Work, Work, Work

 Until I was six years old, I lived at 315 Fourth St. in Jackson, Mi. In those days, I don’t remember seeing my dad a lot. If he wasn’t working, my memory has a difficult time placing hm anywhere in that house or its environs. I might remember him more clearly after we moved because I was older and therefore living a less dream-like childhood with more concrete memories, or it is possible that he was simply around more. 

At about eight—I must’ve needed a year to transition after the move—my dad turns up a lot more in my memories. He’s still at work at lot of the time, but, when not at work, I remember him around the house. He is outside doing one thing or another. In the summer, he is cutting the grass, in the autumn, he is splitting wood, sometimes he is working on an old car he bought from the neighbors who had it rusting away in a garage. He is always doing something. He doesn’t come home from work and turn on the TV. If he does relax, he reads, and he reads tomes on Greek wars that would likely put most people who’ve worked a 10-hour day to sleep in a couple of minutes. He does fall asleep in his chair sometimes. He’s only human. But most of the time he’s poring over what he reads, almost alertly, eyebrows moving up and down in visual cogitation. 

The point is, the dad model I grew up with was always in motion, always getting something done. Even in his recreation, he wasn’t entirely at rest and was still working toward something.

As a kid, I hated this; it was anathema to my idle childhood. Up until we moved, I spent a lot of time in the backyard with my imagination, and after the move, I continued to explore the forest around our house from which my dad extracted the wood for our fireplace, but, by 10 or so, I had become much more committed to the world I shared with my peers rather than the world I shared with my parents and that world was in places where there were sidewalks, parking lots, things to buy, and lights that came on at night. 

It was a world just beyond my reach. True, the house we’d moved to was a two-minute drive to a (relatively) large suburban neighborhood, but as a kid that drive converted into a 30-minute walk on the shoulder of a road with a 55-mph speed limit. I might as well have lived on another planet from my friends.  

So, I spent inordinate amounts of time in front of the tv and on the phone. I’d bring the cordless phone up to my room, turn on my little TV, my Nintendo, my stereo and escape into a world that could’ve been anywhere. I often thought about our old house, the one we’d left when I was six, how close it was to everything. Especially as I got older and started riding my bike into town, braving that 55 mph road. If I still lived on Fourth St. I could’ve gone anywhere on bike, or even foot in under 30 minutes. Instead, it probably would’ve taken an hour to walk to the corner grocery store and another hour to walk anywhere past that. 

Thus, my dad and I moved into our polarized positions. When we lived in town, I don’t remember him in the yard or around the house doing anything but just being there. Now, he was like a groundskeeper with a large holding to care for, and that care was his recreation. On the weekends, he was always sweaty, coming into the house, wiping his brow with the exuberance of someone really living life.

“Damn that oak is hard to cut!” He’d exclaim or “Damn, we really let that grass get long!” or “Damn, I got get more copper sulfate into that pond!” But he always made these mock complaints with a grin on his face. Like there was no place he’d rather be than out putting copper sulfate into the pond on a beautiful sunny day or using his snowplow on a driveway that snaked about 700 feet through the woods to the busy road.

Often, from my pubescent cave, I’d hear him say, “Where’s the boy?” And I’d roll my eyes, and set my face into a concentrated scowl. When the door opened, and he’d say, “hey, why don’t you come outside and help me with the chainsaw?” I’d say, “Dad, I’m on the phone.” Or “Dad, I’m about to beat this level.” Or “Dad, I don’t want to go out into the merciless sun, or the freezing snow and mess around with a chainsaw. That’s your thing, not mine. Isn’t it enough that I have to live way the hell out here? At least leave me Saturday to pretend I’m somewhere closer to my friends.” 

I don’t know if I ever articulated this sentiment, but I refused every time he asked me something. It was my default. Why go outside? In front of the TV, I felt a connection to my peers (in the years before smartphones, we would call each other, turn the tv on the same channel and watch it together, sometimes going a while without even saying anything). If I went outside, I let go of that connection, my Gibraud jeans, or, later, charged mohawk ceased to mean anything and I was just a kid with his dad, stumbling along, uncouth over the snow, under the summer humidity to sweat, to freeze, and what for? So we’d have wood for the winter? So what? We’d have it anyway. If I helped or not, it would get done. The only job I ever went in for was mowing the lawn. After we got a riding mower, I could sit there and, with my discman balanced just so, I could keep the thing from skipping most of the way through Green Day’s Dookie, pretending I was far from the field where I was mowing. I was on my bike, a few blocks from the mall, standing around with my friends, deciding what to do next. But, every other job, unless forced, I would not do. They were too messy, too uncool, and too strong a reminder that I was not independent, or even cool, that I lived in my parents’ world most of the time and only had fleeting moments of escape when someone drove me to the mall or I was at school. 

When I turned 18, I moved to Chicago, right to the middle of the city. And because I didn’t want to rely on my parents for anything, and because they were paying both my tuition and my rent, I never spent any money, and a good deal of the food I ate, I got from the dumpster. Luckily, by the next year, I had figured out enough of living on your own to get a job and pay my own rent. But even then, I never had to think about tuition until I went to graduate school. 

Somewhere in that transition to adulthood and responsibility, I started to understand my dad’s attraction to work. Rather than cutting up fallen trees in freezing January temperatures, I went to the diner down the street and memorized Italian verb conjugations, applied sociological principles, and read Tom Jones and tried to understand it’s importance in the Western Canon. College, and the work it entailed, became my justification for independence. I was afraid of being pulled back into a world where I was inconsequential, so I studied. And as I studied, I felt my ignorance, and studied more.

I wasn’t an especially talented student, but I was thorough. I made up for the lack of talent with dedication. One summer, I took two 400-level English classes. One class assigned eight novels, the other 12. There were also supplementary readings. The classes were condensed into eight weeks. So, in two months, I read 20 novels. I skipped nothing. Even when I didn’t like the book. I read every single word. For those two months, when I wasn’t at work, I was reading. It wasn’t work the way my dad had modeled, but it felt good. I frowned on my peers who openly admitted they didn’t have time to complete the reading. I thought “you’re an English major; this should be your passion!” Because I didn’t feel this limitation, I began to imagine my life as an academic, spending entire years in the relentless study of words and meaning, returning, with every spare moment to my desk and stack of books, the way my dad had read his tomes on the wars of ancient Greece.

After graduate school and two years of living overseas, I realized I was no longer interested in the cloistered life. I wanted to be out in the world doing things, not reading about other people doing things. I spent the next six years doing things. I stayed out late, I closed the bars, but I always came back to writing about it later. I may have not had a vocation, but I found some comfort in reflecting through words. 

Through these somewhat turbulent years—I lived on three different continents, in four different countries—I enjoyed breaking from the academic schedule. Almost every weekend, I relished the idea that I didn’t have a paper to work on and, after work, I could do whatever I wanted. Even years after graduate school, I still enjoyed this freedom. But after a Friday night spent wandering around Buenos Aires drinking Quilmes, or in San Francisco, falling asleep in Golden Gate Park, I sought stability in work and because I lived in small apartments, and owned nothing but a bike and a pile of clothes, that work was limited to writing. 

By Sunday morning, I’d usually be hunched over the computer, forcing my mind up, out of the dullness of the weekend, and into examination. As unprofitable, as empty a task as it was, it provided me with a place to put my effort and feel that I was forging a valuable future, that I wasn’t lying down on the job of preparing myself, at some distant point, to be a professional, an academic, or, at least, a serious-minded person. 

By then, I was out of danger of being pulled back to my parents’ house and losing my identity. I could no longer become an anonymous ten-year-old striving to be someone, I had too many experiences now to be anything but myself. 

Between years spent overseas, I would stay with my parents for a few months, and I enjoyed the feeling of my own personality mixing with, and not being eclipsed by theirs. If I worked with my dad, it was because I wanted to, and I came to feel the recreation in it. I no longer felt like a child kept from the world I wanted to inhabit. I inhabited it, and I was only visiting this place. I felt sure my ten-year-old self on the lawnmower, dreaming of agency, would be glad to look into the future and see that this had come to pass.

A few years later, I found having a kid, no substantial upset to this routine. When my daughter was born, I was still in an associate faculty position, but I put a lot of effort into exploring all my options and I had interviews for jobs in North Carolina and Kiev. We could’ve kept moving, but my wife, understandably, didn’t want to raise a family on the go. It was either stay put and have more kids, or continue the mode of life that had become so comfortable. The former option, being unknown, seemed at once more challenging and interesting.

Raised with the model of constant work, I struggled, but my stubbornness and ability to make work, or even discomfort, a part of my routine, won over. When I first arrived in Armenia as a Peace Corps volunteer, I missed my friends, I missed San Francisco, I missed the whole world I’d known until that point, but gradually, I accepted where I was and stopped thinking “two more years to go”. I did the same thing when hiking the Appalachian Trail. Every day, I woke up and hiked. I never understood how anyone got tired of it. I loved having such an enjoyable task to apply myself to each day. The walking was constant work, but in a very single-minded and even enjoyable way. 

It was after my son was born that, for the first time in my life, I met a significant challenge. I could no longer apply myself to a task I had set out for myself, be it writing an article, hiking, making a podcast, applying for jobs, or whatever. I had to be at home helping as much as possible. While I was at work, my wife was caring for both an infant and a toddler. I knew how exhausting this was, and every spare moment I spent at the café working on whatever project I was dreamed up for myself, I was giving her more of that work. 

So, I started spending my weekends at home, or as much as I could. As an English instructor, I would often have piles of essays coming in at once that required thoughtful reading and response. I also had to constantly be revising my class to fit the ever-changing needs of my students. Even on the weekends, I had to work, and, like anyone with an associate faculty job, I had another job. Mine was delivering bread which I also did on the weekends. 

When I had a lull in work, I tried to be at home, to help with the kids, but, more than anything, I struggled with my inherited need to work, to more forward and accomplish—especially as we were still living on the wages of two part-time jobs, and associate faculty make nothing considering the education and dedication required by their job. The combination of a lousy job, and the need to achieve led to feelings of inadequacy and the need to always be striving toward something more. While I was still in this situation, I always felt like I needed to improve it.

But doing more created problems. When, after grading papers, I took a break to look for jobs, I came home excited about possible opportunities my wife, caring for two young children, had no desire to entertain. If I couldn’t look for another job, how else could I improve our situation? How could I continue to do the meaningful work I’d been raised to do? We lived in a small community, to stay where I was afforded very few options, none of them desirable.

Eventually I got the full-time job, though not the one I’d expected, and to augment that, I even took on another part-time teaching position. And for a time, I became somewhat noteworthy in the district as someone working hard to salvage a department that had been left without a director. Twice they offered me the position. But I had to put the breaks on the meteoritic rise that—had I not had two kids with another on the way— may have been the fulfillment of my effort. I had to learn that you can work too much when you have young children. My dad worked hard to provide his children with every available opportunity. And it was from this hard work that I was able to get launched on my own path to learning the value of this work. If I had taken out loans and hadn’t had help paying the rent my first year of college, I don’t know how it all would’ve turned out. I wouldn’t have come home, but I may have struggled for a long time. I was grateful for that work, but I didn’t know if I could make it fit with my family dynamic. I didn’t know if I wanted to. 

Becoming the director would’ve meant being at work all the time and feeling more dedication to the department than my family whom I didn’t want to live apart from. I turned it down. Later, I turned down an offer to return to the university that I had been working toward for a long time. I had a good balance with what I had. There was no reason to trade it in for an unknown, as tempting as it was. And I accepted my routine. 

But the old desire to do more is always there. I still prowl the real estate listings, even though I don’t want to move, nor take on the additional expense. I still surf the job listings, even though I often feel like the job I have was created with me in mind, and with my extra energy, I still manage to write a little each week to consider the life I’m living and hopefully render the lessons of it more intelligible for my kids when they’re older. 

My yard is small. I don’t have a fireplace to cut wood up for. I don’t have a driveway to plow. But I’ve crowded the front and back gardens with plants, and I continually return to the nurseries looking for something else to put in the ground. It’s not the heroic labor my dad would emerge wiping his brow from each weekend, but it is something my kids are accustomed to seeing me do and it gives me something to cultivate, even if most of that cultivation consists of standing around just watching. I’ve gotten good at watching things grow, there’s a lot of that to be done around here, and I’ve come to realize, there’s really nothing more important than that watching. The real challenge is learning how to stand still for it. 

 

MicroEdens

 The kids were off for President’s Week and, to help, out, I took a day off after the Monday holiday. My wife went to work for the day and I stayed home with the kids. 

The week before the weather forecast had shown snow for Tuesday, and the kids and I were excited to see if there would be any truth to this. But snow is rare on the coast and, as I understand it, the influence of the ocean makes coastal weather notoriously difficult to predict. One day, the forecast showed snow. The next it showed rain, and the next it would be back to snow. 

And there was no consensus among the different weather projections on the various sites for weather that I spend too much time looking at now. Not only looking at my own weather (and predicted weather) but also looking at the weather other places.

I started doing this to get a better sense of the growing season, to be on gaurd against any overnight frosts that could hurt the subtropical garden I’ve got the audacity to cultivate at 40 degrees north. The same latitude as Indianapolis and Columbus, OH, but also of Madrid and Naples. Like I said, the influence of water can make a substantial difference. 

The week before I’d brought home another hibiscus and was waiting until the danger of frost had passed before planting it, so I kept looking at the weather, anticipating the snow, bracing for the cold. 

Monday night we had a rare crack of thunder, one so loud it set off car alarms. My daughter who’d just gone to sleep, came in our room pretty worried, but I think she could see how excited I was about the prospect of a storm and realized it was pointless being afraid of something your parent is so gleefully anticipating. She went back to bed and there was no more thunder nor lightening. 

Snow had been forecast for early the next morning, but when I awoke, it was only cold and wet. There wasn’t even a dusting of frost on the roofs as there had been in January when we had a few really clear nights that brought the temperature down, but then went way back up during the day when the sun came out with no obstruction. After coffee, the wind began to pick up and blew a scattering of hail in. I went out and scraped together a cup of it for my son. He looked at it for a second and asked me to put it in the freezer where I think it still is. 

It was a pleasant morning to be inside, watching the hail and rain blow around. I could imagine too well riding to work in that slop, soaked and freezing. My daughter finally woke up later in the morning and, by then, most of the hail had melted, except in sheltered pockets here and there. 

After my wife left for work. I took the kids out to run errands and pass some of the wet afternoon at the library. I told them they had to be quiet—they have a tendency to bug each other in the car—the roads could still be slick with the hail. And, as we drove, I pointed out little pockets of hail on roofs and even—in a visual depiction of a microclimate—a few block radius where it seemed to have fallen harder than anywhere else and was slushed to the sides of the streets where it piled up in the gutters. 

When we got to the library, I thought we’d really be hunkering down for a while and I found myself wishing I’d brought a coffee. But after I helped the kids pick up some books, read them a few more, I looked up to see the sun shining brightly in through the windows. The kids felt it too and the cozy library spell was broken. We went out into the bright afternoon, shedding coats along the way. 

There had also been a possibility of snow that night and Thursday, but neither developed. The weather stayed colder than usual, and the rain may have been a little more vigorous, but we didn’t get any more hail and the moisture—as it usually does—kept the temperature from dropping too low in the evening. 

On the coldest night, I was happy to see that the temperature was just as low down in Pittsburg, California: home to the world’s northern-most fruiting mango that’s not in a greenhouse. This only strengthened my resolve to plant one in my south-facing backyard as close to the wall as I have room for.  If they can manage it in Pittsburg, CA, we might be able to do the same here. 

The cold spell ended with the return of the clouds and our customary 50-degree weather. Certainly not the tropics, but usually far enough from freezing to support sub-tropical plants. 

Winter could always come back, but I have a hard time believing in winter when it’s not happening, or at the edge of the 10-day forecast. With nothing but overcast 50-degree weather predicted, I spent last Friday putting in a giant bird of paradise I had noticed at the nursery when I bought the hibiscus. Even having this beauty in a pot on the back deck substantially improved the aura of the place. The plant is already five feet tall with fan-like fronds growing out from the center. They can turn into trees and after a few years, they produce the typical startling bird of paradise flower, but without the orange, just blue and white. 

My wife and I spent a while deciding where we could even fit the giant, and then my son helped me dig the hole to plant it right where we can see it from the sliding glass door while we eat where it will continuously snag my attention as similar plants do when I’m driving around, forcefully swiveling my head to get a better look.  

This plant focus is one aspect of adulthood I never would’ve anticipated. After I moved to San Francisco from Michigan—where’d I’d lived until 23—I noticed plants in a way I never did before. The electric purple of the princess flower on Nob Hill, the rocket exhaust body of the Mission St. palms, the smell of the eucalyptus groves in Marin. When I was in the Peace Corps in Armenia, I was startled to come upon a windmill palm in Ijevan which had been brought back from Sochi. I stood in front of it feeling this longing for the flora of California but at the same time, feeling so relieved to see a palm, like an old friend after years of being back in a continental climate. And in Paraguay, we spent every weekend wondering among the vast public garden that is Asuncion, collecting grapefruit, guava and avocados along the way.  

But it wasn’t until I had my own house that I began to pay attention to plants in the way that I once paid attention to houses which were for sale. I walk by the front gardens of the houses by the high school and in Sunny Brae gathering ideas, trying to make out which of the trees are avocados and then marveling that they are here at all and wondering how long it will take mine to get that big, and all of this with an eye on the weather. I have, after all, seen fruiting bananas (small and green, it’s true, but still there) on my walks and plump passion fruit hanging from vines in a sheltered area. And I love passion fruit.  

In addition to the changes brought by having children, my life has reopened at this new interest. Each time I’ve had such an all-consuming interest, it is dictated my attention when moving through the world. In my late teens and early 20s, I went out into the rustbelt night noticing places to paint graffiti: rooftops I could climb up to, overhangs I could attain; In my 20s, in SF, on my day off, I noticed taquerias, bookstores, and cafés, new aspects of the city to enjoy. And now, in my 40s, I walk though Arcata, Petaluma, Berkeley, amazed at the plants in gardens thinking “could I grow this in my yard?” when I find something particularly striking. Thankfully the answer is always “yes” because snow might be forecast about once a year, but it seldom actually falls and with freezing temperatures so rare, who know? I might keep a mango tree alive long enough to get see some fruit and it’s an easy place to rest my hopes: Not very disappointing if it doesn’t turn out, but astonishing when it does. 

Meanwhile, my kids are growing up. They will likely have memories of me fussing around in the tiny back garden, creating mountains of dirt, brushing the roots of plants, and mixing fertilizers in with the potting soil I plant them in. If we stay in this house they will grow up alongside all these plants, watching their progress mirrored who know what that mean to them, but it’s fun to think it might mean something when they pluck a passion fruit of the vine which by then has grown stately and gnarled against the wall of the house; it’s fun to put a plant in the ground and think what the moment might be like when it bears fruit. 

Momentito

 My top ten of being a dad would no doubt include a moment my daughter and I shared at the Monterey, California Peet’s Coffee when she was either 3 or 4. I woke early in the morning—as is my wont when on vacation—to have a moment to myself while I had my coffee, and then to wander around in the dawn a little before coming back to the hotel as everyone else woke up. I was as quiet as possible as I slipped my clothes on and looked around in the disorder of luggage, clothes, and unfamiliar living arraignments for my book and shoes.

My daughter was either already awake, or she woke up and asked what I was doing. She’s usually not very interested in exploration; she’d prefer to stay at home, but that morning the prospect of staying the room while everyone else slept was likely too dull a prospect. She agreed to come along with me. I grabbed her Dog Man book to bring with my own. My wife and infant son slept on as we gently eased the heavy hotel door closed behind us. 

Monterey sort of slopes down to ocean. We were staying up the slope and took a series of stairs and walkways through the sleeping pinkish town under canopies of familiar trees rendered unfamiliar by their age and position among the 200-year-old adobe of the Spanish administration. The sun rising behind us, our shadows stretched out almost preternaturally in front of us in the almost tropically clear light. 

Peet’s has been my favorite chain place to get coffee since a trip to La Jolla just before my daughter was born, just before becoming a dad. My wife and I had been swimming in the ocean. We came out of the water into a bright and hot afternoon. Peet’s was the first café we saw. She got an iced coffee, but I’ve always enjoyed hot coffee on a hot day. Maybe it was the swimming- and sun-induced languor, maybe it was the warm salt air, but walking through incredibly bourgeois La Jolla, I felt like one of the upper classes enjoying such a great-tasting coffee and I’ve been going back ever since, though admittedly never quite recreating the experience.

The Peet’s in Monterey is right downtown, a small area that is both touristy and practical, and in the morning frantic with sea gull cries on stillness. On the way down, I’d been considering different emotions. Was I slightly annoyed that I wasn’t going to get my quiet moment in the morning with my book and coffee, or was I happy to have my daughter with me, even if she only had the patience to stay in the café about five minutes and wouldn’t want anything they had? My kids always seem to think they like hot chocolate, but I’ve never seen them actually finish a cup of it. Would the café be an alien, uncomfortable, and boring place to her that she would bug me to leave right away or, given the early hour, could she hang out long enough looking through Dog Man to let me drink a full cup of coffee?

These scenarios rattled in my head as we came in the back door through the parking lot and walked the hallway past the bathrooms into the small area with counters and chairs. They’d just opened and only one of the five or six tables was taken already. The place was dim and the music turned down as any good café is. 

We held hands while waiting in line, and at the counter I had the inspiration to buy a brownie since they can’t be spilled and would probably be more interesting. We sat at the table for a moment, regarding each other face-to-face and I realized as I so often do when I take the trouble to look someone in my family in the face, that I don’t do it nearly enough: there’s so much to see and appreciate there. My daughter was regarding me in almost the same way, her clear eyes, her small features, this little, new person. What did she see when she looked at me? We tried conversation for a while, but it was a bit too early for that and after we had lapsed back into silence, she smiled at me as if to show that she was alright with not talking for a while.

“Do you want to read our books for a little bit?” I asked. 

She nodded and picked up her Dog Man. For the next 30 minutes or so, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt prouder. Truth is, I wasn’t even able to pay much attention to my book. My thoughts kept going back to the tableau we must’ve made: man and very young child sitting in early morning weekend café, reading at a small table together like old friends, like people who are completely comfortable in each other’s company. 

…

I had my first serious thoughts of having kids in 2016 when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Long days of walking through forest, though varied in terrain, flora, fauna, etc., still offer the mind an opportunity to take the focus off much of the exterior world and turn inward. Somewhere in Virginia, probably about six weeks in, I started imagining hiking with a child. Gradually in this daydream the child became my child and as we hiked, we held hands. This thought kept coming back to me, sometimes with such especial clarity, I could almost feel the little hand in mine. And the more the thought came back, it was like reaching into the future to touch what would be, and the concept of having children lost a lot of the uncertainty which had always made it seem rash and unlikely for me. By the time I got to Maine, I was ready to talk about it seriously. 

…

In that moment, sitting across from each other at the Peet’s, it felt like that trail vision had come to fruition. We weren’t walking through a forest and holding hands, but we were sharing this moment of quiet trust and interdependence. Each time I took a drink of coffee, I glanced over at her and watched her quietly studying the pages of her book and, like a true café habitué, pick up her brownie without taking her eyes off the page she was on. It would have been difficult not to imagine her as an adult doing the same, and, in thinking of this, I gained an appreciation of what it was like for my parents when visiting me in the present. To see someone you had watched grow from an infant to a capable, and better yet, thinking adult. Wow. What would it be like to visit my daughter when she was 35? but no, here I was in the moment. She is three, perhaps recording this memory for future consideration. I hope so, it was one of my best because I was just so solidly there with her. Not questioning, or suggesting, or lecturing, as it’s impossible to avoid most of the time as a parent, but just there with her sharing the moment. 

And if she remembers that moment with all the clarity and wonder I ascribe to it, perhaps it will yet be repeated if she has children. Perhaps it will be something she will hope to share with her own child: a moment of quiet, mutual understanding. After all, what more could we possibly ask of our children than to understand us in turn?

…

That visit to Peet’s was years ago. My daughter is now seven and has begun reading Charlotte’s Web on her own. In just a few evenings of reading before bed, she is already most of the way through the book. She sits up in her bed, her finger tracing over those all-important words which make up what amounts to the United States’ cultural introduction to empathy—thus required reading. I wonder what impression it could possibly have on a child already so empathetic. Hopefully, we’ll have a moment to visit a café soon so maybe in addition to reading together, she can tell me about what she’s read and what’s it’s meant to her. 

 

Agoraphilia

 

The wide, swinging entrance taking in crowds and, at once, disgorging people to the football-field-wide parking lots, hundreds of lanes, hundreds of cars, either glistening under the snow and ice, or recently shut off engines ticking loudly in the summer heat. Every time we’d drive up, my mom would remark on the number of people. “What’s going on here today? You’d think they were giving this stuff away!” But the malls didn’t need to give anything away to draw in the people. At the time in which they were prominent American fixtures—arguably most saliently in the 1990s—the malls provided a sense of community and belonging which was not available elsewhere in small town America—especially to kids who had no recourse to bars, lodges, or other gathering places and in the 1990s, cafés were only beginning to enter the American panoply of places to spend money in and were largely small, dingy establishments in college towns. 

When I was very young, I went to the mall to walk through a physical recreation of the toy commercials the TV was inundating me with. The mall was the world on TV brought to life. Everything smelled like new plastic, the floors were always recently waxed and squeaky, and the coins in the fountain sparked like they’d been polished before being tossed in. After the drudgery of home, with its worn carpets, smells of frying food, and the gray voices of local talk radio, the mall was so full of promise; each time the doors opened on their pneumatic hinges, they loosed a promise of entertainment, arcades, toy stores, and the smell of freshly baked pretzels. It was just an aspect of entertainment—it was all aspects of entertainment, together.

Now, the doors scrape across the tile floor, and the foyer, once overstimulating with music, conversation and back-lit store signs is now only a cold and echoing hallway, the light insufficient and rainy-day gray, like the light through empty aquarium glass. Inside, one feels the senses significantly neglected rather than catered to, something like descending into a cold basement with a single naked lightbulb illuminating the scene—unconsciously, you want to limit the length of your stay.  

Today, the malls offer only large-scale emptiness and the memory of the station they previously occupied in the American social/commercial map. The emptiness and memories that were once the propriety of warehouses and abandoned factories, only the malls are still open for touring while the warehouses have rusted chains and sometimes barking guard dogs. 

Despite the lights, and the climate control and the lack of (visible) rust, the malls, like the warehouses and empty factories seem like blight; in the name of progress, one wants to tear them down, or, better yet, turn them into something functional. But what could these airplane-hanger-size buildings possibly be repackaged as? Now that we have at length returned to our downtowns, and have learned to appreciate the open sky above us while shopping, why would we ever return to these cheap tenements of commerce? It seems their only possible function now would be as museum pieces; life-size displays of the late 20^th century. 

…

My kids go through the doors of the mall as if they are trespassing on something, holding my hands tightly but then, gradually, perhaps scenting the vague promises of the past, they loosen their grips and begin to run unheeding through the empty corridor, laughing at their echoing voices, the clattering of their feet on this vacancy. To them, it’s just a big empty building, how could I possibly explain to them the prominent place it still occupies in my memory and all it once meant? How it was all here. Even when I rebelled, eschewed the narrowly competitive confines of capitalist consumption, I couldn’t help but to return to the malls, over and over. How can I explain how the malls felt to me who was once young in them?

…

1994. Downtown is still in the death throes of the late 80s and early 90s when unemployment, drugs, and violence emptied all but the most well-known stores of the more prosperous 50s and 60s. The comic book store held on, so did the fur coat store, and a jewelry shop. But there was no congregating point; no cafes, no restaurants, just a few greasy spoon diners that you’d emerge from reeking of cigarette smoke and raw onions. Worse yet, everyone said if you were to attempt the distance between any of the stores that were open downtown, the long blocks of empty storefronts, and alleys latticed in old fire escapes and crumbling brickwork, you were sure to be mugged. Downtown bordered multiple “bad” neighborhoods. Mechanic., MLK Jr., Blackstone, if you didn’t live on these streets, common wisdom held that they were not wisely transversed. And all of them overlaid downtown. So, people parked right in front of Walt’s Heath Food, got their yoghurt-covered raisins, and got back in their cars and got the hell out of there. Indeed, I wondered how people could work in the Viginia Coney Island and Walt’s all day and not be robbed repeatedly with respect to where they were.

The center—because downtown is always the center regardless of where it is geographically in a city or town— was empty and sad. The big buildings, the Greek-columned post office, and the Greek-owned diners, but they’d put another post office in one of the malls and everyone went to that one even though the lines were so much longer and lacked any official grandeur. And after they mailed their letters and paid their utility bills? That’s right, the mall had a Greek diner now, too. Combined with the plastic, floor wax and fountain chlorine, the cigarette and onion smell wasn’t too overwhelming. It is hard to understand now, but the smells actually complemented each other; together, they were a kind of fragrance, young and heady.

I’m in fifth grade and I have my first crush. I am holding the fluttery love to my chest, thinking constantly of her eyes and hair and associated fruity smells that, at ten, is the sum of the feminine mystic. This crush is making me feel courageous and beautiful. It is endowing me with a purpose I have never known. It says, “you, too, belong to the race of humanity; you are not merely an observer, but an active participant.” I smile upon my fellow humans as I push open the mall doors, knowing they have all been in love as I am now and feeling gentler toward them as a result, feeling like we all share a great and important secret; we know beauty and its consort, compassion. And everything, everything I see in the mall is, in some way, connected to that feeling, those radiant, languorous eyes and the desperate need to do something to please them, to see them slightly crinkle at the corners in smiling response to something I have done. And everything in the mall confronts me with this possibility.  

At the entrance is the hippo sculpture I climbed on and slid down as a kid waiting for my mom, the space between the hippo’s ears and nose having been burnished by millions of kids’ butts and scored by the rivets in their jeans. The music of the fountain is a low murmuring over the voices of those waiting in line for cookies and pretzels. Ace of Base and All 4 One on the overhead gently urging on my nascent, peacefully romantic feeling. Without being made explicitly aware, we are all in a party, a party to shop, to buy, to consume, yes, but a party nonetheless. 

I wander through this festive background to pre-teen romance, into the plastic aisles of the Kay Bee Toys, past the mirrored walls of the Sbarro Pizza, into the blacklit poster display of Spencer’s Gifts. And throughout it all, She is there because if she could be anywhere in the world, she is here in this place of general meeting, custom and satisfaction. If she is anywhere, she is here in the agora, the souk, the plaza, the market: the mall, and then, over the racks of CDs in Record Town, the blood drains from my head, the sound goes down, and there, through the pulsing of my heartbeat in my ears, I see her, and I am overcome with wonder and contentment at this incomprehensible and benign world. 

I say “hi”, she smiles at me, and waves “hi”. Ah, the way she said it. Low and clear, she sculpted the air coming from her perfumed mouth for me alone. I know it was not just a greeting, but a pronouncement of her mutual affection. She had, after all, smiled gently when she said it. At 11, it is enough, there is no reason to go beyond this single syllable, the elaboration of which will easily consume the rest of my day imagining how we will spend the rest of our lives together. The mall around me quietly encouraging this sentiment, despite the intention of the greedy rich who built the thing, I buy nothing, I need nothing, having derived all I needed from a simple visit and an encounter. 

What backdrop will serve for this feeling for my children? The mall they have grown up with is cavernous and empty; a novel place of emptiness. The Claire’s, instead of being the birthplace of worldly femininity, is a couple of sad racks on a too-wide tile floor. The products obviously woefully out-of-date. The Game Stop, rather than being the sole means of accessing the supreme entertainment, is a faded tribute to it. The music store is gone, along with the packages music used to come in, jewel cases, liner notes, and anti-theft devices. There is only one restaurant left in the food court—one!—in a place that was once a feast of the senses and a tribute to our great nation of immigrants and the one contribution to culture that is always appreciated: food. Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Thai with the spice, the ferment, the fish, the too-bright, the too-spicey the unAmerican all paired away until all that was left was the palaver of sugar, salt and color, but, ah, how beautiful it looked and how contented we felt eating it. And the big box stores at the ends, once gigantic and labyrinthine places to seek out our moms, among endless aisles of clothing are now shuttered, offering only a blank, incongruent surface where once was a great opening, a way in. 

Of course, it is a great thing that our meeting places are no longer in corporate hands. Now that we do our shopping online, we don’t need the consumerist excuse to meet and our meeting places have returned to the 19^th century ideal: Cafes, parks, seashores, hiking trails and downtown squares festooned with hanging lights and not crowded but convivial in the evening. The downtowns are no longer empty. Once we started looking for more than just a place to buy from our meeting places, we returned to the forgotten beauty of red brick, sidewalks, murals, actual stars overhead, and wide restaurant windows giving out onto all of it. 

And maybe, like the malls, the downtown squares have speakers which play top 40, and maybe the parks have their own incredible smells. Wet pine needles, leaf litter, and melt water streams being more subtly redolent of peace and harmony than plastic and floor wax. And maybe as the summer day closes and dissolves into twilight, and the gold comes up in peoples’ faces, and the lights sparkle on their eyes, maybe in those times, children ardent with first love are still encountering each other. Maybe it is better that they should love the sight of each other in a natural light rather than the halogen of the mall. Maybe it is better that they should see each other as a part of the sky and the trees rather than between aisles of crap to buy. Maybe. I wouldn’t really know. I only have my experience; I only have my memory of the malls as they were and can’t begin to imagine seeing my crush on, say, a hiking trail at 11 years old. This is as incongruent as imagining seeing her on the moon. 

It's for the best that my kids will grow up without the artifice of the malls. They will become comfortable with things as they actually are, and they will expect the world to behave in a natural way rather than the artificial way I learned to expect from a childhood spent indoors going from one store to the next. However, as my kids and I range down the empty mall together, and I catch what feels like the last wiff of Sbarro’s pizza and hear the last soft plash of a coin falling into a fountain, the last click of the camera capturing a picture with Santa, a curtain is falling, a curtain that will separate their experience from mine. Perhaps this is a curtain that must fall between every generation so that adults cannot know their children’s loves too closely and interfere with them, but as this curtain tumbles down between my children and me, in a flash, I see how beautiful my mall world once was, and how terribly lonely and empty it is now, and I see my children’s glittering new world—just a glimpse—then the curtain is down, and I’m left with the tyranny of this memory, these huge buildings no one wants anymore, and, way down at the bottom of it, the euphoria of the love I knew there when I was young and without expectation, back when the curtain was heavily falling between my parents and me, piling in velvet folds and plumes of dust on the stage floor. I want to reach out in all directions. Toward my memories of the 1990s, toward my children’s world of smart phones and real trees in their social spaces, and even back to my parents’ world of department stores and bring them all together, but, no, we only get one experience and there I stand, looking over the CD racks, 11 again, seeing her wave to no one but me. 

"People Never Notice Anything"

 Yesterday was our last trip to Ben Hurd’s. The kindly old Christmas Tree farmer, so much like a Santa figure himself with his white beard and unaffected friendly manner, died sometime last year, leaving the acres of Christmas pines, the two gigantic holly trees, and the porch with its focal stove as an item on his will to be bequeathed to the California Highway Patrol for whom he worked before turning to Christmas trees.

I reread The Catcher in the Rye around the holidays and still had Holden’s admonishment “people never notice anything” in my mind as I took my kids through the familiar rows to pick out a tree one last time. Before having children, I never bought a Christmas tree; it seemed odd to me that anyone without children would waste money on such an unnecessary item. When Gina and I celebrated our first Christmas together in Buenos Aires, I was disinterested in the subject enough to make her call home wondering if I was even planning to do anything on the hallowed 25^th. This feeling of course being exacerbated by being 1000s of miles from home in a place where Dec. 25^th is the official beginning of summer.  

As a kid, my parents didn’t go anywhere consistent to pick up a tree in fact, try as I might, I can’t remember buying a single tree with them. God. I can remember cereal commercials from when I was a kid, but I can’t remember buying a Christmas tree? What a bad trick of my middle-aged mind. 

Maybe we all remake our memories of Christmas when we have kids. We build up our own traditions, decide the ratios for the standards: Santa, cookies, décor, etc. For example, as a kid, throughout December, my mom was frequently baking cookies. They’d be on the table for anyone who wanted them. When my grandparents came over at some point during the season, my grandma brought cookies, too. For us, Christmas had a lot to do with the baking and eating of cookies. But, this isn’t really something I’m that interested in doing with my kids. Baking stresses me out on a good day, and with kids helping the mess gets unwieldly quickly. So, I ask my mom for cookies as my reoccurring present. Hers taste much better than mine anyway. 

I like to see Christmas lights on houses, but I’m not going to put them up myself. I have a hard enough time doing the spider webbing for Halloween. It’s not like it’s an altogether Grinchy Christmas around here though. We have some traditions. One of which is to listen to a “Christmas Raps” LP from the 1980s that I found in some bargain crate when I was younger. We put it on while we decorate the tree. While I carry on another time-honored tradition, that of the dad largely absenting himself from these festivities to clean up the house. While my mom and I would put up the lights, or put on the ornaments, my dad was usually in the kitchen doing the dishes or something. I often wondered why he didn’t participate in the direct way my mom and I did; now as a dad myself, I understand: from the dad perspective, it’s impossible to see a task that needs to be done and not plunge into it. With the kids occupied, it’s the perfect time to clean up the kitchen—which is constantly on the verge of collapsing into a chaos of dishes, overflowing trash, and little pieces of this or that on the floor that my 9-month-old daughter will put in her mouth. I can participate in Christmas from over here, listening to Christmas Raps and occasionally taking a picture. But for now, let’s get to work on these dishes. 

The one tradition that I never absented myself on was picking out a tree. Our first child—my oldest daughter— was born in November, so probably one of the first things we did as a newly expanded family was to buy a tree and when we did, we went to Ben Hurd’s. 

…

It doesn’t snow here. Maybe one morning every other year has a very light dusting that disappears by noon. My kids, who are barraged with Christmas images of ice and snow, sledding, snow men, etc. think of snow in a mythological sense and wonder aloud why they should be deprived of it. I try to explain to them that while snow does have some very beautiful aspects, it is a biproduct of a kind of miserable cold that they would not like, given as they are to not wearing enough clothing to adequately prepare for any temperature below 60 degrees. Of course, I was the same when I was a kid. All kids, for whatever reason, can’t stand the idea of a single superfluous article of clothing. When we get older, the situation becomes opposite. The kid’s thought: “Better leave that sweater at the playground, I don’t want to have to drag it around” becomes the adult’s: “better bring that sweater, I don’t want to be cold.” Of course, kids have smaller capacities for hauling stuff around. I felt so encumbered by a sweater in my arms when I was younger; it was like being shackled to a radiator or something. Now, I just put it in my backpack, or throw it in the backseat. Along with the kid’s extra clothes, I’ve usually got half a suitcase in tow when I go anywhere.  

In coastal California, it rains in the winter. To my wife, Christmas is a cozy day in from a drizzling rain. To me, there is nothing Christmasy about rain except maybe very early in the morning, when it’s still dark outside and you can’t see it, but you can hear it clattering all over the place in the dark, making oily pools in the streets filled with distorted Christmas light. No sun has ever risen on a rain-scape that I’ve appreciated much. They have too much grey in them to excite any sense of appreciation in all but the parched desert dweller, iridated with a lifetime of sun, looking to extinguish some of it and hydrate.   

After my daughter was born, and we went to get a tree. I was probably imaging a muddy fern-crowded forest with a couple of scraggly trees. Nothing to compare with the classic Christmas image of snow-dusted holly berries, the bright scent of pine on a cold breeze and, familiar sound of snow being stomped off from boots when people came in to pay for their trees, and the absolute magic of a hot drink when it’s that cold outside.  

Ben Herd’s Christmas Tree Farm not only met my pessimistic expectations, it confirmed them. A clearing in a redwood forest. Ferns and mud all over, with scraggly trees. How could these farmed trees complete with the sequoia giants just a few feet away standing 100 feet tall and absorbing every last particle of nutrient from the soil? And yet, dammit if that place didn’t come to feel as Christmasy as Christmas Raps and the Pogues “Fairytale of New York” to me! As much as I appreciate the ideal Vermont scenario with snow, and brave green trees in the face of it, and draft horses or whatever, Christmas, at least the only part of it I’m really involved in, has become a fern crowded, muddy clearing the redwoods.  

Maybe the first time we went, it was drizzling, with a low fog crowding the small trees and beading them with moisture and so it appears that way in memory. A fire going on the front porch, a place to dry off, have a cup of hot cider and chat a bit with the proprietor and whoever else was buying a tree that day. In reality, I think the last bunch of years we’ve gone, it has been a beautiful sunny day with a steam rising from the wet ground and the trees to refract the light into rainbow beams pointing to all the sacrosanct trees—scrawny as they may be. It didn’t match the traditional Christmas scene, and it wasn’t even necessarily cozy—as it could be in the rain—but it was beautiful, recalling spring rather than winter when everything is thawing out and waking up. The place, no matter how late you arrived in the day, always felt like it was just waking up. 

The only thing that snagged on the picturesque scene was the people who came wearing clothes for the ski resort: pompomed ski caps, overstuffed coats, snow pants on the kids for god’s sake! It’s 60 degrees out here! But I guess, for some people, that’s how they make a winter, that’s how they make anything, put on the right clothes and there you are. But, being from Michigan, wearing a knit ski cap in 60-degree weather will never look anything but absent-minded to me.  

So with Ben gone. This year the farm was volunteer-run. From what we picked up on, no one is likely to want to take it over. It’s not a very lucrative venture. Tend to a crop of trees all year to sell at $50 a pop really only works when you’ve got a retirement income to supplement.  

My son kept choosing trees and then being on the verge of a tantrum if we didn’t pick that one; there was tree guys up in one of the redwoods, 100 feet up sawing down branches yelling to each other in Spanish. My daughter wanted to know when she’d be able to get the cookie they give you at the end, and then, once we finally picked out a tree and sawed it down, we discovered we didn’t bring the required cash to pay for it, so I had to drive 10 minutes back down the mountain to a grocery store to get cash back. By the time I got back, I just felt flustered, and, we had somewhere else to get to anyway, and off we went, leaving behind that first really established Christmas tradition, according to old Holden Caulfield, not having noticed anything.

That night, I had to ask my wife, she’d been going there since she was a little girl, and she’d returned to take her own children there. I wondered if she weren’t feeling a little sad, a little emptiness after her last visit. But while I was in the middle of asking her, our nine-month-old daughter woke up crying. My wife sighed, rolling over to pick her up. “I don’t know,” she said, “It’ll probably hit me next year.” And I went to sleep thinking about Holden Caulfield and what he would’ve been like with kids of his own and what he would’ve had to say about noticing things after calming tantrums, making assurances, and having to leave to get cash to pay for the tree. After you have kids, you sort of just farm out the noticing to them. They’re going to do so much more with it anyway. 

We went home, put on Christmas Raps, dug out the decorations and ornaments, and I went over to watch from afar; capitalizing on the momentary distraction to wash the dishes. That might seem callous, but it’s the best place for a dad, watching, appreciating, remembering. And now that the tree’s up, I’ve been noticing the coming and going of these parking lot tree sales, a paltry string of lights, a wire cage of trees. There’s no atmosphere, no warm drink, nothing to even look at, hell, they probably even pick your tree out for you. I may not notice anything, I may have passed the torch to the next generation, I may be saddled with conflicting ideas about what Christmas even looks like, but there’s no way I’d buy a tree from a parking lot. That must only work for the people with enough imagination to wear ski caps in warm sunny weather. 

I guess we’ll have to create a new tradition next year. I’m in favor of getting a permit and driving up the mountain and just sawing down our own damn tree. If we drive up high enough, there might even be snow.  

Merry Christmas.

Skating to Buck the Trends

 On Halloween, trick-or-treating with the kids, we passed a pumpkin with a “6-7” design. I figured it was some inside joke for the people in the house, but my wife told me it was an inside joke for young people in general. Only confirming what has been a burgeoning thought for a while now, viz. I have no idea what the world’s youth are paying attention to. Yes, the collective adult world has been baffled by the fad of “6-7”, so I’m taking convenient example and, yes, it’s very old of me to use this example, but, like “6-7” itself, it’s just a device to get to something more meaningful.  

Rather than use my complete lack of understanding for this phenomenon as a litmus for my increasing obsolescence I have held onto it and have seen it become an appreciation of the place I have worked to get to since I was twelve or so, a place most youth aspire to: total detachment from fads. I guess this is a place most adults find themselves either by design or by accident sooner or later.  

The coincidence is that when you achieve the lofty, detachment that young people work hard to affect, you lose a good deal of your conversational fodder which is what allows one to connect to the world at large. I used to get together with my peers and discuss everything going on in the world, from singular things like “6-7” to politics with global consequences. Gradually, very gradually, I’ve stopped consuming the media which—I didn’t realize—was my primary source for this conversational material. Without the news, without TV, hell, I don’t even watch movies anymore, I’m left with a world that only seems to change in the physical. A new bridge is built; I can’t miss that. A building is torn down, and I see something change, but the everchanging effluvia of the world, I’ve managed to mostly tune out, and when I do have chance to talk with people without a directive driving the conversation—which isn’t often—I don’t have much to say. 

However, back when I did have “something” to say, it was almost always a complaint anyway. Almost always just a rejection of whatever was being discussed and then a reiteration of my manifesto that provided the basis for this rejection: “it’s all just manufactured crap; there’s a great deal of pain and suffering in the world, and what are we doing about it by consuming this tv show, or thinking about this superfluous topic?” But at least when I talked about this, I could speak from authority, because I still knew what was going on in the world enough to reject it. Perhaps this is the requirement: you have to demonstrate understanding of the world you are complaining about, otherwise, you are just crochety, and give the impression that everything just upsets you. 

But having kids changes the effect of the world; it makes it nearly overwhelming, even in its smallest aspects. I used to get bored. I used to feel sad. Since having kids, I’ve completely lost both of those responses to the world. I always feel a little overwhelmed by the stimulus coming at me, which I guess is why I’ve had to mute so much of it. And the profound emotional responses I used to get have either been suppressed or have dissipated for having become irrelevant in my day-to-day life. I no longer wonder what I’m going to do with a Sunday afternoon—I just hope I can squeeze a little gardening in between the trips to the kids’ section of the library, the playground and playing Candy Land. Usually, the only thing I manage to do is stand around in the garden and look at it. I no longer wander around at night and feel like a 19^thcentury romantic poet because I’m asleep or trying to get to sleep by 9pm. 

But this change in my relationship to the media of the world to the concrete has wrought some interesting changes, things that I think I lost after early adolescence when I stopped using my imagination as much and started consuming a lot of media. I’ve noticed the same change in my wife, too. While I don’t pay attention to the news, or modern music and celebrities, I’ve become more aware of my responsibilities in the place I occupy in the moment, ie. where I’m standing and who I’m standing there with and my responsibility. 

…

On my way down to San Francisco to catch up with a friend, I stopped at the Ukiah skatepark which has a nice little bowl section. When a ramp is about three feet or so, I’m able to do things fakie as well, so I was having a lot of fun the more warmed up I got. I keep a pair of skate shoes in my car and they were rapidly falling apart the longer I skated. I was also wearing a pair of pretty tight jeans. I don’t like them that tight, but that’s how they came in the mail, and I wasn’t going to bother returning them. So, I probably looked strange to all the kids there, old and out-of-touch, scarecrow shoes and pants, but I was having fun and I had almost no time limitations. 

A kid, probably about 12 or 13, joins me in the bowl section. Since it’s just the two of us, we’re taking turns and watching each other skate. He’s got a good fakie stall—I don’t know what it’s called—and his 180s are slapping down really nice each time. So I complement him. 

“Dude, you’ve got those 180s down! The slap sounds great when you’re popping them every time! Like textbook!”

He thanks me and says how fun they are. I know, I like 180s, too. But damn if I can get them to pop like that every time. But I’m having fun doing fakie to 50-50 which is something on larger ramps I can never get back on the transition from. 

We’re taking turns skating a while, but it’s a big park and so, to keep my momentum going, a few times when he’s skating, I skate away to another section. At some point I hear his mom—or whoever she is—say from her bench something about him not “breaking open his head” or something. I figure she’s just telling him to be careful, normal mom stuff. But then it sounds like she’s really kind of berating him. I don’t know, I’ve got my headphones on, and I don’t want to be nosey. So I’m barely hearing all of this go down.

She keeps yelling and eventually they leave the park and return to a customized school bus in the parking lot which looks like their home. It’s painted a flat gray and has a trailer with some crap on the back. I see a lot of school bus homes in Northern California, and none of them have been customized for aesthetics, but this one looks particularly drab, uninteresting and messy. Between songs on my headphones, while I continue skating, I can hear the mom yelling at the kid after they get back to the bus. I hear him mutter responses, but he never yells back, probably because each time I hear him respond, she yells even louder. When I pay attention to what she’s yelling, it’s obvious she’s a little crazy:

“If you were to fall and bust you mouth! and I had to take you to the dentist! and they prescribed you antibiotics!, I won’t be responsible! for the nuts who would attack the dentist for prescribing antibiotics!”

Or some kind of crazy shit like that. I’m listening to this go on and on, and I keep thinking about the kid landing those 180s so textbook and the smile on his face when I noticed and I start feeling mad. The yelling starts to feel like it’s aimed at me and I’m skating less and listening a lot more until I start thinking, “I can’t be a witness to this bullshit.”

I skate a bit more, but I’m trying to come up with a plan. I need to do something to communicate this kid’s worth to him. I need to tell him I see him. I see his potential that his crazy mom is paranoid, or bi-polar or something and doesn’t know what the hell she’s ranting about. As I keep skating, I can hardly focus because I’m thinking how important it is for me to tell this kid that he’s good. That he’s important, and capable of the same greatness as everyone else. All the while, I can hear her yelling. The bus isn’t leaving, just sitting in the parking lot. The worst thing is that there are other people at the park. Not just skating, but playing tennis, exercising, etc. Other people hearing this yelling, who are just ignoring it or figuring it’s none of their business. Do they know there’s a kid in there for god’s sake? Do they know it is a kid on the receiving end of this paranoid rant? Someone who’s got a life ahead of him, a long path through the world who is being influenced by this shit. 

I go out to the car, just across the parking lot from the bus and change my shoes, slowly, trying to decide what to do. I don’t want to have a confrontation with this woman. I’m all sweaty and shirtless from skating, who knows what it might look like to the casual passerby, but I’ve got to do something. I finish changing, hop in the car and drive right up to the bus, roll my window down and start shouting to the kid.

“Hey kid,” I start, wishing I’d asked him his name earlier. “Hey kid, you’re a great skateboarder.” I think I started with this because his mom seemed to mainly be interested in yelling at him because he was skateboarding, or wanted to skateboard, but then I started in on the more general. “You’re going to be great some day. Keep skating; you’ll be great some day. Don’t let her get you down. This won’t last forever.” By now the yelling coming from the bus and risen to a frantic volume and pitch as it was directed at me. But I didn’t pay it any attention.

“Kid you’re going to do great things. This won’t last forever, you’ll be out on your own soon. Keep skating, you’re going to do great things.” I was babbling now, just yelling a message of positivity, hoping he could hear it over the screeching which was coming from the bus, but the rage I heard in her voice made me feel like I’d beaten here and her spell on the kid. It reminded me of a cartoon when the protagonist gets their confidence and shouts down the antagonist and the antagonist, realizing they’re beaten, can only scream in futility. It felt like that.

Back when I was more caught up in the world, when I paid more attention to the news, and trends in music and fashion, I would’ve been upset to hear this kid get yelled at, but I don’t know if I would’ve considered it my business to respond to it. Now, it’s like I don’t have an option. I’m there and I’m thinking of my own kids and I just react. 

So, most of the time I don’t know what to talk about, and I don’t know what profound personal feelings I still have to delve into, but maybe without all this excess filter, I’m more inclined to just act. Which I prefer over knowing what’s being discussed in the news, in social media. The world is right here, happening around me and rather than holding it at a distance and inspecting its products and byproduct for meaning, I can stay out-of-touch and just tell the young people that they are important and that I believe in them. Hopefully, with more practice, my message will gradually become more coherent. 

 

 

The Inspiration in Obsolescence

I met up with a friend last Friday night after a lot of back and forth about whether we should meet up. Neither of us really very interested in denying ourselves the sleep that we would’ve enjoyed rather than hang out but, at the same time, aware that we need to maintain friendships and, well, have a life separate from work or home. 

Despite our reluctance, we managed to have a decent time meeting up at a bar that serves tea and mostly seemed to be hosting an older crowd that night. As I age, I am becoming increasingly disquieted at finding myself at college-age events. The students, who until recently seemed like slightly younger peers have suddenly become children. No matter how I screw up my eyes when I look at them, they live in a world different than mine, and though I don’t warrant the same attention from them, they see the same otherness in me. I have aged out beyond the extent of their imagination. Because they cannot imagine being me—42, three kids—I can no longer remember being among them. And we when we interact, I smile a lot more than is necessary, hoping that will get me seen even though I know it will probably only more firmly place me into an invisible category for them: strangely eager old guy. 

My friend and I sat at our table, drinking immuni-tea. I haven’t had alcohol in over a year now and most people my age are more than willing to skip the beer. No one with young children who is over the age of forty wants to wake up remotely hung over. Saturday morning, you want to be at the top of your game so that when the kids start to tantrum in public you don’t accidentally raise your voice too loud, or so that when the tears come over an everyday injustice, you don’t react too callously, or too “I-told-you-so”.

In our booth, sharing the bitter tea, we talked a little about books, a little about music, but sometimes when I talk about these things now, my old passions desert me. I can’t work up the diatribes I once could. I could sit down with someone who professed an absolute adoration for Crazy Town or Barenaked Ladies and I probably couldn’t work up the indignation I would’ve felt about this before. I might not even be able to make myself care.

Even more frightening, I can get lost in my speech. Unless I’m telling a story, I can forget my point and start babbling, just grabbing at words to try to find my way back to my point. I keep talking but my mind is screaming “what are you saying? You don’t know what you’re saying!” My increased sensitivity to talking too much, or interrupting people only exacerbates this.  

I used to pontificate; I used to hold forth, discourse at length on subjects which interested me and, especially those which bothered me. I can remember telling people how wrong they were in their personal tastes on things. I wasn’t completely serious, I had fun with these conversations, but my opinions flowed thick and fast borne on a steady current of beer breath and cigarette exhalations. If you weren’t with me, I was willing to listen, but I certainly wouldn’t flag on my rebuttal. These days, the person who thought “Come My Lady” was a good song, could probably knock any argument down from me down immediately, if I put up any fight at all. 

But now that I’ve got my tea what I really like is dipping into past revelries with anecdotes—like any other elderly McDonald’s patron with the rustling newspapers and the cheap coffee at 7am. In my senescence, I’ve realized that most of my opinions are only feelings that are not substantiated and, therefore, undebatable. But the stories of being arrested by the Armenian military, of sleeping in an Uzbek brothel so sick I could barely move, New Year’s Eve in Prishtina, skinheads on the Chicago El at 2am, and, especially all the stories produced by the heady foment of punk rock, alcohol, and teenage discontent at growing up in a small blue collar town about an hour west of Detroit. Most people I meet here have had none of these experiences, so I can talk about them without fear of censor and I become more confident in the telling, which impresses my listenership into something like attention, or at least momentary tolerance.

Listen.

“Fuck this shit, this Prison City shit. We’re getting out. This place is bullshit.”

That was a song by the band Disease I played bass for at 16. We used to sing those lyrics with varied attention, varied commitment. They were terrible lyrics after all. But when we were angry at the shared place of our birth, we sang this song as imprecation rather than just angst. We leveled the words at specific instances, people, situations which, we reasoned, would’ve been avoided in another place, another time. 

At 16, Jackson, Michigan was a terrible place because it had no model of a future that we could aspire to reach. No one’s parents reflected our youthful curiosities, and there were no yuppies, or anyone in their 20s or 30s around who were successful in their creativity. If they were creative, it was something they engaged in when they were at home; it was never something anyone was paid for, or held as a profession. 

Much like conservative places the world over, my hometown was only populated with children and adults; there was no substantial group of searching, questioning, curious young people in their twenties and thirties sitting around Dolores Park on a Saturday idly watching the world go by and making plans to impact it some day.The twenty somethings in southern Michigan, at least back then, were emigrating.

Yet, we knew, growing up in proximity to large university towns and, later, the urban poles of Detroit and Chicago, that there were ways out there to redeem our creativity, this jouissance that we screamed in chorus in basement shows, that we danced out on muddy garage floors, that we roamed through when let out of school in our long walk/talks across town ranging in thought and distance. We knew there could be a place for it, it just wasn’t where we were. 

We didn’t dull it with alcohol, we tricked ourselves into believing we were making satisfactory use of the creative force when we drank. When drinking beers on a Friday night, sitting around the park, talking about what had happened that week, or dreaming about the future felt important, like we were constructing something. But in the morning, nothing remained, and we spent the week building it all back up again. We wrote new songs, sewed new patches, planned zines that no one ever made, drank bottomless diner coffees and sketched on napkins. We dissipated all this energy over the weekend screaming into a microphone—unrecorded—or packed into a stationary car on a January night singing along to The Misfits only the glow of our cigarettes betraying our expressions in the dark. 

But back then, o how I was understood, o how I was appreciated for the loud-talking, interrupting, obnoxious kid that I was whose catchphrase was “I haaaaate that!”. My face did not yet have the musculature for an ingratiating smile. I hadn’t eaten the fruit that would force me to see how few people cared about my opinions and I reeked of them, belted them out at the slightest provocation. Ah god, I was so sure and so supported and so contra-bullshit. 

And as annoying as I could be, my friends were my ardent supporters. They saw something in me despite their parents’ objections. And it was obvious they enjoyed my company. For the last ten years or so, I have very rarely felt sure of anyone’s approval. When I speak to anyone now, I must always weigh my words, for I am always being judged by the content of my conversation. Am I being entertaining enough in my speech? Am I being thoroughly intellectual and supporting my conclusions? I feel this current to conversation that must be maintained, and its maintenance is exhausting. I’m always on the verge of dropping the ball and earning the disapprobation of my interlocutor. “Ugh, that guy? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! Ugh, that guy? He just blabs on and on.” I never felt this when I was a kid with my friends. I talked, they listened, or they talked, and I listened. That’s all there was to the exchange.  

As a result, I maintained a comfort with them that is almost physical. When we are together, maybe once a year, I find myself wanted to lean on them, put my arm around them, be wrapped up in them and protected by them as I once was. 

We have maybe two hours a year to reunite, but they are times I relish because, once together, we can go back to being understood as we once were, we can talk in the off-handed way we once did without worrying about judgement, even without the beer. 

And as I get older, and I feel more detached from the world around me, I find myself thinking more and more about the place that I once declared so brashly to be “bullshit” because all my friends stayed there together, still despising it, but knowing that it was important for their identities to stay twined with that force. The lack of validation kept them creative. They are not employed in traditionally creative sectors, but they have remained profoundly creative because they never tried to sell their creativity; it was never anything with any market value, but rather something vital. They still work all day, go home, put the kids to bed, and then they paint, write songs, sketch, doodle. I don’t know anyone else who makes time for these things. 

When I struggle to find time to meet with new friends; when I feel alienated by the place I have found myself in, I go back to these memories, these friends, and I imagine meeting with them every Sunday morning, having coffee and just talking without direction, just taking comfort in each other’s presence and being revitalized by it. And I understand why immigrants go back home when they are old, why they return to that which they left behind, which they likely held in contempt, because it was the same place that once gave them the confidence to leave, whereas all subsequent places were indifferent to their coming or going. Only the first place can ever say “go ahead, go see the world; I’ll always be here because you can only have one place you are from.” And likewise, those friends will be the only people who remember who you were when you were first filled with the divine afflatus of adolescence and can still restore this feeling for you even, and especially, when you are old because they never knew the you who misplaced confidence, or bumbled through opinions. 

…

Back in the near-present,  my friend and I continued our conversation after the tea had run out and even into the street while I unlocked my bike. I have been fortunate to make new friends—even if I find it difficult to make time to meet with them—because I had such great friends when I was young. They created a paradigm for friendship which may not be easily satisfied, but continuously provides me with good people willing to listen to my stories, even if my arguments are not as potent as they used to be, even if I get a little confused. I can only hope continuing to talk and listen will keep my conversational ability sharp enough for membership with the early morning McDonald’s crowd when I make retirement. That there will still be a place for my talk, and still an audience gracious enough to receive it even when my opinions become nonsensical and removed from all real-world context because, I will still have stories which, as time goes by, only get richer for their increased obsolescence. Perhaps it is what we disdain in argument that we appreciate in stories. If that is so, clear a seat for me on retirement row; I’ve got some whoppers.