Call and Response: Viewpoints in 100 Words (#16)

Marvin sits to my left. Recently divorced from his wife of 28 years, he is often distracted and sometimes weeps silently early in the morning when he thinks nobody is there. Beth, to my right, has a son in preschool; she occasionally leaves work early because he bites. She, too, is distracted. Charles is our manager; his distraction is his own boss, Michael, who sells himself as a corporate visionary but who cannot articulate those visions to subordinates. My distractions? sunrise through tinted windows, the soft feathers of a bird that fell from its nest near the building's entrance today.

_____

I clean the breakroom and the cubicles. I am careful not to disturb anyone's personal belongings. Some people keep their cubicles clean, and others surround themselves with family photos and their children's artwork. I know when people's lives change: photos appear or vanish, for example. I've seen births, graduations, weddings, divorces, and vacations. I complete my tasks by 5 in the morning. When there are layoffs, people and their belongings simply vanish, but when they quit, belongings disappear slowly. Sometimes as I drive to the office, I imagine these people are my children, and I want to love them all.

I Was Once Very Fat (chapter 2)

This is all you'll get.

I Was Once Very Fat (chapter 1)

Author's note: This is the first very rough draft of the new novel. It is unedited, un-proofread, un-anything. It's also the only chapter that will be posted. Who do you think I am, Charles Dickens?

 Chapter 1

I was once very fat. This is what I tell myself, mantra-like, every morning when the alarm clock sounds and, usually in the dark, I find my running clothes, lace up my shoes, and head outside. 

My running route covers eight miles on a normal day, ten miles a couple of times a week. Not that many years ago I could not walk a hundred yards, which probably embarrassed my then-teenaged son as he sprinted back and forth on the football field in front of his high school. He never said anything about my size and physical limitations, but fathers are more perceptive in these matters than some people believe. Nigel, my wonderful son, has been in the army now for nearly fifteen years. The morning he left, his mother Sandy and I watched from our front porch as the recruiter drove him away in a Toyota Prius. She and I both cried, though we cried differently and in different places that day.

The wife I had then, though, is not the same wife I have today. Twenty-five years into our marriage, not long after Nigel left, Sandy said that she, too, had to move on. Of course, our life together during a couple of years before that decision were not pleasant. I had grown fat, and we had both grown quite stubborn. Nigel told me one afternoon that he understood, that he had seen enough of the world in his military career to see how even the best-planned missions sometimes fail. Now, Nigel keeps in regular touch with his mother, who is good enough to keep me informed of Nigel’s well-being. Sandy told me in an email last week, in fact, that Nigel has met someone he calls “special,” and that things are getting serious. 

I am now married to Melodie, a beautiful woman I met when I joined the local gym. We both enrolled in the “Get Fit Now!” series of workouts designed for people who need an extra push to keep them motivated. Melodie was much more fit than I at the time, but she says now that after many years of trying, she can fit into “normal” clothes. I am Melodie’s first husband, and she told me that she cannot foresee a day when we are not married. Sandy is still single and, from what I can see, quite happy.

I allow myself a few cookies or other sweets every few days, but I must exercise if I want to stay relatively slim, which, to Melodie, is pure common sense. “To think we had to join a gym and pay money for someone to tell us that,” she said. I am not a fast runner, but I am steady.

On the last day of August, a Saturday, I started earlier than usual; Melodie did not even move when I slid out of bed, got dressed, and headed outside. The morning was cold for August, but the sun was rising and I knew I would be warm soon enough. I don’t stretch my legs much before I run, which I have been told is a mistake, that I should prepare my muscles for exertion. She is probably correct, but I prefer to simply start.

As I started running, I remembered how Saturday mornings used to be: I’d sleep in late, get up and eat a large breakfast, and then watch college football or maybe spend a few hours on the computer. Sandy was a good cook, and she always liked preparing special lunches on weekends. So, most of my weekends were filled with sitting and eating. It was not a bad life by any means.

I felt good as I started moving. I can usually tell after a quarter mile or so how the run will go. My route starts through begin and safe suburbia and continues up and down gentle hills and, toward the end, through a fine stand of conifers that someone planted as a windbreak decades ago. At the end of the final mile is the tallest hill, which is bare of everything but a cellular phone tower. When I reach the top of that hill I stop and gaze over the rooftops and backyards of my neighborhood. On clear mornings I can see as far as the airport, and I sometimes pause to watch passenger jets glide in or lift off. I feel like Rocky when I am up there. Melodie does not run. Instead, she spends many hours a week at the gym, and this is evidenced in the shape and firmness of her upper arms. She is a strong woman.

I’ve wondered about the cellular phone tower, whether the signals it sends and receives are harmful. The phone company organized several public meetings before building the tower, and a tall, good-looking man in a nicely cut suit told us that hundreds of studies and pages of scientific evidence support the idea that everything is safe. I liked how he spoke; his voice was confident and well modulated. “These are not like X-rays,” he said. The phone company has plans to disguise the tower with fake boughs and branches designed to mimic the surrounding conifers. 

As a neighborhood, our singular demand turned out to be that our access to the hill would not be restricted. The summit is not just popular among runners and other pedestrians, but also among families to enjoy picnics. Though I am not always the first one atop the hill in the morning, on this Saturday I was the only person. Frank McConnell, who lives on the street behind mine, had erected a small bench in memory of his wife Elaine, who had died a couple of years earlier after what he said was a “courageous battle with a pernicious form of pancreatic cancer.” Frank had built the bench himself in his own garage using slabs of an oak tree that had once dominated his backyard before a meteorological micro-cell of some sort tore through the area and felled the tree.

As I said, I feel like Rocky when I am at the top of that hill. When I first started exercising, I could not even walk from top to bottom, but I have come to enjoy how my thighs ache as I near the tower. When I sit on Elaine’s bench, I feel that I am rewarding myself for a fine effort. On this Saturday, the air seemed especially clear as I sat down and let sweat drop from my forehead to my running shoes. Melodie has mentioned that I have a great capacity for sweating. 

I enjoy watching the airplanes. I imagine them filled with people excited to be going to or coming home from someplace, and the airplanes seem so graceful, if machines can indeed have grace, as they come and go. There seemed to be more airplanes on Saturday mornings, and this day was no different. I sat and sweated and watched. The planes were landing from my right to my left, and approaching from the distance I saw a plane that seemed to be rocking a bit from one wing toward the other. This plane also appeared a bit lower than the ones in front of it. I wiped sweat from my eyes, and when I focused again I saw the plane drop lower, then climb, then plummet.

On occasion in my life I have seen things that made me adjust my perception to something that does not seem quite right. As a teenager, I was walking home from high school one afternoon and watched a car, a blue Ford Pinto, skid through a red light just as a black Chevy pick-up started through the intersection. “Black and blue,” is what I thought at the time, “like a bruise.” As I watched, I kept hoping that the two vehicles would not collide. Physics and bad driving, however, won out over hope, and the Chevy broadsided the Pinto. Glass and noise were everywhere.

I felt the same hope as I watched the plane. “It’s going to lift up,” I said aloud, but it did not. The plane seemed to fly directly into the ground, collapsing in on itself like a Slinky. I kept waiting to hear the sound of the impact just as I’d heard the Chevy and Ford, but things seemed even more unreal because there was no sound. There was a small fireball, and then much smoke. 

I have read somewhere that what witnesses are, more often than not, incorrect when they describe what they have seen. People who study memory have written that we in fact create memories over time, often as a way to force events to fit into our unique perceptions and beliefs. As I watched the smoke rise and drift, I had to force myself that I had actually seen something, and I replayed my version of things over and over in my own thoughts. 

The air suddenly felt colder. I was still sitting on the bench, the polished oak smooth against the backs of my thighs. “I should tell someone,” I said aloud, but immediately knew that “someone” already knew. Standing, I looked around the summit to see if anyone had joined me. There was nobody. I heard the sound of the impact then—not loud, really, just a dampened noise that at some point might have been impressive and frightening. “Oh, Christ,” I said, and I sprinted down the hill toward home.

Thinking Through Winter

I have a strong affection for winter, for its short days and low sun. I do not like the Central California summer, which is relentless.

During the week this time of year, I am at the office well before sunrise. The building is quiet, and if the lights are still on from the day before, I switch off all that I can before sitting in my cubicle.

A couple of weeks ago I spent two nights in a tent in Yosemite Valley's Camp 4. I set my tent on the snow, rigged up a warm mattress constructed of an old sleeping bag and a leaky Thermarest. For a couple of days I hiked around the Valley and enjoyed fresh air, tired legs, and the post-Christmas respite from all things ordinary. I got to see a wild bobcat for the first time, as well as a healthy coyote and several deer. The last time I was in Yosemite was in September, when I sometimes enjoyed a strenuous backpacking trip that, a few days in, found me unable to either eat or sleep enough to maintain a normal level of energy.

The day before yesterday I drove up to the mountains and spent several hours of skiing in the backcountry. I encountered nobody, and I had the trees to myself. At several points I stopped to enjoy the falling snow. 

For about the last month I have had my evenings and weekends to do pretty much as I please: no classes to teach or take, no students to call, no papers to grade. In a couple of weeks I once again start teaching: two nights a week, two hours a night. I am trying to gird my mental self for the increased activity, but the thought of 30 students staring up from their seats causes me no small amount of anxiety.

I will also be taking a guitar class, basically the same course I took last semester but am allowed to repeat at least a few times. I am not a good guitar player, nor will I ever be. But I am better than I once was, and being a student again will help me (I hope) be a better teacher. Many of my students are afraid of writing, really, just as I am afraid of playing my guitar in class. I am hopeful that I am developing a bit of empathy for those who truly do fear having to write. For one Christmas when I was a kid, I asked for a guitar, and what showed up on Christmas morning was a cheap plastic thing that I treasured. Mike, an older neighbor who would end up having quite the dark side, once offered to sell me his electric guitar for $100. I balked, one of many decisions that I have regretted. If I'd started playing then, even with this fat, meaty hands I'd be a much better player than I am.

For Christmas this year I asked for and received a box of Blackwing 602 pencils and a new Rhodia notebook, requests that befuddled more than one person. With these pencils and in this notebook I have begun writing the newest tome (mentioned in in a not-so-old blog post), an exercise in futility and creativity that I'm hopeful to make habitual.

I have told my students for many years that they, too, must practice their writing, that it will get easier and they will get better if they just stick with it, no matter how fat and meaty their hands are.