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. 

Eucalyptus Blood

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

…

 

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

 

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

 

 

The Ghosts of Titan

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Man, that jacket is so cool!”

“Mmmhmm.”

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

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

“Would you ever sell it?”

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

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

“Mmmhmm.”

 

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

 

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

 

“Hey. Catch.”

 

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

 

…

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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