply, the moral of YA books is entirely misplaced on someone like me—not because I am old, but because I never developed any particular talent, though not for lack of trying. What I hope is inspiring/comforting my kids—making them feel as though they can be themselves and find strength in that—continually serves to remind me that, well, I don’t have my whole life to look forward to, that I’ve made all the decisions that the books are poising the readers for. 

So, I examine the choices I’ve made. Is there anything I neglected while rushing around in my youth? Were there any opportunities I missed? Should I have stayed a certain course longer, or cut another off more quickly? I can very easily say “no”, but that’s really because I never ardently pursued anything, at least not when I was younger. As I delineated above, I flitted from interest to interest almost as soon as they presented themselves as possibilities. I did not focus on becoming, say, a professional athlete and then, after countless hours of practice when I should’ve been eating/sleeping/socializing/studying, met with intense disappointment when I didn’t make the final cut, though I was close, so close that I reevaluate the championship game over and over as though I could go back and change it. No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all like that.

And the thing is, I’d recommend this ADD-influenced mode of living. If I could summarize it into a plot for a kids’ book, I would. Something like, “it’s a crazy, multifaceted world out there, kids. Why get too bogged down in anything? Why even worry about trying to be particularly “good” or “successful”? Just let life blow you where it will” –I’m not sure this “Tales from a 42-Year-Old Nothing” would sell well, however.

Constantly reading about the precipice of adulthood, I have to consider my formative years in high school, when I, too, was part of a social clique—though thankfully not a mean-spirited or exclusive clique—and made all kids of bad decisions. I read about kids forming meaningful relationships, and avoiding the associations which might mean social advancement, but would not permit them to be their true selves. It is tempting to lament my reckless adolescence. To summarize it as only leading me down a path where I have not learned to really focus on anything, or develop a solid character. I didn’t learn discipline by wanting to win the championship game, or get into the best school, but, I guess, I did eventually learn it, only when I realized that everyone else had it and it was something I would need. 

Rather than single-mindedly pursuing a goal, I did a bunch of disparate things which have led me to be the kind of person who likes making things more than buying them, reading more than watching TV (though reading YA graphic novels is probably on par with watching Game of Thrones as far as my mental development is concerned), riding a bike (or skateboard) more than driving, etc, etc. I might not be particularly good at anything, but I enjoy the things I do, no matter of half-assedly, and, at the end of the day, if my four-year-old son’s most anticipated event for the next day is simply playing with me, I can’t have screwed up too badly. Even if that playing, too, is something I’m not particularly good at. 

Windows and Figs

 There’s an abandoned house in our neighborhood. Who knows the reason. The siding has either disintegrated or been smashed off the back of the house, revealing the insulation panels beneath. From the front other angles, the house looks fine, It even looks like someone lives there because the neighbors use the driveway for their extra car. It’s not a scary-looking empty house. It must be a rental with a mowing contract, because someone still comes by and cuts the yard. The apple tree in the back yard still blooms and fruits. If it weren’t for the hole in the back and the long stillness around the place, it would be just another house: a focal point in routine for a small group of people, the place of constant return. 

The kids and I peeked into the windows the other day. I think it’s helpful for your children to see your curiosity outweigh propriety once in a while and—despite age and experience— still remain open to adventure. I pulled them off the sidewalk and said “’c’mon; let’s check out that house.” They of course, hadn’t been expecting this and hesitated while they calculated whether dad was asking them to do something too risky for their comfort (wouldn’t be the first time). But when they saw me cupping my hands to look into the back window—into someone’s house!—their own curiosity outweighed the possible risks.

I think it was the garage we were looking into, but it was clear it had been inhabited, or at least been a place of constant attention and traffic when the house had been in use. By the window, just under where we were looking, there was a padded chair next to an end table with an overflowing ashtray. There was a couch opposite it, and beyond the dull ring of light from the murky window, I could make out the edges of many other unrecognizable objects. The stuff that had been introduced into this garage rumpus room and had been left there either purposefully or not when the tenant quitted the place: a meticulously created museum piece of the life of the poor in the early 21-st century. 

The kids wanted to see it, too. For some reason, now that I had looked in, I didn’t want them to see inside. There was so much stuff and so many shadows. In my quick scan of the room, I hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of something frightful in there, something I wouldn’t want them to see. While they clamored at my waist, I took another look to make sure the room was devoid of corpses or obscene posters. But something about the room in the partial light was so nebulous that I couldn’t focus on anything and only saw the same gray tangle that I hoped they would also see. 

I held my son up first, probably because he was making the most noise; he’s also younger and more prone to complaint if he isn’t the first. He attached himself to the glass eagerly, but I had to show him how to hold up his hands to block out the light bouncing off the glass around him. 

I don’t know what he saw. He neither seemed interested, nor disinterested. He looked without moving his head and when I brought him down did not protest, nor say anything. It was like he was having to process what he had seen. All that stuff that belonged to no one. 

I thought my daughter might even be mature enough, or timid enough, to not want a look in, but as we turned to go, she protested and I held her up to the window realizing, with my usual concern, that I felt more hesitation in exposing her to the unknown that I did with my son. Is it because, as a male, I have a certain understanding of the female experience and an innate desire to, like, uphold that understanding? Do I see my daughter’s innocence as something more valuable than my son’s, or is it just that there is something in her personality, something quiet, empathetic, and kind that I want to protect and nurture?

I held her up and could feel the shift as she positioned herself to take in as much of the view as she could. She brought her hands up and leaned into the view while I pushed down anxieties that there was something in that room that I hadn’t noticed. But it was just an inert room. Interesting only for this selfsame inert quality among so many living, moving, functioning homes. 

My thoughts were interrupted by my daughter’s question as we continued across the neighborhood toward the massive fig tree we discovered the other day.

“But why did someone leave all their things?”

I started to tell her how people are evicted. Sometimes they aren’t allowed to recover their things. Sometimes, they just leave in a hurry, or they leave everything behind in a jumble as a protest. But this explanation was eclipsed by the intrusion of a memory and without thinking much, I started to tell her about it. 

“When I was about 16, my friend Jim and I found a house like this: empty but full of people’s stuff, strewn around everywhere. But being 16 and without a place to drink the malt liquor we’d purchased (I left this detail out), we went in. At first, we’d waded cautiously through the ectoplasm of someone else’s life. Even at 16, it was hard not to feel respectfully sad when we came upon a room that had obviously belonged to a small child filled with stuffed animals and fluffy pinkness. But deprived of order, deprived of use, the stuff—even the most personal objects—had become junk. And the more we moved through the house, and the more we drank, our sympathy for the former inhabitants melted away. We began to kick things aside, toss them at each other and soon, we were breaking them.” 

I paused, not sure how to back out of telling such a revealing story. I keep forgetting that to my children, being a hostile teenager is unfathomable. Why would you break the stuff? Why would you be in an abandoned house drinking malt liquor in the first place when you had a home you could go to, when you had a loving family and even your own room with a TV in it you could turn on whenever you wanted? 

Telling my kids stories of my past, I’m continually bumping into the fact that I was a pretty selfish and frequently obnoxious kid who, despite crying when he read Where the Red Fern Grows at 10, probably evinced little else that looked like empathy or kindness until after his 18^th birthday. 

If I hadn’t had kids, I don’t know how much I ever would’ve come to examine my own childhood in this way. I think we are all inclined, as adults, to give ourselves a break when remembering our childhood. Over the years, I have written many times about the experiences I had being young and dumb, but I never took myself to task for it. If anything, I overfocused on what still seemed like injustices done to me. Uncharitable teachers, a father who yelled, a non-verbal sibling who absorbed a lot of attention: I looked everywhere in my memories to justify my actions, but I have never had to confront my own stupidity, my own utter lack of empathy in that way that I have since I started telling my kids stories of my youth, particularly of my pissed off teenage years. 

They understand in the same uncomprehending way I did when my dad would tell me stories of his youthful misbehavior when I was a kid. When I was my daughter’s age, I wasn’t so different from her: a wide-eyed quiet kid who appreciated the difference between positive and negative attention enough to share my cookie with my sister if my mom asked me to. If I had been near an abandoned house, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go inside and start throwing everything around either. 

In a way, I’m telling the stories back to myself. And it proves a maxim I repeat in my classes to my students that audience perception does a lot for the purpose of your stories. With that little hand in mine, walking through a warm spring evening toward a fruiting fig tree, it is difficult to avoid this aspect of myself that somehow atrophied after adolescence, or—more likely— just manifested as a stubborn selfish streak, albeit less destructive. 

I don’t know what happened to the kid who trashed that house many years ago. We live so many lives and that one was so far back that I no longer have a frame of reference for and, perhaps consequently, I have run out of empathy for, and I earnestly hope I have converted enough of that kid into someone good to be worthy of raising these trusting, intelligent, and  compassionate children who, thank God, have no understanding for the kind of anger and belligerence that hangs on the edges of my resume which can only be somewhat obscured, never completely covered by present-day good works. 

We walked on, leaving the dim, empty house and my memories of being an inconsiderate, angry kid to the shades of evening coming on from the east and, by the time we reached the fig tree, my kids had forgotten all about the story, or at least their interest in it, as they reached out to pluck the strange green and unripe fruit from the spindly tree.

Unripe figs, like most unripe fruit, have no taste and no texture, just empty white pith, but as we each chewed it took us different intervals to realize this, spit out the pulp and run off through the still-blooming azaleas to whatever was next. 

Samsara

 I have had two coworkers in the department since I came over about three years ago. They are both older than me, so I consider them both almost equal in age, or I did. The other day it occurred to me that one must be in her sixties, while the other just turned 50. Now that I’m 42, I’m closer to her, than she is to our colleague in her sixties. I’m sure she thinks of it this way, and, yet, to me, they were both “older”: a category which we all define once we are out of our twenties as “the people who are a few years older than we are” all the way up to nonagenarians. As you age, this category ages with you. 

Of course, there are moments of clarity. I work with young people mostly one day a week, and the experience of being jarred out of my pretended youth is concentrated. Many of these young people betray no differences between us, but others insist on reminding me of our difference in age by reminding me that they were not born and therefore couldn’t have witnessed 9/11, or that when Covid really got bad were only 12 years old. 

Did that happen, like, last year?

Still, the world, or at least our society was made for the old. The culture the predominated when I was a kid is still a referent and our tendency to revere things we couldn’t have been around for have made me something of a cool museum piece. I’m always telling my kids things like “Ninja Turtles, ya’ know, I was around when it first came out.” I guess this would’ve been like my dad telling me the same thing about GI Joe. But, c’mon, GI Joe was never a ninja, nor a turtle. Also, the kids these days are obsessed with this grindy, DIY band that my friends and I were obsessed with back when the band was still around. The other day I was in the record store, flipping through the “Punk” section and wondering what 50% of what I was looking at was, when a kid came over with an employee.

“I know it’s been repressed a few times, but I don’t think we have one.”

“Yeah, it’s been on a few labels now, but it’s a classic.”

They came over and flipped through the “D” section. I looked out of the corner of my eye. The kid’s disappointment was almost tangible as the employee announced :”no, we don’t have it. Do want me to put your name down in case any Dystopia records come in?” In 1999 (or maybe 2000), when Dystopia was on tour for their second and last album “The Aftermath”, a carload of friends of mine headed up to Detroit to see them. I was still at the age when I was having trouble getting permission for this kind of thing, but as it turned out, shortly after that show, my mom got tired of arguing about it, and I went up to the Trumbullplex for many subsequent shows. In short, I very nearly saw Dystopia live. 

Thank god I didn’t though. Who knows how long I would subject this kid—and others like him—to my “yup, I saw them back in ‘99” stories?

I tend to keep my memories to myself around the youth. It’s taken me a few years to realize that I am from another time, and that my experiences, too, are of that impossible-to-fathom period and therefore something like fiction. But there is one thing that I, if I were able to condense into something intelligible, I would tell these youngsters. 

There’s a lot of talk now about letting yourself be bored. And occasionally, while going to the bathroom, or waiting for something to load on the computer at work, I have to assert myself over the desire to pick up my phone and see what’s going on in the world, or check my email. The news, local or national, is outrageous and depressing, it’s designed that way, and the emails usually make me feel like I need to be working faster, or remind me that I’ve forgotten something, or still have something else to squeeze into the day. No, it’s better if I just start at the wall a minute. When I leave work (or the bathroom) there are also my kids. 

It's incredible how many parents complain about their kids’ use of screens, but then constantly produce their phones for little tasks. Turns out phone use is something like aging: we always think it’s someone else’s issue, no matter how often we are checking email, or even just looking things up!

There’s more to this, too, advocates very rightly say that there’s a creative power in learning to deal with boredom. I did a lot of dumb things in my quest to alleviate my boredom. Once, I climbed up on the roof and thought “I could make a secret entrance here that no one would ever see” but after I’d broken through the outer covering, I realized the myriad flaws in my thinking. 

I think of things like this, shudder, and hope my wife’s common sense wins over in our kids. 

However, you know what I also did? I made things, and a lot of them were inspired by burgeoning feelings of love. And while these things weren’t impressive in their own right, making them cultivated an ability to focus that I, otherwise, would never have developed, which has been such an important factor in successfully navigating the adult world. 

I imagine the temptation is too great, when one develops one’s first crush, to not just hang out on the object of affection’s social media pages. When I was a kid, all I had was the one grainy, black and white photo in the year book (maybe a millimeter of a color collage, too if you were lucky), and I spent plenty of time mooning over that, imagining her voice, speaking gently to me, imaging the smile in the picture being the result of something clever I’d said.

But yearbook photos can only offer so much solace for love. I used them more as starting points to clarify the picture I had in my head, but from there, inspiration dictated that I create something. It wasn’t enough to feel something so beautiful and calming and just sit there with it, nor would it have been right to just walk around with it and go about my day. No, something had to be made!

It started innocently enough as daydreaming plans to impress. I would imagine things I could do or buy that would make me worthy of her attention. But I learned quickly that buying things for someone you like doesn’t go beyond the moment you hand the object to them. After that, you’re back to where you were a moment before. And the first girlfriend I ever had cited “you bought me too many things” as the reason, or one of the reasons, for our breakup. Of course, I was 11 or 12. 

My second girlfriend endured much longer, and while we spent a lot of time on the phone together, I found an easier confessional in letters. It was in letters that I first declared my love, in letters which I first confided in her my dreams for the future, a future I had hoped we’d share, and it was in letters where we built this future. 

We wrote that at night. She probably did them after her homework or something, I wrote them instead of doing my homework, probably because, as enamored as I was, I couldn’t focus on homework. I had to get the thoughts, the declarations, the intentions, the whole incredible-yearning-for-the-future out somehow!

We went out all through jr. high and I amassed a substantial collection of folded 8 ½ x 11 notebook pages, each one with my name simply on the top fold. Some of the better ones with a heart around the name. By the second year, they all ended with “I love you”. The letters paved the way for this salutation that we could never bring ourselves to say. 

In high school, punk rock diversified my interests, and, while I thought about girls, I sewed patches on my sweatshirts, pushed studs into my backpack, and eventually, started writing with no direct addressee. 

I sat for countless hours with these intense feelings of love and well-being and tried to work them into things: a poem, a drawing, or an outfit. I could just as easily have squandered these thoughts and feelings while mooning over countless photos and posts across several social media accounts, and, very likely, would have, had it been a possibility because, when you’re in love, what better than a facsimile of your beloved, a digital effigy, pieces of her frozen in an array of moods, attitudes and poses. Hell, probably better than the real thing in that you can stare and stare and stare and no one will think less of you for it—after all, that’s what it’s all there for, right? To be looked at?

I have, once or twice in the last few years, been tempted on to social media, saw what a distant friend was up to via their posts and closed my account pleased to have caught up with them, but, of course, I hadn’t caught up with them. They knew nothing of me. We hadn’t connected, I had merely peeked into their curated life and realizing this, I had to resist the temptation to call them or write to them and tell them I’d looked at their social media page. Number 1, kind of a weird way to reconnect with someone you haven’t spoken to in five or nine years. Number 2, it would take too much time. When so much time has gone by, one doesn’t simply say “hi” and then duck back out of an old friend’s life. 

The issue is that my glimpse into their life was undetected. Likewise, all the teenagers looking into each other’s social media posts, all the photos, opinions, documented real-life events, and there to be perused and with impunity. 

While I’d had very strong feelings in early adolescence, the first actually dizzying feeling I felt for someone wasn’t until my senior year of high school and with this, I remember staring out over my parents’ snowy backyard in the porchlight for hours just focusing on how I saw it, focusing on the details individually, or taken together. I remember watching TV and not watching TV, being so in my head that the music of VH1 made tears start from my eyes. I talked to her while I drove around, imaging what I would say, how I would say it. I took the feelings, the strongest feelings we will ever feel, those of young love, and upended them, explored them, let them shape my trajectory, as I believe we were meant to do. 

If I had had social media, I can’t help but think, knowing what I know of my tendencies with it now, and what I see of its use, that I wouldn’t have committed to this critical moment in the same way, or, that I would’ve entirely squandered it, by making an altar or her posts. What’s worse, who can say what the development of this empty habit would’ve led to? I would’ve begun scrolling pages of my crushes in jr. high, even elementary school, by late high school, such an action would be cultivated and natural. I might never even consider the possibility of creating something to channel those feelings, or even just watching the snow fall. 

Ever generation has the privilege of being that last to do something noble or beautiful that had carried through ages. Cars did away with the ubiquity of the horse. Mass production of food did away with our generational knowledge of planting cycles. Phones and televisions gave us entertainment away from our neighbors—our community— and made us less social. I have the distinct old person’s privilege of seeing something good and tangible pass away without notice of those who would’ve inherited it. I can see it so distinctly, a box filled with notebook pages, filled with words, drawings, directions, linear notes: all the things teenage love compelled us to make in our stoppered up desire to speak it. To have known it so well, and have found so much inspiration in it, it seems to me like the records of an entire civilization, but, who knows, maybe mooning over social media posts will eventually lead the kids to find some incredible way to express themselves. After all, they managed to find Dystopia.  

Portal

 I came home from work one evening thinking the kids would already be asleep. Lately, I’ve been wrong in this supposition. My headphones still in, wheeling my bike into the garage, I was greeted by their visual clattering. I took my headphones out. Happy to have their “dad’s home!” in my ears, but instead I got “Dad, the bathroom door got locked again and there’s a candle burning in there!” Having relieved themselves of their informational burden, they ran back inside, presumably to be closer to the chaos which, this close to bedtime, or this long after bedtime, was more than welcome. 

I’m processing the bathroom door being locked again when my son runs back out, and adds “welcome home, dad!” I can’t tell if this is done as a coup de grâce or if he is still young enough to actually be thinking of my feelings and trying to mitigate the impression of the door news.

The energy of the house is focused on the bathroom door, even though no one is near it. Is that the candle flicking causing the lambency in the light under the door or is there already a fire in there? I don’t smell any smoke at least. 

“Hi” my wife adds from where she sits on the couch fully nine months pregnant, and at this point in the day, unable to do much other than eat ice and apologize for eating ice. 

“Hi,” I say. “So the door’s locked again?” I ask, wanting to know what I’m up against. 

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened *crunch*.” She bites down on another ice cube. Damn those things are loud.

“Yeah, but what happened to the tape?” I ask. 

After this happened last time and it took me about an hour of agonizingly screwing around, cursing this particular type of door handle, and being generally inept at this kind of thing to get the door open, I wrapped tape all around the locking mechanism on the inside of the door. Usually, the door doesn’t even get closed, so the tape seemed like a sufficient precaution against this happening again.

Apparently not.

“I’m not sure *crunch*. I think one of them took it off.”

I look at the little rascals bounding around in celebration of the disorder they have caused, and I think of Mikey’s maxim of entropy being the natural tendency of all things. 

I set to work on the door. The kids gather around in excitement, but when they realize that the door isn’t going to be broken down, or explode in flames, they resume running around in circles demanding candy as is their wont before bed. 

I manage to locate the paper clip I bent with needle-nose pliers into the perfect shape to fit the notch inside the handle the last time this happened. It’s just a matter of turning the mechanism inside the handle over. But it is like a game of chance. The mechanism is tiny, and it seems only to be luck to locate it. 

“It might be harder *crunch* this time. The tape might still be on the other side of the handle.” My wife says, taking the kids up to bed. Surprisingly they go without any further resistance, and as they go up the stairs, I think how I miss them even when I they are asleep, how, sometimes in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I just want to go lie down in their room to be near them and be part of their growing up. 

What I say is “how the hell did the door get locked with the tape still on?” Everyone shrugs and continues up the stairs. 

Last time, once I’d found the right Youtube video, the right paperclip, and the stars had aligned, I’d managed to get the door open pretty quick. So quickly, that I’d saved the paperclip, designating it an important tool, but now, the damn thing just seemed to bend in there. Every time I connected with the mechanism and got purchase, I’d feel the paperclip turning and then it would take on the torque and start twisting until: Pop! It would come out of the mechanism. Damn! Was the tape still on the inside of the door? If the lock had become engaged and was reinforced by tape on the other side there was no way this was going to work, but how could the door be locked when there was tape over the lock?

“I wouldn’t be so worried,” a voice calls down from upstairs. “If it weren’t for that candle in there.”

The door leads into the closet-like downstairs bathroom which, in our small home, sits at the confluence of the dining room, living room and kitchen. It would probably be the only bathroom that ever got any use if it weren’t for bathtime, bedtime stalling once the kids are upstairs, and the tattered remnants of modesty which still prohibit the adult use of a bathroom so close to where we eat for certain uses, thank god. 

There’s no way to get into the bathroom, but knowing I can’t go to sleep with a candle still burning in there, I can’t help but to project my imagination under the door frame. I even start prying my fingers under there until I realize the absurdity of it and diligently go back to the paperclip and imagine how much better dinner will taste after this thing is open. 

I’ve got the paperclip all twisted up now. I’ve folded it back on itself to try to get more torque from it. It’s looking less like the slick tool it was when it popped the door open last time, and more like a tangible demonstration of my frustration and desperation. I’d take a break, but all that’s going to do is make this take longer when, suddenly, pop!, the twisted wire catches, the handle turns free, and at last the damn door is open.

The candle burns innocently on the shelf above the toilet where even if the door hadn’t been opened, it would’ve just gone out. I had been imagining it, smokey, surrounded by paper, maybe even oily rags, but it’s just an innocent little bathroom candle burning even delicately, if such a thing is possible.  

I blow the candle out, just in case the door somehow locks again. I’m seeing the bathroom as if for the first time, unable to believe I’ve succeeded in getting the door open. It’s so small and cozy in here, much like the home I share with my family. It is familiar, and yet strange, and almost unbelievable that I should own such a thing as a bathroom with its toilet, and plumbing, and hastily painted walls. It seems so incredible, so wonderful to own a bathroom, an entire house.

“Wow,” I say quietly to myself. And then I hear my wife coming down the stairs. 

“Oh good, you got it open. Do you want dinner now? They’re asleep.” She stands in the doorway of the bathroom, measuring the room with her eyes, and probably thinking something similar to what I was just thinking, or maybe just being exhausted and being happy the door is open. 

“Yeah,” I say, finally leaving the sanctuary of the little bathroom. “What’s for dinner?”

The next day, my son and I went out to get a new door knob without a lock. It turns out to be pretty easy to put on.

…

After a week of rain and working in front of the computer, I spent the entire morning outside, positioning myself in the narrow wedge of sunlight falling over the driveway, cleaning and changing the tire on my bike. My son played a game where he’d ride his bike across the street, call to me, and then indulge in my astonishment that he’d crossed the street so quickly. 

“Wow!” I’d say, looking around wildly. “You’re already over there!”

I sprayed WD-40 into the crank and loosed all kinds of grit in clots of gravely foam. I scraped congealed oil from the teeth of the chainring. I ran several Q-tips around the rear hub. The more I cleaned, the more I found to clean. When I finally replaced the tire, I discovered I’d put it on backward, which is a very minor detail, but, no, I thought, I’m not afraid of a little disassembly, and I took it off to flip it around, and, what the hell, try to clean it a little more. 

My son and I had been going in and out of the house. Getting more Q-tips, seeing what my wife and daughter were doing in there, getting a snack, a drink, etc. We’d opened and closed the front door many times with no more effect than usual, but probably to the slight irritation of the neighbors—our front doors and right next to each other. 

When I finally had the bike put back together and the rag, soaked in bike grease and grit, thrown out, I started to go in and found the front door locked. 

The handle turned without issue, so it must’ve been the deadbolt. My greasy hands fumble for my keys, soiling my pockets. I have to work later, so I still have the giant cluster of work keys in there to differentiate my house keys from. Meanwhile, I an hear my wife crunching ice and my daughter painting at the kitchen table in there. I want to shout, “will someone please open the damn door!” Why the hell is it locked? I’ve been in and out of the house? But I manage to get my oily fingers around the right keys, get them into the deadbolt lock and push aside my irriation. I turn the key and push, nothing happens. I try the handle lock, it is still turning freely, but the door won’t open. I shove. I rattle the door in its frame. Nothing. The bolt is frozen in there. 

“What’s going *crunch* on out there?” My wife asks around a mouthful of ice.

“The damn door won’t open.”

“Huh?” It’s hard to hear when you’re chewing something that loud. 

“I said the damn door won’t open!”

The neighbors, by the way, are hearing this entire conversation. Given the proximity of our doors, one can hear everything that is said on our shared front porch. They are good people, and too polite to say so, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t see us as indelicate rubes forever yelling through closed doors, loosing a gaggle of indelicate children upon the world who are frequently trying to take a peek into their windows. All I need is a big old rusted car parked in my front yard to complete the picture.

When she finishes her ice trays, my wife tries the door from the inside. She rattles it as I did while I walk around to the back of the house and come in the back door to do the same, as if the result would be different. 

“Dammit! It’s stuck!” I say, stating the incredibly obvious.

For a moment, the kids crowd closer to see what the hubbub is, but when they deduce that it is only more door rattling—which they’ve recently seen with the bathroom door—they return to their stations at the kitchen table and on the back porch. 

While I go get the tools, I think about how often I say “dammit” Recently my three-year-old son, in conversation with me, tried out a casual “damn”. I thought, “well, it’s something even my grandmother would use to express frustration or impatience. It’s not a word without function, and it’s not vulgar. Still, when you hear a three-year-old use it, it make you wonder how often you are demonstrating frustration or impatience. I leave the garage with the tools, resolving to be as cool as I can about this whole thing. 

I take up my station at the of the house and continue rattling and pounding at the front door just to make sure the it isn’t the deadbolt or that it can’t be unstuck. The neighbors come out. 

“What’s going on?” They ask in a friendly way. 

“Oh, door’s stuck,” I say sheepishly and feel guilty for the door being stuck, like it’s something that would befall such a bumptious family that yells through closed doors anyway. There’s probably some polite, quiet thing that decent people do to care for their doors that I’ve never heard of which doesn’t involve all the rattling and tools.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” my neighbor tells me. “But I can help when I get back if you still need any help.”

I thank him and try to push down the feeling that he’s going to come home from work and find a doorknob that’s had a hammer taken to it, which is still stubbornly attached to the door, and the door attached to our house with the whole family coming and going through the front window. My wife and I still yelling to each other despite the window being open. A baby bawling from inside. 

I go back inside and start to remove the handle, but even when I’ve got the handle off and the bolt’s mechanism—the cylinder?— is there, I can’t get it unstuck. The bolt won’t pop back into place no matter what part of this thing I mess with. I shove a screwdriver in there, I grab a pin with pliers, I have two screwdrivers going at once. This thing isn’t budging and now, well, I’ve got a hole in the door where the knob was. I can’t leave it like this. 

I resort to the internet, which I had been really hoping to not have to do. I hate the feeling of tapping on my phone screen while holding a screwdriver in the other, impatiently listening to people who know how to fix doors demonstrate how the lock will just “pop open” on doors and door handles that look nothing like mine and, I suspect, are mere props to generate views. 

I leave Youtube and go to Reddit. In response to someone else’s advice on a thread, someone has posted, in all caps: “THE BOLT IS FROZEN. THE ONLY SOLUTION IS TO REMOVE THE DOOR.” Dammit, but at least it’s another option.

My wife has since slipped out the back door, and the kids come over, their curiosity renewed when they see me tapping out the pins the hold the door to the hinges. I explain to them how I have to remove the whole door since the bolt is stuck. They both climb up the steps behind me, probably secretly hoping the whole door will topple down on me with a crash when I take out the last pin or a similar calamity which would entertain them. 

But even with the third pin out, the door remains stuck fast. A Youtuber tells me to use a hammer to pry the door off the hinges. He has a lot more space than me to get the claw end of the hammer under the hinges, but I do my best, knocking all kinds of dents into the wall and around the frame in the process. Yep, there should be an old Ford parked right under the eucalyptus tree in the front, one with plants growing out of it and the front hood rusted open. It would match the hammer dents around my front door nicely. 

The kids weary of the mock drama of me wrestling with the hinges and resort to playing games of quiet narration on the stairs. I can hear them whispering the action of their games to themselves as they move toys back and forth and the sound calms me immensely. I love hearing them resort so thoroughly to their imaginations. It assures me that they will grow up to be compassionate and independent people. 

I go back outside and try throwing my weight against the door, but it’s as if the pins aren’t even out of the hinges. It’s like I’m throwing myself against a bank vault door.

I’m afraid to just try mangling the hell out of the lock, afraid to force anything in case I have to bring a locksmith into this. I can imagine them coming over and seeing the bent, smashed lock cylinder twisted part way out of the door and just shaking their head at such an obvious display of frustration and ineptitude and then saying something condemnatory like “well, since you’ve got this all twisted in here I’m going to have to get the blowtorch.” However, I manage to get a screwdriver underneath the cylinder and I can’t help but to just pry at the damn thing. It starts to bend and I think “here it is, the point of no return. This is where you succeed only in hopelessly mangling this. This is when you create a huge mess for someone else to deal with.” But then I realize that I’m obviously going to get a new lock; I’m going to throw this one out. Who cares if it’s bent as long as I get it out of the door!

Relieved of any anxiety about the state of the door, I just bend the thing all the way back, like an ape trying to use a complex machine, and just before the whole door falls on me, I remember to put the pins back in the hinges. The lock breaks, but the door remains intact and swings open to the front yard and the hazelnut bushes and azalea I have planted out there in lieu of having the rusted car. I return to the dignity of homo sapiens. 

The kids come down from the stars and congratulate me. The phone rings, I tell my wife on the way home from the pool—who I’m pretty sure was chewing on ice even in the car— to stop and get a new lock set. Hell, I even manage to get the knob installed, ready to go before I have to leave for work. 

The sun is out. It’s a beautiful afternoon. I announce triumphantly that I’m going to ride my bike to the office after all this honest labor. I go into the garage and find my bike with the back tire, the one I worked on all morning, totally deflated. 

“Dammit!”

Ways to Wake Up

This morning, on my way over here, I passed a man standing in his yard with a baby strapped to him, pacing, bouncing slightly. No matter how normalized, a still very incongruent thing to see in the dark of the very early morning.

Quite likely, the man was at a major crux of experience in life. An inflection point that, like most of them—except maybe high school graduation—we are ignorant of how profound and irreversible it is. 

It is difficult to catch the signs of a baby’s nascent personality, traits that will later solidify into something we recognize as a unique human being, with a unique orientation to the world. As a baby, they seem only a packet of demands, the fulfillment of which becomes duty and, in turn, shapes our unique orientation to the world.

In high school, I discovered my capacity for creativity was greater at night when the house was quiet, and I had space to explore my thoughts. Back then, I roamed through future possibilities, sandwiched, as I was, between a Stephen King novel and the Michigan winter outside. What I never intended to go beyond indulgent reading, mere resolution of conflict, gradually grew into musings on maturity. King’s teenage protagonists ventured into a world in which they were alone, and I followed eagerly in my mind, seeking a better understanding of my own burgeoning independence. 

Eventually, I discovered that I could intensify the experience by manipulating words in another way: before reading each evening, and exploring new emotional scenarios of independence, I would write, usually focusing on a single emotion and expanding on it as much as possible. In a way, I was priming myself to read, checking in with who I felt myself to be, before spending hours with imagined characters and trying to extract something personal from their experiences.

I built a cult of this routine, spending hours each night in words, trading the ephemeral daytime experiences of human interaction, of sight, and sound, for the solid, but mutable experience of writing and reading surrounding by the sleeping world. 

Turned out the routine was a great primer for college. The bulk of what I was expected to do as a student was to sit with words, ideas strung out in paragraphs and entire books, and make something of them, understand them and comment on them. Now, on my own, I built a temple for my cult of words, as a student, I was to be their acolyte. 

Long before I was a morning coffee drinker, I was an evening coffee drinker. I still can’t help but to associate the dark, earthy flavor and warmth more with twilight than with dawn; a way to cross over into the quiet period, to hone the focus on the page, while the world grows still, abstracted only by the occasional set of roving headlights, passing the café on the road outside. Inside, I was using the words I was reading to construct what I was writing through quoting. Moving them from one pile to another, sifting them through my fingers, using them to examine the radical present I was living in, on my own, with all the roads leading to the horizon seemingly open.

But unable to construct much foresight, I eventually began to impetuously follow these roads. No longer imagining them, glancing over the top of a book, but setting the book down and going out to walk them. Once I had begun, I found it difficult to stop.

I read less and walked more. With less of a routine to hold me to the nightly exploration of words, they lost their magnetism, and I wandered larger and larger circles in the night. The night would begin with reading, but I was no longer anchored in it by assignments and due dates, and, closing the book, I’d walk to the ocean, through the mountains that were just outside my constantly changing windows. Why read about what was, after all, right there?

I found other people out in that night, and I realized that I had been alone in my books, with my words. I followed these people, sometimes, and other times, they followed me. We went new places together, had conversations which reflected the writings I had done, it was another way of playing with the words, one that left no trace, and suited my itinerant lifestyle. 

Until all this foraging and this ranging through words and experience leads you to the experience of creating another life. For me, this transition came in the same way that moving from words to experience did. Gradually, I explored this idea further and further. Leaving the book face down on the coffee table, and shuffling out into the night for a walk that led to three hours halfway across town. 

And then I found myself in the position of the man walking through the neighborhood streets very early in the morning, bouncing a wide-eyed baby, resigning myself to being awake at a previously unknown time, and knowing that if I sat still and read, the baby would cry, and being tired of hearing crying. Being very tired of hearing crying.  

Before having a baby, dawn was the bleariest time of the clock. It was the punishing treasure at the end of the night, the exhausted sunrise before collapse. When reading, it was the time when you realize you have passed the entire time the world has been resting following someone else’s thoughts. When wandering, it was the time when you finally made it back home, having crossed over the night like a bridge. It was when the spell broke and you had to come back, or get risk getting seriously lost. 

My son slept beautifully, but he woke up around five or six am every day, and I gradually adapted my orientation to suit him. I went to sleep early, walking only to the mailbox, reading only a paragraph or two, knowing I would be awakened before the dawn for a new kind of exploration. 

Having known the world of words, and the world of wandering, I slept through the night, and woke to the experience of holding another world against my chest while I strapped the carrier on, and made my pre-dawn coffee, and together we would step out into the precise place on the earth rolling over into the sun shining through the darkness of space. The same point that once signaled the end, now signaled the beginning. 

No amount of reading, or wandering, or baby-soothing ever prepared me for the next stage in life, but it has always been fulfilling to know that I devoted myself so entirely to each one while I lived it. 

And just the other day, my daughter expressed regret at not being able to stay up late, explaining that she felt much more creative at that time. God knows what late stage I will be in when she begins to take my books of the shelf after we have gone to sleep, ready to create her own world of words and follow it where she will. 

 

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.