Remapping Desire Lines

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

for Gina 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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