Eight Years of Critical Mass

 When I first moved back to Arcata, my wife and I were still childless. I want to say “young”. I want to equate youth with not yet having children. But this is misleading, so let’s say, somewhat young and childless. 

Since we were planning on having children, and probably not going to move again for a while—until then we’d been moving to new countries almost every year since we’d met—I thought, I’d like to get something going here that I enjoy. I’m glad I did. As it turns out, it’s really hard to get into new things when you have three kids. 

I made flyers for a Critical Mass ride. At the time, there was no ride happening in Arcata. And while I’d heard rumors of them having happened in the past, I’d never seen one. 

I had multiple reasons for this. Foremost among them was that I enjoyed riding in big noisy groups which asserted their right to use the full lane in way that was difficult to argue with. Sure, drivers could still yell, say “get off the road!”, but they couldn’t really point to the shoulder and expect the whole mass to acquiesce immediately. The whole “mass” thing was what protected each cyclist from being bullied by cars and trucks. Drivers are forced to cede their dominance of the streets and most, when they see the crowd slow down, smile and wave, as opposed to when they see a single cyclist and think “this guy’s going to get in my way”.

It is a happy thing to see a bunch of people on bikes, yelling, waving, talking. When you’re on a bike, you’re in public. You can’t roll up the tinted windows, blast the AC. You’re sitting there, slightly elevated, but basically as you’d be if you were walking. Seeing lots of people smiling in public usually makes other people smile, or scratch their head, but most don’t immediately get angry.

This is my second point: riding around in a big group is really fun, and it makes people otherwise not comfortable with riding around on streets in a new (read:college) town, a little more comfortable with seeing their bike as a viable means of moving around on a daily basis. Nearly every Critical Mass ride, I hear someone express wonder at how far we’ve gotten so quickly, or, better yet, they admit they don’t even know where we are. They’ve just been going with the flow, talking, riding, not paying attention to destination and suddenly, they’ve found something new. 

I like to think it has been the gateway to a lot of bike rides that may have been drives otherwise. 

In addition to this ease and enjoyment, there’s also the means of meeting people. When I first moved to Arcata, I didn’t know anyone, and in a new small town, I found it difficult to meet people. I would’ve shown up every month for an event as amorphous as Critical Mass, where we just rode together and everyone talks to everyone else. 

But, it took it a long time to get to the point when the ride was viable. When I began putting up the flyers, I’d get maybe one or two people showing up at the Plaza to ride each month. We’d be a group of five or six and we’d call out for others to join us when we saw people on bikes. We weren’t big enough to ride in the street. So, it was really just an intimate group of strangers taking a bike ride together in which we yelled at other bike riders to join us. 

I took a picture of the ride the first time we reached like ten people or something. It felt like a feat. That picture makes me smile today. It seems like proof that sometimes one does have to wait years for something to come to fruition, even something simple like getting people out to ride bikes around for an hour and a half on Friday evening.  

I continued making flyers, which I enjoyed, but after a while, out of curiosity, I started asking how many people had come to the ride because they’d seen a flyer, and it was never more than one or two.  By that point, we were regularly over 50 people, so I stopped doing the flyers. I liked that the event was now exclusively word-of-mouth, although someone who rode with us in the past had made an Instagram account which others still post photos to. 

At first, I kept the ride pretty apolitical. We’d yell, and ride, but every time there was an outrage in the bike / pedestrian community, I felt I had to bring it up. Once we did a memorial ride with thousands of donated flowers. But it was in silence, and I didn’t like trying to impose silence and mournfulness on the riders, as outraged as I was, I’m sure for some of them, it was odd showing up to a usual boisterous event and being told, “Quiet! We’re in mourning tonight!”

Last month, we rode in memory of Ronnie Franklin, a 20-year-old who’d been killed installing a bike lane in Eureka. We didn’t make it a mournful ride, but it brought to mind that we are all in this unprotected space together. When we ride at the end of the month, we bring all the frustrating experiences we’ve encountered riding alone all month to share. Some tell of being yelled at. Every so often stories resurface of a white truck throwing bricks at bike riders. It’s helpful to have a venue to connect about these things, to all be people who regularly ride bikes-- together.

Over the years, I’ve seen many people come and go: Carisse who made stickers, and started the Instagram page, Ben who rode a tallbike and always wore a chicken costume, Jacob who open a restaurant and now can’t make rides, But mostly they are faces, I can still recall many of them. The faces which are there month after month, and then one month, they aren’t. With such a substantial crowd, no one notices a missing face until a few months have gone by and it’s “hey, has anyone seen this guy lately?” And we all have to admit that we haven’t. A lot of people ride every other month anyway. Occasionally, someone who I figure I’ve been seeing every month will say “I haven’t been here for a year!” and it’s like, “oh, well glad you’re back!”. Other times, I will ask people if it’s been a while since they’ve ridden with us, and they’ll tell me they were just on the ride last month. 

Some always show up with the same group, and others are always alone, but most of the riders bring something different to the ride, something important that makes their absence felt when they are not there. 

And, last Friday, looking out over the sea of faces and bikes, I felt that: the importance of everyone there. And I suddenly understood, that Critical Mass isn’t just an event that I wanted to bring to Arcata, it wasn’t just something I did automatically every month, but rather it was a community. A fluid community, sure, but a group of people with a shared value over their right to be safe in their streets on bikes, to be able to use bikes to go places, as far or as close as they’d like. Many of the people last month were also among those who have shown up month-after-month, in some cases year-after-year, and I’ll admit, that seeing familiar faces does make one feel a bit more comfortable and connected. 

Since returning to Arcata more than eight years ago now, I’ve never felt very connected to the town; it’s always felt like a place I kind of had to be, rather than a place I wanted to be; however, I’ve begun to feel like there is something uniquely suited to me that exists here in the community of bike riders. Something of community pressing forward for the things we care about, even if all we do is ride around once a month and yell. At least what we stand for and value are very clear.

In a way, the ride has allowed me a way to connect with the community on my own terms. I don’t have to go out and find a place to belong to it, a place to try to get in. I can ride with enough people the last Friday of the month that when I ride alone to the grocery store for coffee, or ride to work, I pass other cyclists and hear them yell “hey, Critical Mass!” and feel like a part of something larger than myself—a valuable feeling when, in the meantime, cars are revving up to 35 in a 25, letting you know you’ve inconvenienced them by using their street. 

It’s as much mine as it is yours, but come on a ride at the end of the month and feel the connection not only between people, but between you and your town, your environment when you go places on a bike, you might stop trying to race through this tiny community, you might start to see the world differently.

Elysian Fields

In Michigan, even southern Michigan where I grew up, the summer evenings reach far into the night. After a slow humid day, there is an even slower liminal period when the sun sits at the horizon, the stars carelessly shed their lights, the fireflies start to click on, as if testing their glow, and the garden beds seethe with the scents of sweet blooms and wide chlorophyled leaves.

The more so at my house because my mom was in the herb garden cutting the lavender, the basil, the verbena, and these smells comingled in the heavy air, like the oxygen-rich sweetness after a thunderstorm. 

I was starting into my obdurate teenage years, but the smells of things always had a tranquilizing effect on me. I sat on the stark concrete block of a front porch on a plastic chair reading, but so distracted by the smell of the plants being cut and crushed and soil being lightly overturned that I was only taking in a few sentences per minute. 

“Do you want to help me?” My mom looked up from where she had gotten to among the chives.

“No, ma. Those plants are your thing.” I thought such a response gracious, not seeing in it the invitation to share something. Besides, getting off the chair, going down into the dirt? Too much like work. And I was enjoying the result of it enough from where I was. 

My mom was growing and cutting more herbs than was her wont, however. Since the beginning of the summer, she’d started her own company—although I use the word loosely considering I don’t think a single legal term was ever invoked with respect to it. She called it “Elysian Fields” and had, as its sole assets, a rubber stamp with the name and an angel, a role of blank stickers, flat plastic containers—like those strawberries come in— and a wooden cash box.

I don’t know if they had yet to regulate herbs, or what, but my mom convinced several grocery stores to stock her products and a couple of times I went with her when she changed them out. And at the store by myself, or with my friends, I went over, too, to check on her items, see if any had sold, and smell the peppery nasturtium smell of the garden in exile. 

In southern Michigan, in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much of a market for fresh herbs, and my mom was lucky to sell one or two packages a week. She figured she might need to show the shoppers directly the benefits of the herbs, so it was back to meeting with the store managers, this time to ask to demo the products. I imagine they only said something like “The customers? Sure, feed ‘em whatever you want, lady.” Because the next week, we were there—I don’t know how I was drafted into helping—setting up a spidery garage card table in the produce section while my mom arranged tablecloth, bread, nasturtiums (again), and a butter which had been crammed with dill. The smell of which was so fresh, it made me feel like I was lying in a heap of the stuff in the shade. I wondered at all the shoppers who could pass by the opportunity to see what it was this curious pair was up to in their produce section. I’m sure I looked sullen enough at 13 or whatever I was and likely did not encourage interaction by my clothing and choice of facial expression, but the dill smell was so well-chosen; it permeated the entire area. 

Still, most shoppers only passed through the produce section on their way to the great bounty of microwave popcorn and frozen pizza elsewhere in the store. But I was content to help myself to the samples—my mom must’ve anticipated this and brought enough—each time noting how the slightly refrigerated quality of the dill in the produce section, made the flavor stronger, more complete. When we packed up after a couple of hours, we’d probably only spoken to five or six people. 

My mom did a few more of these, but I only helped that first time. At my age, atmosphere and even good food lost out—easily—to video games, or just being on the phone with my friends, not talking but watching the same thing on TV. 

The other “demos” were all about the same. Only a handful of people even willing try the dill butter, despite the clear, clean smell of it. And certainly, no one turning to pick up a package or two of Elysian Fields Fresh Dill to make it themselves. 

There was no formal retiring of the Elysian Fields brand. Autumn came and even the tenacious nasturtiums failed after the first touch of frost. This was, of course, expected, perhaps even anticipated in the name which conjures both eternity, but also mortality. My mom had never been planning any large-scale greenhouse productions. The rubber stamp, the roll of blank stickers, and the cash box that made up the entirety of the business beyond the ephemeral product itself, found a place in a hall closet. Perhaps the intention was to bring them back out the next year, but, by then, the excitement of turning an indifferent public onto the benefits of herbs was off, and it all stayed in the closet where, in my older and less innocent teenage years, I was bold enough to dip into the cash box when in want of a few extra bucks. By then, the cash had been sitting there for years. 

I misunderstood this to be the result of indifference. And figured if the cash was going to sit there, why not use it? I couldn’t apprehend that the money, to my mom, demonstrated the collusion of the few who’d likewise valued her work, her herbs, and the ability to get fresh dill to add to their butter. The cash was a constant reminder that she was not alone in her particular vision of the world. I don’t know if she noticed that it dwindled as I robbed the inspirational till for cigarette money.

I doubt whether my mom ever expected to make much money by the venture. I’m sure she’d hoped to do a little better than she did, but she had enough sense not to force a product the people weren’t ready for; however, only a few years later, I noticed tubes of dill, chive, basil, and the other herbs my mom used to sell in the same area she’d once occupied in the produce section. She’d been something of a gentrifier of the local palate. Perhaps it was just that people didn’t want to have to touch and chop the herbs themselves. But a tube? No, even if this had been the answer, my mom couldn’t have abided it. To her, the picking, the cutting, the tactile appreciation outweighed even the pleasure of eating the herbs. She wanted people to use their hands to prepare them.

In this sense, I realize that her short-lived venture had a predictable outcome from the beginning. The same outcome preordained for anyone who should aspire to make money from what they love doing. And even though Elysian Fields was never an actual business, and my mom’s goal was more to share her appreciation than to sell it, when it was packed as product on the shelves of the grocery store, it lost the weight, the self-sustaining importance of the summer twilight, or rather it sought to bring that magic time into too profane an arena. 

If nothing else, the venture made a mark on me to whom the smell of fresh dill is inferior only to the smell of refrigerated dill, and I can comfortably conflate summer twilight with supermarket produce aisles.   

So Gradual As to Be Mistaken for Natural

  

I went back to Michigan recently and found myself slightly out-of-step with how my friends remember me. Having kids has changed a lot of my tendencies, and even altered my beliefs somewhat since my life has come to revolve around them. My friends remember me as an arch-iconoclast. Someone who was rigidly against a lot of what others took for granted, and constantly on guard against hypocrisy. Which, of course, I’ve had to relax somewhat. Nearly everyone marvels at my possession of a smart phone. “I never thought you’d get one!” they gasp when I take it out to look something up or show pictures of my kids. In truth, neither did I, and I often think of getting rid of it—as I suppose anyone aware of any spiritual aspect of life must, but the material side tends to overwhelm the spiritual obligations with concreteness. I’d love to return to the forest, to communicate by letter from my log cabin, but I don’t think anyone would write back, much less come and see me. I’ve sent a few letters in the past year that I’m still waiting for replies to. 

I don’t really think of the smartphone thing as being excessively hypocritical. You need one of those things to navigate the modern world. As I still wish to belong to the world, I don’t worry about having one; I can always turn it off or leave it at home, though admittedly, I do those things very seldom. 

The way in which I’ve defied my friends’ expectations in the last decade—as well as my own—is that, when I was younger, I avoided buying things from multinational companies as much as humanly possible in the US.

Before having kids, I didn’t feel I needed a car. Getting around places like Chicago, Lansing, San Francisco by bike is not only easy, but fun. And I seldom had to move anything that wouldn’t fit in my backpack. Maybe once a year, I’d rent a car and take a roadtrip. This relative support of big oil, I could live with for the pleasure of seeing friends, and the freedom of movement afforded by a car, but for daily life, I never found it necessary. 

I also used to buy most of what I needed second hand. I could spend an entire day looking for a new pair of jeans in the thrift shops and, if I didn’t find anything, it wasn’t very important. 

Some of these changes have nothing to do with having kids; I just got lazy. When I realized that H&M (for all their horrible labor practices) had cheap and decent-looking clothes that fit me. I just started shopping there. I have to admit, I never liked thrifting, but the west has such a surplus of clothes, it makes the most sense. 

But I don’t think I ever would’ve bought a car if it weren’t for kids. We bought our first car used for a few thousand dollars just before our daughter was born. Then we bought one new car a few years later and, when that grew too small for the family, we bought another. I hate driving around town, I hate buying gas and fueling so much of the bullshit in the world by being another human who requires the stuff to live. I’m aware that before I had a car I supported oil through so many other aspects of my life (like buying anything for one), but at least I didn’t buy the stuff directly from the pumps on a regular basis like I do now. At least I still ride my bike to work. 

But these are all minor transgressions against my past self when compared to my patronage of Starbucks. I think that one still leaves the homies scratching their heads and asking “could this even be the same guy we grew up with? Didn’t he hate Starbucks with a passion?”

I grew up in Jackson, Michigan in the 1980s and 1990s, and I watched a homogenization occur in that time. The downtown which was only local business gradually shutdown, emptied out, and the crowds sought the comfort of the predictable in the ever-growing row of chain fastfood places by the highway, or in the bland predictability of the malls. 

While we may have had McDonald’s, and Gap, we weren’t white collar enough for a Starbucks until the early 2000s. Even then, they put the thing way out where 127 intersects 94. I imagine that at least half of the clientele are people driving between Detroit and Chicago and, espying a convenient coffee break, pull off. 

The lack of Starbucks in my day-to-day didn’t stop me from hating the company when I was younger. I saw Starbucks as the ravager of my most adored of small businesses: the independent café. When I first discovered cafés and coffee as a student in junior high (circa 1995), they were all independent. Theatre Coffee downtown was where I sat on Friday evenings with the all-girl Goth set, drinking cinnamon French sodas and thumbing through the Anne Rice paperbacks that stocked the complementary bookshelf, to Café Royal in East Lansing where I went on my first dates, drinking pint glasses of resinous, obsidian-dark coffee like no one roasts anymore, to Café Gourmand in Chicago’s South Loop where I first discovered my student persona, studying hour after hour and frequently getting up to have my cup refilled. And anyone who knows me has heard me reminisce on the beauty of Theios, which, to be fair, was more of a diner, but I never did anything but drink coffee there. 

These places—as important as they were to my development— are all long gone now. Like so many other great cafés I discovered in these United States. How many of them were plowed under by Starbucks (or other more regional chains, for example in mid-Michigan, ugh, Bigby) is hard to say, Theater Coffee was probably gone before Starbucks even left its roost in Seattle, killed by the crushing economic despair sweeping over the rust belt in the 90s, when downtown was quickly emptying and becoming synonymous with crime. Honestly, I can’t imagine what the people who started Theater Coffee were thinking. It existed at a bad time in a bad place, but it introduced me to a very important concept, and I will always be grateful to those risk-taking owners for that. Café Royal closed and became Espresso Royal and, in its upgrade as it moved out of the parking complex in downtown East Lansing, acquired too many people studying, you couldn’t even get a seat in that place. While the original was drafty, dirty and usually nearly empty, they had the best coffee I’ve ever had, so smoky and oily, it was like a tire fire, and it set the standard for coffee for ever after. 

And now, I never go into a local café and find anything darker than a medium roast. Coffee snobs (who influence everyone else) having declared that anything darker than the subtlest of roasts is “burnt” and should be beneath one as the accident of chain coffee (read: Starbucks) that everyone naively accepted. 

The preponderance of lighter roasts being marketed as though a revolution against corporate coffee tastes. The little guy is taking the bean back to its rightful place of tasting like juniper, citrus, honey and all kinds of other crap. They are freeing our palates from what Starbucks has forced upon us for years. 

This argument has become completely ubiquitous. I see it from Michigan to California. Very few independent roasteries do a true dark roast, like the one Café Royal had in 1997, so afraid are they of seeming to support the Starbucks sacrilege. What is overlooked here is that coal black coffee was the revolution; at least the one I grew up with. In the 1990s, most coffee was a watery broth kind of stuff you got at Denny’s, made to be drunk four or five cups at a time as the waitress came around and refilled. 

It was the midnight, coal roasts that started to crop up at the small artsy places with the dumpy couches, and ashtrays perched all over the place. Dark roast coffee was a challenge to the existing banal order of watery medium roast. It said, “look, this can be done another way where we really tap into the heart of this bean, bring out those beautiful oils and, yes, burn them because they taste good like that!”

I came of age in cafés that served these blackhole roasts. Airpots lined up on the counter with hand-drawn caricatures of people in berets reading “French roast”, pint glasses with carboard coffee sleeves, and the first taste of bitterness. I can’t help it, I’m nostalgic for it, but what happens when I go into a new café and inquire after it? Either I get a “dark” roast that’s on the lighter end of medium, or my taste is scoffed at as too plebian. “Go back to Starbucks” being the implication when the barista smiles and shakes his head. 

What a shame that our beautiful revolution was so co-opted as to eventually become the sole name in coffee and, therefore, be something to rebel against in turn! I took it for granted when I was younger that dark roast coffee would forever be hanging around in an oily haze in every little café. 

But revolutions, if they are successful, eventually establish the standard to be rebelled against, and, as Starbucks, and (to a much lesser extent) Peet’s made dark roasts the inescapable standard, they were also fomenting discontent. The old couches, the pint glasses, these things became anathema to a new generation of café proprietors who, instead, opted for Edison bulbs, air plants, white paint, wood and glass. The lash back took the comfort out of coffee, declared it to be coddling. A little café in the SoMa of the early 2010s looked like a laboratory with people drinking coffee out of beakers while coffee molecules were painted on the walls. 

Again, the intention was freeing the soul of the bean. Only now, the bean was imprisoned by the oils which oozed from it and burned in the erstwhile revolutionary process. The new generation of rosters turned down the temperature. They tried less and less heat for shorter and shorter periods of time, and they had some weird eugenics thing going on, too. Believing in the “purity” of certain types of beans. Never mixing them and putting “single origin” on everything, as if mixing beans had somehow polluted their stock, making them less, rather than more. 

I learned to avoid these coffee laboratories, after all, they were really easy to spot which such thematic décor. I got tired of getting patronized when I asked if there was anything dark. I never believed in tasting the terroir of the bean, reading two paragraphs about it on a notecard while I waited for it to be brewed through a lengthy (and showy) pour-over method. It always tasted like some kind of broth to me, like it was salty somehow. Meanwhile, the proprietor would be leaning over the counter, eager to see if he had convinced you in the perfection of light roasts, but I could never lie. They’d turn away in a huff after I delivered my verdict: “ ahh, it’s ok”.

 At this point in coffee history, these kinds of “light roasty” labs were popping up in cities, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods, but they were not yet the standard. There were still many cafés of the old type that proudly served smoky, black coffee. You could tell which was which quite easily by the smell, and the smell of the dark roast places is such a romantic smell to me, hinting as it does at a warm interlude on a cold afternoon. A place both for physical warmness, but also to warm the heart with the kind of strong coffee that clings to your clothes when you exit to the cold afternoon. The light roast places smell like so much fresh paint and the sourish smell of beans not long roasted. 

It was just a few years ago when I realized what happened. That the fringe of light roast places in North Oakland, Detroit, and Pilsen, established the standard for “independent coffee”. I never walk into a new independent café and find a legitimate, oily, black dark roast on the menu anymore. On the positive side, the politics of roast preference have died, and I also don’t get a lot of flack for this preference, most places are happy to have a “dark roast” only these are generally way too light for my preference. 

So, despite my incredible antipathy for Starbucks as a kid, they preserved something too important to me to be let go. Dark roast coffee isn’t just a flavor to me, its youthful memories preserved in coffee amber. All the places where I sat hunched over a laptop, leaning back with a paperback. All the places, I set my backpack on the floor. The places where I mused, and others around me mused, the places I met like-minded people and conversed with them. The only place I really felt comfortable going on a date. The warm place removed from the cold and the empty place in the summer with the light hitting the floating dust motes. Dark roast is like a perfume to me that stirs memories of someone long-forgotten and, in its absence from local cafés, I am unable to give it up, at least as long as some place is still serving it, even if that place still embodies the corporate greed for expansion which I think makes the world a less interesting, homogenized place. I would much rather buy the coffee I want from a local place, but can’t choke down something I don’t like to stay true to my ideals, so, I guess in the end, it is just taste that wins out, leaving not only my friends, but even myself scratching my head and asking “who the hell is this? Is this the same kid who used to wear the ‘Starbucks, Fuck off Get out of My Neighborhood’ shirt?”

I can only answer, “it is, but I wore that shirt without realizing just how unrecognizable the world would become in middle age, without realizing the importance of memory in or preferences, and without realizing just how much I dislike light roast coffee. However, the ideal is still there, and I look forward to a time when I get act upon it again.” 

Looking Back on the Height I Have Walked down from

The height of my knowing myself occurred probably between the time I came home from the Peace Corps and when I started working in Paraguay. It was in this period that I felt the greatest self-possession, like nothing I did was a misstep, nothing I did was untrue. When I moved in this period, I moved with decision and certainty; I knew myself and I was busily engaged in this knowing, daily testing the parameters of who I was. 

I worked; I wrote; I read; I traveled; I skateboarded; I had a huge appetite; when I went out on Friday or Saturday, I stayed out late. I felt beholden to no one. I was my own person, finding my own way and doing it comfortably. I didn’t have to compromise anything. In Paraguay, I realized, however, that I did, because I lacked a degree of professionality.

I still do things in a somewhat slipshod, less-than-professional way, I guess. But I’m in a position now where my methods work well enough, and I don’t think they are much questioned, balanced, as they are by my obvious passion for what I do. 

Yet, I have never recovered from the blow to my self-possession. Today, I can’t even feign the kind of relaxed attitude I took toward life back then. Some of it was sacrificing parts of my personality to meet a more generic standard, but most of it is that I have kids now and no one responsible for children can be sure of anything, leastwise themselves. There is too much chance involved. 

My kids are well-behaved—at least I think so—most of the time. But at five and seven they have developed their wills and they exert them strongly. Thus, their behavior is very often unpredictable.  

One of them is reading on the couch, the other sits down next to her. 

“Go away” she tells him flatly without looking up from her book. 

“No” he responds, or, more likely, he doesn’t say anything, but makes no move to go. He must show that he doesn’t live by her command.

In in seconds, someone is screaming at the top of their lungs. Perhaps because a fight ensued, and they were hurt, or through being emotionally overdrawn by the situation, just not having the capacity to deal with being bothered any further. 

As the parent—the responsible party-- it is up to me to diffuse such situations, and I am utterly inept at it! The kids are screaming, I try to make myself heard with rational next steps, no one is listening, so I raise my voice to angry-dad level and say curtly “stop!” which only serves to make everyone feel like they’ve violated some rule when all they’ve done is try to work out who is sitting where. Not really that big of a deal, but no dad’s yelling again. 

We’re in the grocery store, and we’ve managed to make it past the toy aisle without any demands, or whining, but then they’re climbing all over the cart, constantly in danger of tipping it or making me crash into another shopper. I can’t resist trying to reason: “Hey guys, try not to climb around so much. We don’t want to run into anyone or fall over.” But though I repeat these words, they aren’t heeded, or can’t be heeded and, once again, we come to the point when all I have to use is “stop!” and everyone is upset again, the tensions are up and, rarely, do things suddenly come down from this level. The next thing to happen will likely catch the attention of everyone around us. The cart will tip, a carton of something will fall and break, or, simply, the screaming again. 

I once made my way comfortably through the world because I knew what I wanted and I had a reasonable idea what would help me achieve it, now, what I want is largely not for me, but for my kids, and I have no idea how to achieve it. I blunder after them as they race toward adolescence, doing little more than picking up what they drop along the way and yelling “stop!” occasionally. 

When I am at home, I feel ineffective and somewhat superfluous, when I am at work, I hope everything is going alright at home. I no longer have the means to be 100% anywhere; part of me is always where my kids are and this makes me less engaged generally. 

If my wife and I have any time to ourselves, I have a hard time really being engaged in conversation unless we’re talking about the kids, but that is not a topic that can be resolved, we only talk about it to try to get a vague sense of understanding, like groping around an unfamiliar object in the dark. 

I suppose some people anticipated having children long enough that they were able to go into the rearing of the children with their self-possession intact, but not me. I wasn’t around children much growing up, and, in my twenties, I never thought about having them. Even after we had kids, babies don’t prepare you for anything. They might not sleep, they may scream on airplanes, but everyone forgives you because it’s a baby. You smile and shrug and they smile back; babies make you feel more connected to the world. Most people like babies so, by extension, they seem to like you, the parent. 

But once your kids are out of toddlerdom, the expectation is that they will follow the social norms they are only still learning. They don’t get the automatic forgiveness afforded to babies. You blunder after them, yelling “stop!” devested of all self-possession, a ragged, fatigued, and largely ineffectual person. Even a bit of a factotum because anyone can see that what you’re doing isn’t working but you keep doing it anyway, hoping, this time, things might be different. You are capable of feeling pity for those in the same situation as yourself, but, at the same time, relief that it is them and not you with the tantruming child at the farmer’s market. 

Until one day you realize you’re not entirely sure who you are anymore. You’ve spent so much time correcting behavior, trying to minimize the temptation for other types of behavior, and foster burgeoning interests that, alone, you’re uncertain what to do with yourself. When you have time, if you don’t sleep, you wander around, but without the interest you once had because the sense of discovery, without kids to share it with, feels limited.

 Life is a great bell curve. As a teenager, you struggle to understand who you are and feel in control of your life under your parents’ care and subject to their limitations. You gradually endeavor to make the right mistakes which you learn from, and you rise in estimation of your peers, and you find things that are fulfilling and aid in establishing something of a character. 

In early adulthood, you float through life, comfortable with even the unexpected. It is just you and, without enough understanding, it’s not hard to navigate one person through the Sturm und Drang of life. You have a hard time conceiving how it could even be difficult for anyone. 

With kids, you become like the model of the atom, a proton, surrounded by chaotic, spinning electrons. The proton is the only part you have learned to control. You go out into the world, the electrons spinning wildly around you, occasionally reaching out to steady them, to keep them from crashing into each other, or into someone else. You take up a lot more space as such, and even the sympathetic can’t help but to be somewhat annoyed when your electrons call someone a “poopybutt” because they are “on one” and trying to outdo each other in silliness. 

Before our third child was born, my wife and I were sitting outside the supermarket, alone, chatting. We saw a struggling mother making her way to the door with three children in tow. One of them was having to be carried for some reason, the other, in the cart, was rocking it precariously, while the third, walking, suddenly demanded to have her shoes which were in the car. The mother, being rational, assessed her control of the situation which was dramatically decreasing as they neared the supermarket doors and made a decision. She turned around, went back to the van, and drove away. Nope. No groceries today. 

In the moment, I though “shit, that doesn’t bode well for us.” I couldn’t imagine going all the way to the store, getting everyone in and out of the carseats, etc. only to turn around without accomplishing the errand. But there was a lesson there, one that I’m still struggling to learn. I don’t always get my way—even if my way is something as mundane as getting the groceries—sometimes, you need to turn around and go home, or do something else. It might be possible to recover a little of that self-possession if I stop trying so hard to exert it. Perhaps rather than make the proton overwhelm the electrons, the proton need only move in another direction, after all, the electrons will follow.

It is very difficult to imagine ever having the self-possession I enjoyed in my mid-twenties return, but I guess the point of life has never been to get to a comfortable position and stay there; you have to take on new challenges to grow and, adding a bunch of electrons to my proton is a pretty obvious way to grow. Still, it’s hard not to look back to the solitary “me” I once was and feel some amazement that, so far in the past, I had such a better idea of what I was doing. Surely there’s a scientific explanation for that, too. Maybe entropy, maybe nostalgia.    

Different Kinds of Work; Different Kinds of Earning

 

I slept terrible in the tent because I’d neglected to bring any kind of bedding. I’d lain there, still sweaty from the hike on the lumpy nylon of the tent with the dirt and sand sticking to me, rolling back and forth in imitation of sleep throughout the night. It was impossible to tell how much I’d actually slept, if at all. 

But the night passed, and when the sun came up, I was glad to knock the tent down and get moving again. Up on the Selim Pass, there are few cars, fewer trees, and I walked most of the morning with the sound of my shoes scuffing the road for company. About 9am, a mountain storm swept in and broke over me. In a few seconds, I was soaked through to my underwear. I stopped and rung everything out as well as I good and continued walking. The return of the sun brought a depressing humidity as well as chafing where my backpack pressed against my wet shirt, where my heels rubbed against my shoes, and where my thighs met each other. 

By mid-afternoon, I came down into regional center of Martuni and recalled the first time I’d made this trek and seen this town. It had been late autumn. Someone had given me a lift over the pass because the weather had been bad and I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. When we dropped down into the town, it was windy from the lake, cold, and bad-dental-work-gray. The main road had been crisscrossed with dead dogs: two on the right, one on the left, another on the right, three on the left. All recently shot, their fur still soft, standing, ruffling in the wind, in particular a German Shepard—a rare breed to see here—not dirty, the gathering hail in the brown and black fur the only indication he wasn’t asleep. 

Jay had still been here then. We’d been in the same training village. When I’d mentioned the dogs, he’d said only, “yeah, they do that sometimes here.” I wondered who would eventually come to pick them up and I was cheered to walk back over the snowy pass the next day toward home. 

That had been something like 18 months ago. When I came back to Martuni, still carrying the mountain rain in the folds and seams of my clothing. I was much more comfortable; I knew to talk to the curious group of boys so they wouldn’t harass me. I kept in mind now that some of the people I’d meet selling fruit or greens in the market were refugees who might not be interested in me because they were still thinking of a home they couldn’t go back to, because all this around them still felt temporary and, therefore, uninteresting, my banter included.

The first building in the market area was large and empty. I surprised myself by tagging the dust in the window—something I hadn’t done in the years since I’d left the US. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, but it was fun to do, satisfying to discover something of that era was still there because a lot of it was gone, too. Maybe for the better. 

Even without a sleeping bag, my damp backpack was still quite unwieldy, especially in a place where men are never seen carrying things. The overstuffed market bags are entirely kept up with women’s hands. Maybe in transport, a man will step up and carelessly help a woman by stuffing such a bag into an overhead compartment, but even then, their disgust at handling this feminine object is obvious and here I am with a giant bag on my back and a bandana around my forehead. 

I bought some bread and sunflower halva in the market and made a meal of it before starting on my way toward K’var. I would have to stop somewhere and camp before I made it there. I’d spent too much time up the mountain, and even the long summer day was nearing late afternoon. I’d never walked the road between Martuni and K’var before, so I didn’t know if there’d be anywhere to camp; I was hoping for something down by the lake, maybe even in sight of the lake where I could hear the sound of the wind on the water even if I couldn’t sleep again. 

I’d only just left the outer villages surrounding Martuni when I passed a group of men killing time in front of a gas station. 

There were probably seven or eight of them, alternately squatting, standing, smoking, and spitting sunflower seeds. I was on the other side of the street, but they waved me over vigorously. 

“Ari stegh. Ari, axpers; Ur es e tun?” They commanded and questioned at once in an annoying imperious tone like all the world was theirs to shout and wave their hands about at.

I tried to ignore them, but their shouts came louder, almost reaching a shouting point. I could pretend not to understand, but I turned, unable to resist the temptation to disabuse them of their orderly way of seeing the world.

“Yes, I’m walking. I’ve been walking since yesterday morning. I enjoy walking. This is a beautiful land. That’s why I walk it. No I’m not married. I don’t want to shave. I’m going to the next town. I know it’s far; I told you, I’ve been walking for two days now. I’ve come from Yeghegnadzor. Yes, I’m from the US. No Swine Flu hasn’t wiped out the country-or at least I’ve heard nothing of the sort. Etc. etc.”

I yelled most of this prepared speech from a distance, hoping they would dismiss me with a wave as so many others had done. Usually when the men learned where you were going and got to ask why you weren’t married, they were satisfied to leave you alone, but either this group was really bored or they were actually interested in my answers; they kept asking me questions, I had to cross the street and talk with them face-to-face.

I was annoyed, but found I was glad to drop my pack and light a cigarette. In every group, there’s always the antagonizing one, the one who asks about women with a leer and then, once on the subject, won’t let up, but just as the conversation seemed about to go that way, it swooped back to more tasteful subjects. I began to feel lulled by the pace of the questions, the smoke, the men’s interest. Having to pick the pack back up and continue down the road into the gloom was losing its appeal the longer I sat there talking. Still, when the men told me they all worked at the station and slept in a workers’ quarters there and invited me to stay there with them, I hesitated. I was not yet their guest, but once I accepted the offer to stay, they would be responsible for me in a way that could feel very overwhelming and obliterate my agency, my plans. But I was exhausted. The moment’s reprieve had evaporated any interest I had in going on further and I was done being alone. 

How can I describe the feeling of intolerance for solitude? I’d spent the better part of two years wandering the hills, following two-tracks, lying on monastery floors, sliding down dusty scree by myself and, I’d experienced this feeling several times, when you make for human company and conversation like it was water. It was like a waking up to a need for people that, growing up in a much denser society, I’d never experienced before. The greatest thing about it was that it enabled you to spend the night talking to one person and feel as though the conversation were replenishing something vital—that people themselves were necessary for your own wellbeing.

I had a lot of great talks this way. Perhaps this is how people were, or more specifically I was, meant to live. Long distances, long times in solitude punctuated with bursts of conviviality. 

The men showed me to their bunk. The alcohol came out, but after the first shot, no more was pressed upon me. I tried to continue talking but I was overcome with languor and my eyelids slacked in a way that even my excitable hosts couldn’t ignore and they showed me my bunk. There was no blanket, but it was still an improvement on the dirty, sweaty tent floor. I dropped off almost right away, still surrounded by the talk and the smoke of the men. 

It wasn’t a dream, more of a reaction, a response. Hands were reaching from the darkness for my throat. I batted the apparition away and woke up in solid darkness with no idea where I could be. A blanket had been draped over me, but even as I realized my nightmare for what it was and began feel the weight leech from my body that signaled the return to sleep, one of the men came up from the darkness, holding another blanket; he draped it over me with unconscious kindness. “Jon jan”, he said quietly as if wishing me a pleasant sleep, or simply admiring me as another human being, lime himself, deserving kindness. 

I slept late into the morning. The men finally woke me up to tell me they’d found me a ride to K’var. I put my stuff together in a daze, got in someone’s car and rode away thinking only to wave to my kind hosts after we’d gone around a bend in the road and they were out of sight. In my bag, they’d snuck a few apples which I ate on my way down the road, thinking of what they’d shown me that a lifetime spent accumulating possessions and prestige would never reveal. 

 

 

Rites of Spring

 Despite waking up at such an early hour. It’s light out. Summer is coming despite the overcast weather, which is typical on the coast when it warms up over the mountains to the east and, I imagine, the rest of the country. The warmth causes this blanket of clouds to creep over the first 10 miles or so between the landmass and the water. This marine layer in the traditionally warming months produces a June Gloom here. The temperature stays at 55 degrees and we are buried under this rubble of cloud avalanche. 

But, get on a plane and the impossible occurs, takeoff punches you through this gauzy layer into the brilliant sun. The clearing, lifegiving effect of its rays wasted there above the clouds where there are no gardens, no people appreciating its light and warm. It’s a desert of beautiful sky, just beyond reach. 

Alternately, drive into the low foothills into the coast range, into the Klamath Mountains. You won’t get above the clouds as it might seem from the change in altitude, they just stop. Blocked by the craggy massifs and whatever physical law holds the fleecy clouds back from the mountain pastures, only letting in a few at a time. 

With time enough, I’d take my family up there, to get above the clouds. Willow Creek has a nice café and a new skatepark. But we have to go early; the kids aren’t used to the heat of the unmitigated sun after growing up under this cloud blanket. 55 and cloudy is normal to them. They sit inside and pore over their Pokemon manga with the dull, silvery light seeping in from the windows and sliding glass door unaware that they are missing anything. And on mornings when the sun is out early, they are giddy without quite knowing why. 

Gas is too expensive to justify the drive up into the mountains anyway. It’s only been a few days of clouds and it looks like it’ll break up in about a week for a day or two. So, we stay where we are, under this grey undulating mat, ragged on the eastern edge with the serrations of redwood spires and a solid line where it meets the ocean, looking like it goes on forever out there. 

It makes me restless. Under the clouds, it’s hard to be hedonistic or even spur-of-the-moment. I am overwhelmed by a gray Teutonic need to “get things done” even when nothing needs to be done. The result of which is that the early light—it’s not even 6am—troubles me with the need to be awake and accomplishing. It is not the sun that wakes me up, but this nagging thought that I should be acting, forcing my impetus on the world. 

I get up too early, drink too much coffee and struggle to stay on task. As soon as one thing presents itself as too involved, an undertaking—something I can’t finish in an hour—I give it up and look for something else to do, but the guilt of the unfinished task stays with me, so even while I’m accomplishing something else, there is no enjoyment, or rather the enjoyment is tempered with the frustration of not being able to get everything done—that there must always be something else to do—that the list won’t simply come to an end and the sun come out so that I can walk under it and be happy. 

One day a month, I go in to work in the late afternoon. Starting in the morning the rest of the month, I always find this difficult to adjust to. Not only when I’m at work, but the entire morning and afternoon before. I try to be at home, but, knowing I have to go to work eventually, it’s hard to stay focused. It makes everything feel ephemeral and inconsequential. 

With all this cloudy weather, my potted mango tree is getting blighted, so I went out to buy copper fungicide, even though I’d read it isn’t effective after the blight begins to appear. I thought about repotting it, but that seemed unlikely to be successful, and I didn’t feel like getting potting soil all over the place and getting dirty. Getting dirty is for the days when I don’t have to work at all. It’s a luxury of the weekend.  

I sprayed the fungicide on the plant under a curtain of mist wondering how much the precipitation would affect the already impotent action. I looked out on the rest of the garden; the foxgloves were doing very well, the lilac was covered with healthy green leaves, but had no buds when all the others in town are blooming. The kiwi was doing something after being eaten by bugs last year; all the new pepper starts now looked bug-chewed and slightly crushed. 

I went in to get my toddling daughter and returned to the deck. The mist was falling heavily enough now that I had to sit under the small awning by our door. We sat there while my wife fixed the broken bookshelf inside. I pointed out the cows in the field to my daughter, but kept my eyes on the colors, the growth, the life of the garden trying to wring some kind of satisfaction from it. 

My four-year-old son was going to sing with his class for May Day, and I was glad to have the time off to go watch him for once. We walked out through this mist to his school, waited outside with all the other parents until the door swung open and the teacher overenthusiastically ushered us into the playground doing that thing people do now when they don’t make eye-contact with anyone even while being right up close. 

Holding my daughter, I sat on one of the tiny chairs which had been arranged for us without realizing that there were more people than chairs. As others came in, I nearly stood up to give up my seat, but realizing I was holding a baby I thought, well, I suppose I’m justified in staying where I am, and it was nice being able to sit next to my wife like we were at the theater or something. Necessity is almost always moving us to different parts of a room. 

In school’s courtyard, there’s an escallonia bush that’s been pruned into a tree. My son was standing where its shade would’ve been if the sun was out. The class was in a line, expectantly facing us. I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking around, swiveling his body, waiting in his patient kid way. 

The teacher welcomed us again—less anxious now that she could address us as another sort of class— and took up a flute. The chorus of four- and five-year-olds began. None of them supercilious or mocking as we saw later that day with the second and third graders. At this age, this first performance, all of them slightly unsteady with the newness of the experience, but so earnestly singing, watching their teacher for cues, little hands placed here and there, little voices, at a speaking volume, reciting the practiced, sing-song words, little feet shifting unselfconsciously. So much innocence in that chorus. 

I usually try to be community-minded at school performances and swivel my head to watch the kids more or less equally, but I’m also usually standing in the back with an impatient baby in my arms. Now I had the luxury of sitting with a quiet baby right in front of my own singing child and I was able to watch his effort, his absorption, and see his beautiful potential as the potential of all the children singing and shifting and holding their arms over their heads to symbolize the rocking sun.

My nose wrinkled and my brows clenched, I tried to keep the tears from coming to me eyes, but they wouldn’t. In my peripheral vision, I could see them falling down my wife’s face, too. What those kids must have thought, paraded out to the courtyard to perform a song of renewal for a line of crying parents under a cloudy spring sky, but all rituals are strange the first time. 

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.