Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #9

My admiration for my brother was strong, but as his snoring got louder, I stuffed Kleenex into my ears and leaned away from him. Settling against the window, I remembered another train ride that ended up interrupted for a couple of months. I was drinking a bit more then and had reached a precarious balance between complete obliviousness and mistaken confidence. That's not always an unpleasant place to be, but it's often difficult to leave behind.

I was headed west to east on that trip, but lost over the years is where I was actually going. I know I was alone. Where I ended up, was Helper, Utah, a main street of a town in which there are few violent crimes but many thefts and burglaries. The Amtrak train stopped in Helper about seven in the morning, not long after sunrise, and I stepped outside for fresh air. For some reason I also started walking, and then the train continued on without me. I returned to the station for an hour, probably thinking the train would return for me. I felt glad that I still had my wallet and a few hundred dollars, but my duffel bag was still on the train. I've started over again at several points in my life, but that was the first time without a change of clothing.

When I walked back into town, I found the Golden Rule Mission where I got a free breakfast and directions to the Phillips 66 gas station where the owner gave me more directions, this time to a 3-room strip of a motel. There I paid for a week's worth of lodging and met Susan, who managed the Gateway Lanes bowling alley. When my week was over Susan took me in and said that if she earned the money, I had to cook and clean and walk her home from the lanes late at night.

"Three years," Susan said one night when I asked her how long she had been there.

"Three years?" I pictured Helper and wondered who could live there for that long.

"Legend is that the town keeps people," Susan said.

"Keeps people? What does that mean?"

"Like you'd find in the Twilight Zone keeping," she said. "The town draws people in. Look at you--you didn't show up on purpose, did you?"

"I just missed my train," I said.

"Nobody just misses a train in Helper," she said.

"How did you get here?"

"Bad transmission in a Chevy Nova," she said. "On my way to someplace other than Utah, and this is as far as I got."

But one day she was gone. I had walked to the bowling alley to walk her home, and Nate, the bartender-cook-security guard said that Susan had met someone a couple nights earlier, then had left with him just a couple hours earlier. That was enough for me, so a few days later I boarded the Amtrak train and never looked back.

The train with my family--including my dead aunt and uncle--was headed toward Helper again. Steven was still sleeping and the train had grown a bit too quiet for so early in the evening. I switched on the overhead light and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I found paragraph of small text toward the end of the notebook. Above the paragraph was the note, "I have started writing a novel called The Golfer's Wife. Here is the first paragraph."

I knew the nature of my marriage had changed when I walked into the house and found that my wife had packed her clothes, killed the cat, and moved out of my life. "Angie?" I called tentatively as I walked from room to room, my voice bouncing off the sheetrock of what no longer seemed to be the cozy home I had left nine hours earlier.

I closed the Rhodia and thought about that paragraph, about how everything in it seemed so plausible.

How We Let Go

My youngest son turned 18 today, an age of mythical privileges and responsibilities. When I was young but old enough to pay attention to things, turning 18 meant eligibility for the draft during the Vietnam War. And, in some places, it was the age at which a person could legally buy and consume alcohol. Later, and largely because it seemed important to those who could (and were) sent away to die, it was the age at which a person could vote. All 4 of my sons are now registered for the draft, one of those just-in-case formalities that runs counter to my belief pacifism that grows stronger the older I become.

So it goes, Vonnegut said, and indeed it does, though any more I'm not sure where it goes. I look at my son now and try to judge how ready he is for leaving home for college in just a few months. He admits no nervousness now, but perhaps he senses precursors to that churn in the belly that accompanies our greatest changes. Not long after high school graduation I was away to boot camp, and in my self-centered way I think that I was somehow more prepared for leaving home. Is he prepared? I wonder. Have I been good a good enough father that he has managed to learn what he needs to work through problems he will face on his own?

Then again, maybe these problems I anticipate are mine—he is prepared, but I am not. As we enjoyed birthday cake this evening, I wondered if my concern for him is born from the realization that I am losing control of him. For, in many ways, parenting seems to be partly based on control: "Don't eat that, but do eat this"; "Don't talk to me like that"; "Is your homework done?" The urge to control our children seems so strong, so necessary—yes, we must teach our children to be safe, to be "good" in all that word's definitions, to be prepared for the world they must face. But—and this is so difficult—we must also trust them and their ability to know the difference between the wise people and the foolish. Any "wisdom" I have has been acquired through an ever-growing highlight reel of mistakes, misplaced faith, false prophets, and poor decisions, but in the end I am better off for all that has gone wrong.

Is it easy to let go? Never. More sentimental than I can articulate or even acknowledge, I am in a constant battle of reassurance—that the kids are all right, and that I will be, too.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #8

Steven (mostly)


The youngest of us, Steven was probably the most accomplished even if he wasn't the surgeon Margie was. He had moved smoothly through college and various corporate environments in New York, Chicago, and London. Three years my junior, he had learned well from my mistakes and had developed into a well-balanced and respectable man. Though he must have known--and I must have told him--that for much of my youth I would have been happy if he had not joined our family, he seemed to never hold my sometimes outward dislike of against me. In some ways there are few things worse, more humiliating, than being forgiven by those we hate. He told me once that he had always admired me, but that he had also learned not to emulate me.

Now, he slept in the chair beside me. He was not snoring so much as purring. I looked out the window and wished I had his ability to sleep no matter the time or circumstance. When we had shared a room as boys, I would rise to visible jealous anger that he could sleep through the night when I battled insomnia. I probably would have been a better older brother if I had been able to sleep. His brown paper bag and can of beer were tilted loosely between his hands, and I pulled them gently from his fingers. The can was empty.

Years before, not long after he had returned from London, we were sitting in my parents' kitchen. I have forgotten if were were gathered for a holiday, but it might have been his first Thanksgiving home in awhile. I remember we had spent time looking through my mother's photo albums, and Steven lingered over pictures of the two of us hiking and fishing at Barney Lake in the eastern Sierra.

"Tell me," I said at some point, "what exactly do you do for a living?"

Steven laughed. "I sometimes ask myself the same question. But, I get paid for developing software. Actually, that's not true. These days I get paid for managing other people who develop software. For banks, sometimes for governments. We find ways to transfer money from one place to another."

"That's legal?" I asked.

"As far as I know. It's not even real money, though. It's all electronic--funds transfers, that kind of thing. Billions of dollars going from one place to another in less than a second."

I kept looking out the window at Colorado and wondered how I had missed so many steps along the way. I had started college and dropped out; I had been married twice but was now single; I had had good jobs but was now without one. Steven and Margie both seemed to have missed no steps, and their lives consisted of even and controlled movement forward. Years ago I was jealous of those two lives, and I often felt I was chasing my sister and being pursued by my brother. Steven had never said a thing, though, had never let on if my brushes with both law and early mortality had ever bothered him. "You don't have to be me," he had once said, and I was stricken with how this should've been something he heard from me and not the other way around. I knew it was his way of saying that he accepted me for whatever and whoever I was. We had at different times bemoaned our birth order: the overachieving oldest child pressured to lead the way; the often-lost middle child pressured from both sides; the carefree yet desirous-to-please youngest child.

The train car was filled with the quietness typical of after-meal contemplation. If they could, I knew, old men would be enjoying their cigars and brandy. I turned on the light above my seat and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I searched for something else from Ophelia, and I found several entries all in her fine script. With the tip of my forefinger I traced her signature and felt the depth of the pen stroke.

Steven had stopped purring. "You still here?" he muttered.

"I am," I said.

"Good," he said, and then he went back to sleep.

Ophelia's writing seemed to range from happy to quite sad. One entry toward the middle of the notebook entreated people to read James Joyce's story "The Dead." After several exclamation marks, she wrote: "This is only a small part of the story--out of context. Please read the entire story! This is one of Gabriel's passages..."

from "The Dead"

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasms, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

I wondered about this--about its meanings, about who Ophelia was and what she was trying to say. I looked at Steven's sleeping face and wondered if he would know, if he could tell me who James Joyce was. I felt nothing but admiration for my brother then, and I asked myself if I would ever tell him so.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #7

Leaving Grand Junction


We were, with a slight lurch, moving forward, moving west. The train seemed to pause slightly just as the station was behind us, and there was a slight moan from the other end of the observation car. Moans aside, we were moving.

"Not a place I want to return to," Steven said.

"A good place to leave," Margie said.

"There are worse places," my father added, always optimistic.

The observation car was full of much activity--the comings and goings of people who had been on the train for hours but who now apparently felt the need to move.

"I'm hungry," Dad said.

"We've got a seating time in the dining car," Margie said. "I reserved a table for all of us in about half an hour."

"I'll give up my seat," I said. "I'm not hungry."

"You might be later," Margie said.

"Then I'll eat later," I said.

"Dumb kids," Steven said. "I saw Cousin Mark downstairs. I'll ask him if he wants to join us." Mark was Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet's oldest child. He and I were close in age, but he was the learned type and had found reasonable success as a college professor and a writer. I admired him for the writing, and I wondered if he would be interested in the notebook. Cathy, his sister, would be joining the train in Salt Lake City where she lived with her Mormon family.

"You'll be missing a nice dinner," Dad said to me when Steven was gone.

"Don't humor him, Dad," Margie said.

Half an hour later they were all gone, eating in the dining car while I left the noisy observation car for my seat toward the rear of the train. Leafing through Rhodia, I saw how some people had taken the writing assignment quite seriously, while others seemed to have leaned toward graffiti. One entry, "Nebraska," was written in the same hand as others, and all were signed with the letters "MK."

Nebraska

There is nothing there.
But you have to see it to believe it.

Zephyr rolls hard and fast determined to leave Nebraska at night. With passengers flopped half asleep in all contorted positions, like refugees fleeing the park land of fields, broken by grain silos hiding missiles aimed at evil empires, lit only by Pepsi and Coca Cola machines glowing red and white and sometimes blue against filling stations. Don't lose a minute--just keep humping until Nebraska is done--until we've checked McCook, Holdrege, Hastings, Lincoln, and Omaha off our list of grudging stops. Ride on through the Nebraska corn husking and soy gleaning night. Cross the Missouri and ride on.

I liked it--for the mood as much as the words. I have driven across Nebraska, and it's a drive that never seems to end. It's one of the seemingly endless bad filmstrips among the country's 50 states' worth of travelogues. And something in it made me think of Peggy again, how she and I were young enough to see glamour in so many bad motels when we took to the road. We both enjoyed getting on the road a couple of hours before dawn and letting the day open up to us. Then we'd find someplace to sleep in the afternoon, sometimes simply parking our car in Walmart parking lots along with the RVs, and try to be driving again as the day ended. "How is all of this going to end?" Peggy once asked me on a road trip not long before we decided to divorce. I never answered that question, and she never asked it again.

When my siblings and father found me, they were full of food and happiness. "I brought you the leftovers," Margie said. "Half of a hamburger. Slightly cold by now."

I took the food from her. "Such a nurturer," I said. "Thanks."

Steven sat beside me. He belched, slipped his feet out of his shoes, and tilted his seat back. "People are going to think you don't like them if you keep avoiding everyone," he said. Margie and our father sat in front of us; Cousin Mark entered the car a few minutes later and sat a few rows behind us. He was reading a book as he walked by, and I doubted he'd even noticed us.

"I like everyone just fine," I said. I shut the Rhodia and watched what was left of Colorado pass by. We rode on.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #6

Waiting--Grand Junction


Peggy wrote poetry. Nearly every day she would jot individual lines on scraps of paper and now and then assemble those scraps. "Is it any good?" I once asked her.

She said she didn't know. "I'm young," she said. "I write poetry like someone who is young." I didn't know what she meant. I still don't.

Steven and Margie sat beside me. They'd come in through the station's front door, and each carried, literally, a brown paper bag. Steven offered me his bag. "You want a drink?"

I shook my head. "Dad's been sharing his flask. It's a bit less white-trashy than brown paper bags." I didn't offer them the flask itself.

Margie laughed and pulled her bag down to expose a Diet Pepsi. "It's your brother who's the white trash," she said. Steven showed me a can of Miller Genuine Draft.

"Where have you been?" I asked.

"We went walking," Steven said. "Up and down the streets. Not much to see around here. Kind of flat and dusty. We found a couple of body shops and a 7-Eleven. Where's Dad?"

"Back on the train, I think."

"He should've gotten a sleeping compartment," Margie said.

"We all should've gotten a compartment," I said. While the Amtrak seats were comfortable enough for sitting, they were only adequate for sleeping.

"What's with the notebook?" Steven asked.

I leafed through the Rhodia's smooth pages. "Dad found it. It's got stuff from train passengers. A mobile journal." I gave it to Margie when she held her hand out.

"A mobile journal," Margie said. "I kind of like that idea. You find anything good?"

"Haven't read much," I said. But I had read some, though I'd mostly searched for entries that had photographs or drawings. One photograph was of a long highway, with what appeared to be a dust storm in the distance. The photograph took up the top two-thirds of a page, and after it was a story titled "The Map-Reader." I liked that one--the idea of driving across the desert alone for hours and hours. But it was ideas like this that got often got between Peggy and me, too. And as I stared at the photograph, I found myself missing Peggy. "You'll always remember me," Peggy said on the our last day together as husband and wife. And she was right, too. We always do remember certain people even when they're the ones we seemingly should forget.

"You could write down your most personal feelings," Steven said.

Margie laughed. "He doesn't have personal feelings, remember?" She thumbed a couple of pages. "There's some interesting stuff. Looks like some kids got their paws on it--someone drew houses and trees with crayons." She handed it back. "If you can't think of anything to write, give it back to me. I'll write about our family's weird tradition of hauling dead relatives half-way across the country."

"Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were smart enough to get a sleeping compartment," Steven said.

"That's sick, Steven," Margie said.

We let the joke fade. I looked through the window to where the train was, where my father paced. He would appear on one side of the window, disappear on the other, and then reverse course. He finally stopped framed perfectly by the window, and he seemed to focus on several people who were boarding the train. It was the most movement I had seen in hours. "People are getting on the train," I said. My brother and sister didn't move, didn't even appear interested in leaving the station. "I'm going outside to see if something's happening," I said.

Outside, I asked my father if he'd heard any news. "No," he said, "but some of these people talked to a guy in a funny hat, and they talked to other people, and then the whole bunch of them got on the train."

"I'll go check inside," I said. "Maybe someone updated the chalkboard."

I had once spend an entire night in London's Victoria station. I'd missed my connection to Edinburgh, so I sat on a bench and dozed until dawn and the next train north. It was not the worst night I've spent alone, and I must have appeared sane and clean enough that nobody of authority bothered me. The timing turned out to be good, for if I had arrived in Scotland when I was scheduled to, I would not have met one of the few women I've known who could cause me to actually swoon.

The Grand Junction station was not one in which I wanted to spend even another minute, and I felt that luck had visited me because, according to the chalkboard, our departure time was just ten minutes away. I motioned to my sister and brother. "The train's leaving," I said, and they followed me outside.

"Where's Dad?" Margie asked.

Steven pointed upward. "On the train. The observation car."

Our father was sitting near a window and gesturing us to join him. "It's time to go," I said to nobody in particular.

"The engines are talking to one another," Dad said when we sat next to him.

"Family dynamics at their best," Steven said.

My father looked at me. "Where's my flask?"

Fictionus Interruptus

A year ago today I woke up in London and went to bed in Brussels. It was a wonderful day of adventure, of traveling to somewhere I had never been, of being mostly lost for a good amount of time. I had a different job then, one that had owned me for nearly a decade and provided me with ample vacation time for such adventures. Now, though, I have much less vacation available and must carefully allocate my days off throughout the year. The older I get, the more I would trade money for time off. With this in mind, it might be ironic that I traded both when I switched jobs....

I was lost for much of my time in Brussels, starting when I got on the correct local train after arriving by Eurostar but went in the wrong direction. When that local train stopped, everyone got off--I followed suit and found myself in a park dominated by a statue of Winston Churchill. Having no idea about where I was or where I should go, I simply loitered in the park until the sign sign on the same train changed to the name of the station I was looking for. I took that as a good omen, got back on the train, and 15 minutes later was at the stop near my hotel. Significant in this experience is a breakfast conversation I had with two women in London. They described a visit to Paris during which they were riding the metro when the train stopped at a station, the conductor announced something, and everyone got off the train. Speaking no French, the women decided that they should follow suit. They were not sure of where they were, but they eventually ended up where they were supposed to be. When I was on the right train in the wrong place in Brussels, I thought of their experience and simply did as they did.

I would return to England, given the chance. I would return today, in fact. I have brought this up in too many conversations with too many people, and the reaction I sometimes get is, "Why? You've been there twice--don't you want to see something new?" This is perfectly logical question, and perhaps it speaks to the truth that I perhaps I am not as adventurous as I'd like to believe. I suspect that my time in the navy plays a role in this: I traveled quite a bit, but drifted into assorted ports only every now and then, never staying longer than a few days. Age, too, has a role. With a good number of years on my back, new and completely different experiences are a bit harder to come by as I get softer and more settled in habit and responsibility. There is something very new about waking up in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar city and thinking, How do I get breakfast here? How do I get the shower to work? How do I get to Brussels?

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #5

Waiting--Grand Junction



My brother and sister were nowhere to be found. "If they're not here when the train leaves," my father said, "I'm stealing your brother's cigars."

We'd each bought a cup of coffee from the store, and we found a seat on one of the long, wooden benches inside the station, benches that seemed more like church pews. A middle-aged woman pecked away at a computer keyboard inside the ticketing office, outside of which was a small chalkboard with the train's departure time written neatly in blue chalk. That we were currently an hour beyond that time seemed to have been forgotten by whoever was in charge of the chalkboard. During what my parents had called my "wandering years" I had spent a bit of time in England, and even that long ago in dozens of train stations, I had never seen a chalkboard.

"You call Mom?" I asked.

My father shook his head. "Not yet. Later tonight, probably."

"You can call her more than once a day, you know. It wouldn't hurt anything."

"No, it probably wouldn't. But it'd surely make her think something's wrong. She was fearful that I'd be lonely without her, that I'd somehow get misplaced."

My parents had been married for forty-five years, a number that astounded me. They were both eighteen when they met, nineteen on their wedding day. My siblings and I arrived not long afterward. "Mom might be glad to hear that you're lonely," I said. "She'd appreciate being missed."

"I'm not a man of surprises," he said as he drank from his flask. A woman sitting across from us, her two toddlers splayed out on the floor at her feet, narrowed her eyes when she saw my father drink. He noticed, too, and just to make sure there was no confusion between them, he drank again.

"I'm going to get a Pepsi from the store, Dad. You want anything?"

"I'm fine. Potato chips, maybe." He reached for his wallet.

"Forget it, Dad. I can afford a bag of potato chips."

My dream about Peggy still lingered wherever it is that dreams rattle around, and I thought of her as I left my father on the bench. He and Peggy had been good friends, and I've always believed he was somewhat hurt when she was gone. My parents had endured an incredible amount of angst raising their children, and since I was the most troublesome, they were relieved when I got married and seemed to be changing things up a bit. Peggy and I had indeed struggled--including floating around Nevada for awhile--and hope was the last thing we gave up on. But we were both realists and knew when to end what needed to end. I always wanted to think that our life together made me more resilient, but in fact it made me little more than weary. "You don't know what weary is," Peggy once told me when I told her how I felt. She was probably right, too.

"They didn't have potato chips," I said when I again sat beside my father. "You want something else?"

"I want to get on the train and be moving," he said. "So, you write anything yet?" He pointed to the Rhodia notebook.

"Haven't opened it," I said.

"Your sister and brother walked through here on their way back to the train. I think I'll join them." He pointed to the chalkboard. "She updated the sign when you were gone. We're not going anywhere for awhile."

I was dismayed to see that our departure time was still an hour away. I wished that my father had left me the flask--some places are suited for drinking, and Grand Junction Amtrak station seemed to fit the bill. Slouching as much as I could without sliding off the bench, I leafed through the notebook. Some of the pages were completely full; others sported drawings or poems. Several poems seemed to have been written by the same hand, and though I've never read much poetry, they were short and easy to read. One, "Surprise," was centered perfectly on the page, with a sketch of a small, landlocked boat named San Antonio at the bottom of the page.

Surprise

Someone should have mentioned how dusk might
linger like this, how daylight and a diminished
horizon can refuse one another as easily as they refuse
the half-moon. Five-hundred feet below, a slack tide
barely pulses toward the line of seaweed strands,
distressed driftwood, diminished legs of crabs.
From this bluff, from this bed of clump grass, only
the single light on a schooner's mast has purpose--
an unnatural beacon any eye would find until finally
even it is directed away, perhaps into the surprise
of strong water, into what becomes of dusk.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #4

Waiting: Grand Junction


When I returned to the train, I found my father still sitting in the observation car. "You want anything from the store?" I asked.

"There's a store?"

"In the station. You want to get out and walk around?"

He didn't seem interested. "Any idea of how much longer we'll be sitting here?"

"From what I hear, could be awhile. Something about the engines not talking to each other."

"They must be related," he said. "You want a drink?" He handed me his silver flask, something I hadn't seen in years. He used to carry with him whenever we went on family vacations that involved extensive time in the car. He always swore that he never drank while driving, but in the middle of the night once somewhere between Chicago and Michigan I watched from the backseat as he glanced over at my sleeping mother and pressed the flask to his lips. He must have assumed that I was also asleep, but I was never sure if I shut my eyes before he looked into the rearview mirror to see if anyone was watching.

"Is it Scotch?" I asked.

"Yep. Where are your sister and brother?"

I sealed the flask and handed it back to him. "Probably still inside."

"They should've brought their spouses along for the ride."

I laughed. "You didn't bring yours."

"Your mother's been through this enough times." He reached over to the seat beside him. "Look what I found." He handed me a Rhodia notebook, its orange cover smudged with dirt and what looked like strawberry jam.

"Where's this come from?"

"Chicago, from what I can tell."

"You know what I mean. You find it just lying here?"

"A couple seats over. It was there all night, and when nobody picked it up this morning, I started looking through it. It's some kind of travel journal."

The notebook paper was smooth and bright, something a person might use a good pen on. Many of the pages were full, while others had only a short paragraph or even a long sentence. On the inside front cover was a note: "Started by Ophelia in Chicago as a random collection of random thoughts written by random people. Write something here, then pass it on or leave it in a place where someone other than the Amtrak people will find it and throw it away."

"I've been trying to think of something to write," my father said as I turned the pages. "I've been staring out this window trying to come up with an idea. If your mother were here, she'd have every page filled out by now. She loves this kind of thing."

Ophelia started like this:

Once again I have left home, though this time I actually bought a round-trip ticket. I also left a note for my parents telling them that I am fine, that I will call when I get a chance, and that they have nothing to worry about. I had planned to write something on every page here, but I thought it might be more interesting to have other people write things, too. If you have this in your hands, find a pen or pencil and write what you want to write. If all of the pages are filled, please mail the notebook to the Post Office box written below. I will be glad to reimburse you for postage if you tell me where to send the money.

Ophelia's handwriting was beautiful.

"I've read most of it," my father said. "There's some good stuff there, but there's a lot of crap, too. You should write something."

"I don't have a lot to say," I told him. "Maybe Margie."

"You could say that we're never going to get the hell out of Grand Junction, and that we ended up burying your aunt and uncle here." He sipped again from the flask. "You think that's her real name?"

"Who?" I asked.

"Ophelia. You ever know anyone by that name?"

"Nope," I said.

"Neither have I, and I've heard a lot of names. Maybe she liked Shakespeare, or maybe she was just crazy." He stared up at the ceiling for a few seconds, then looked at his hands. "' I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My brother shall know of it: and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.'"

"That's Shakespeare, right?"

"One of the few quotes I remember. From Hamlet. Ophelia."

I closed the notebook. "You want this back?"

"Not especially. Unless I think of something to write." He stood up. "Let's get off this train for a bit before we go crazy, too."

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #3

Continued from before

Steven and Margie thought for many years that I was lost. Sometimes I was but not in the way they feared. I was simply less settled than they were, less comfortable with consistency and predictability. I had always admired their respective even keels, but I also thought they should tip to port every now and then.

Peggy, my first wife, told me I never settled down even when I did. We got married young and got divorced when we weren’t much older, and though we were mostly poor and somewhat itinerant during our time together, I’ve never been able to say that we weren’t happy. I still dream of her, and the dreams are a mixture of fact and, well, dream.

Heat (mostly a dream)

“Christ, it’s hot,” Peggy says in a voice that is smooth and soft. She’s lying on her back beside me, and we’re both naked on the queen-sized bed; a damp white towel is stretched across her narrow hips. Her brown hair moves a bit in the tiny currents of warm air that the small fan moves through our apartment bedroom. There is no breeze outside—leaves on the tall, aging eucalyptus trees outside our window do not move at all. We are barely into June, and it has been hot like this for nearly two weeks. Central California’s summer has started early and threatens to be long.

“It’ll get cooler,” I tell her as I listen to the monotonous hum of the fan. “The weatherman I listened to this morning says that temperatures could drop by as much as fifteen degrees by tomorrow night.”

“That doesn’t help much today, does it?” Her voice is hardly above a whisper. She talks like that—cynical but quiet—when she’s tired of something.

“I suppose not,” I say, “but at least there’s some hope.”

“We have to get a bigger fan.” She looks at me sternly, talking a bit louder as if I were defying her or something. ”That one is worthless.”

“How can we manage that? We can barely afford gas for the truck, and you want a bigger fan? It doesn’t stay this hot for very long. Maybe only a few more days, then it will get better.” I want to tell her that I am not the cause of the heat, that I cannot be blamed.

I turn the pillow over, feeling for a cool spot with the side of my unshaven face. The linen sheet has been covering my feet, and I kick it off the bed. Air pushed by the fan works its way up from my ankles and across my heavy thighs, then to my chest; there it seems to stop.

“We shouldn’t make love on days when it’s this hot,” Peggy tells me, her eyes blinking quickly, her voice back to its near-whisper. “I work up too much of a sweat and it takes me hours to cool down again.” She traces my forearm lightly with long fingernails that she painted a light blue just this morning.

I find myself listening to the late afternoon traffic on the street running in front of our apartment building. Occasional diesels pass, working through their gears far down the street where the hill starts. The trucks strain by our apartment. For a moment the noise and the heat and the oddly sweet smell of diesel fumes combine, and I tense and hold my breath in an effort to shut them all out, to forget about the jobs we’ve lost and the compression I feel in this small apartment.

“Sears might have fans on sale this weekend,” I finally say. “We could charge it, I guess. And it isn’t as if we’d be buying a luxury, or anything. It would be something we really do need.” In Nevada, life was not just heat like this but the desolation of towns like Fallon and Winnemucca and Battle Mountain—outposts in the endless Nevada desert. And it was bad water pumps on the truck and Peggy’s pneumonia and always that slight imbalance of bad luck over good choices. Peggy made change for gamblers in a dozen casinos, and I emptied ashtrays and swept floors in nearly as many. Then the small casinos laid people off, and the large ones didn’t hire. For the five weeks we were In Winnemucca, nearly every day was full of dust and wind. My eyes dried out so much I couldn’t see well enough to drive at night.

“You said yourself we couldn’t afford a new fan,” Peggy says to the ceiling as much as to me. “And you’re probably right. If we can’t afford it, we shouldn’t use the charge card.” She has rested her fingers on the soft flesh above my elbow, pressing down just enough so I can feel my pulse against her touch.

“But we should do something. Maybe we can find one cheap at a garage sale.”

“And add to our wonderful collection of household goods,” she says wearily, her eyes closed now. She presses her full lips together tightly when she stops talking.

Nearly everything we have owned—and sometimes sold—seems to have come from a garage sale or a flea market: the bed we sleep on, the Hotpoint refrigerator, the small black-and-white TV. I think it must be hard on Peggy, having to live with used furniture. But I’m not rich and we’ve both learned to make do for most of our lives. It is the pattern our parents and grandparents followed, and I’ve often wondered how a person goes about getting blessed with wealth.

“Remember Illinois?” Peggy asks loudly, catching me by surprise. Her eyes dance beneath her eyelids like they do when she dreams at night, as though she’s watching something moving back and forth across some invisible landscape. “Remember how much we hated the cold winters? All that snow. God, what I’d give to be back there now up to my neck in a snowdrift. So cold. I don’t think I’d even wear a coat.” She runs her hands up her chest to her neck and throat, then rests them just beneath her earlobes.

“We could move back,” I tell her instinctively, seeing that she is happy with the thought. I move my arm closer to her, so the back of my hand is against the curve of her thinning waist. “If I could find a job. Maybe you could find something, too. I don’t know….” We grew up in northern Illinois, but it was thirty years of those dismal winters that drove west in the first place. We’d both thought that dealing blackjack would be a good way to earn a living, even if we had to work nights or in a small town for awhile.

But now we’re in this place, far from the peaceful suburbs we think we’d like, and I don’t know if I want to pack up and move everything back the two-thousand miles after just starting to learn about California. The work here is not always wonderful, but it is available. What if we go back and can’t get jobs or find a decent place to live? I’ve had enough of living in the back of a pickup truck like we did for nearly three months after crossing to the west side of the Mississippi and having the truck simply lie dead until we raised enough money for a rebuilt transmission. Any romance or sense of adventure in that sort of thing wears off quite quickly.

“Remember how the ice would cover the entire front porch of that house we rented?” Peggy continues. She traces her hands now across her belly. "And how we used to skate where the schoolyard flooded and froze?” Her fingers dance lightly on her narrow ribs. “I haven’t skated in so many years, and I used to be pretty good.”

“Let’s move, then,” I say. “I really wouldn’t mind. It would be hard until we found jobs, but we could make it, couldn’t we?”

“If we wanted to, we could make it. We could stay with my sister for a week or so until something turns up.” She lays her arms at her sides, so her fingernails are once more on my own arm.

“If it stays this hot much longer, I think we should move,” I tell her. I watch a glistening bead of sweat travel from between her breasts down to just above her navel, where the fringed edge of the towel is. I want to doze in the heat, but I force my eyes open.

“But if it’s not too hot, things aren’t so bad here. Just not Winnemucca or Reno again. Or Battle Mountain. Nothing in Nevada.” She wets the corners of her mouth with the delicate tip of her tongue.

“Maybe it will cool down, and then you’ll feel better. And maybe we can find a way to get a bigger fan. Things usually work out for us if we wait long enough. Things usually turn out okay."

“We’ll wait a week,” she says. “Okay? One more week. Then we’ll see how things are going and decide what we should do.” She tosses the towel to the floor. She brings her knees up toward her chest, then lays them flat again on the mattress, flexing her long, soft legs. My arm is sore where she has rubbed her fingernails harder and kneaded them into my browned skin. “Make love to me,” she says suddenly, her eyes wide open as she cradles my face between her palms. "I don’t care how hot it is. Make love to me again.” She shuts her eyes and grasps the laminated headboard. Her entire body shines with perspiration.

I roll onto my side and kiss her, and she puts her arms around my neck, pulling me closer. I open my eyes and look at the sweat that dots her face and between the hairs on her scalp, where the skin shows through. The fan drones on and on with a hum that seems to have gotten louder, louder than even the parade of diesels groaning by. When the fan turns toward the bed I feel warm air against my back, and I see that Peggy’s hair doesn’t move with the breeze anymore, that I’m blocking it out.

I kiss her harder, and she kisses me back.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #2

Waiting: Grand Junction, CO


For good or bad, we were delayed in Grand Junction. “Something about the computer,” the conductor said. “The engines aren’t communicating with each other. Don’t go far.”

Where would we go? Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were in no hurry, and though I could no longer see my father’s face through the window of the observation car, I didn’t think he was in a hurry, either. Margie found me leaning against a wall and asked if I wanted one of the apples she had bought. I took it, polished it against my shirt, and took a bite.

“You and Steven must’ve copied that from Dad,” Margie said.

I considered my toothmarks in the apple. “Probably.”

“You staying out here?” The wind had picked up, and Margie pulled her arms to her chest.

“Getting kind of crazy sitting on that train,” I said. “How’s Dad?”

Margie shrugged. “Kind of like you—tired of the train. A couple of candy-ass men.”

Dad had spent thirty-five years as a plumber in suburban Chicago. Steven and I grew up as plumber’s helpers, but neither of us loved the trade in a way to make a living at it, though we were happy enough spending summers in high school taking our father’s money when the jobs were big enough. Steven went straight to college in Boston after graduation, and he has been happy enough in a white-collar world. Margie went on to become some type of brain doctor, and from what she says, she’s been quite successful. I went on to become a little bit of everything—not especially successful, but not especially unhappy, either.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #1

Drivin’ that Train


Most of us were alive, but Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were boxed up in the baggage car, as ready to get on with decomposition as their pine coffins were. Those of us in the passenger compartment weren’t sad, for we’d been bringing family home for decades; it was what we did. My father, Uncle Frank’s youngest and only surviving brother, said that their great-grandfather had started the tradition when he brought his father home. Since then, aunts and uncles and grandparents and assorted cousins returned to the family cemetery accompanied by as many relatives as could get a few days off from work. We were never told exactly why this had become so important, but it was one of the few family traditions that everyone seemed comfortable with. Nobody extended much effort for holiday gatherings, but when someone died—and in this case two someones—word spread fast.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet had died within a day of each other. They’d both been ill for awhile, Frank’s heart bad for years and Harriet’s lungs more recently so, but they both seemed to have decided that if one couldn’t stay around, the other one shouldn’t. Aunt Harriet must have been at Uncle Frank’s side during his last few hours, but nobody had been by her side. She didn’t even call to tell anyone that Uncle Frank was dead, and we might have gone for days without knowing about either of them if their neighbor who’d mowed their lawn for several years hadn’t checked on them.

Some of us had talked about how things must have happened in the bungalow they’d lived in for half a century, and while we were sad that Harriet died alone, we couldn’t decide on whether she would’ve been sad. My father was 62, Uncle Frank five years older, Aunt Harriet someplace between the two of them.

My father hadn’t said much since we’d left Chicago, just seemed to bide most of his waking hours in the observation car. Going east to west Amtrak always seemed to lose time, even when running across the Great Plains with hardly a hill to climb. My father wondered if this was irony, since time zones were at least partly established to suit the railroad industry. None of us could clearly define irony, though, so we didn’t give it much thought. When the train stopped in Grand Junction, Colorado, we were four hours behind schedule though we never heard why. My father was the only one who stayed on the train while the rest of us hurried into the station to buy some fresh fruit and cold drinks in the small store almost hidden near the bathrooms. Steven, my younger brother, said he thought Dad wasn’t depressed about losing another—his final—sibling as he was at the realization that he was the only one left.

Steven and I, in fact, had long joked about which of us would be the surviving brother. Margie, our older sister, said she gave us odds of 50-50 each. She had also said that the peculiar family tradition was more morbid than not, a drawn-out, perverted version of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Still, Margie was with everyone else buying apples and bananas in the station. When Steven walked off to smoke a cigarette downwind of me, I looked through the windows of the observation car and could see my father looking down at us.

Tales to Tell

As a diversion, there will be some fiction here. If Dickens could serialize his stuff, why can't I? Of course, that he was getting paid must've been nice. And that he was paid by the word must've been even nicer.

The first installment is awaiting a proper photograph to complement the start of things. I have an idea of what that photograph will be, but I haven't gotten it into my camera. Maybe on the morrow I shall get it there and then to here. I'm hopeful that other installments will be written fairly quickly, and during today's bike ride I came up with a couple bits of story line.

The grand work is titled Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch, a line from Madeleine Peyroux's CD Bare Bones, which I've been listening to for awhile.
So, stayed tune. Or don't.

Long, Long Time

So, 2010 has been around for over a month. Happy new year....

Returned recently from another 2-night stay in snowy Yosemite, which was just what the doctor ordered. Not my doctor, of course, but somebody's doctor. I visited one of my doctors a couple weeks ago, and he billed my insurance company $65 for a 10-minute visit. The 40 minutes I spent in the waiting room were free, I guess, just a perk of the modern medical practice. If my doctor had prescribed 2 nights in Yosemite, imagine what he could charge!

Were I a younger, less encumbered man, I believe I would spend a month in Yosemite. At $5 a night for the walk-in Camp 4, rent would be a bargain. A larger tent, a chair, and a stack of books would easily comfort me for 30 days. Free showers at Curry Village would keep me clean enough for my own company, and miles and miles of hiking opportunities would keep me occupied and active. Being the eccentric old man in the tent would be a nice change--at list in description--from being the cranky old man in the cubicle.

In some ways, I suppose, such an experience could be likened to a month in rehab. I could wean myself from computers and telephones, from artificial light, from a plethora of bad habits. After 30 days I could drive home and present myself to family and friends so that they could ooh and ahh at my progress.

Come to think of it, we all should take a month and do something but what we are doing now. We might come out on the other side being outwardly no different, and maybe we wouldn't change much inwardly. Perhaps lessons learned from all those books by, among others, Tarthang Tulku and Shunryu Suzuki are starting to sink in (or maybe find their way out?). Imagine a month in a tent: sleeping on the ground, breathing good air, listening to the ice fall off the rock faces. Not a bad picture, really.

Old Friends

Many years ago I applied for and was given a Master Card. Having it was great fun, and I earned miles on American Airlines whenever I charged something. Citibank and I enjoyed a nice relationship, for the most part, though I never let on that I was also using a Visa card issued by Chase, and with this card I earned miles on United Airlines. I saw no reason for either bank to know of my relationship with the other, though I'm sure each could have (and probably did) learn of my financial peccadillos.

Not long ago, however, Citibank sent me a note saying that the interest rate on my card would soon be over 23%, which is about double what Chase makes me pay. Feeling somewhat hurt, I called Citibank and said I wanted to end our relationship. The woman I spoke with seemed somewhat surprised at first when I told her my reason for calling, but after she put me on hold for a couple of minutes, she returned and quite cheerily asked if I would like an email confirming our breakup. Surprise, now, was mine, for I had expected at least a middling attempt at reconciliation. "Is it us?" I wanted her to ask. But, nothing. We were finished, both resigned to remembering our special times together, those tender moments. I wondered if in her time away from the phone she consulted with her boss, who found that I had charged nearly nothing on the card for many, many months, that I had been spending more time and money with Visa. If the woman had voiced a willingness to change to keep us together, I might have relented. On a slightly related note, in some moments on some days recently I have wished my former employer had made a similar effort to keep me around. Maybe I should learn how to bluff better than I know how.

Perhaps not oddly enough, just a day or so on one side or another of our breakup, Tiger Woods and his own peccadillos hit the news. When I first heard how he and his SUV didn't quite make it away from home unscathed, my first thought was that there aren't many reasons for a married man to dash from his house in those hours between midnight and dawn. I really don't care too much about Tiger Woods, for I haven't worshiped a professional athlete since I was a kid and Billy Williams played for the Chicago Cubs. Maybe Woods is, as some have said, the best athlete of the century, but that certainly doesn't mean he's an especially good (or intelligent) person. Then again, I don't know that he never really claimed to be either good or intelligent--those adjectives were ascribed by others who ascribe those types of things. Woods was once one of the faces of American Express, the snootiest of all credit cards, and I wonder how they ended their relationship.

On the heels of Tiger Woods' rush into gossipy tabloids, I read that the wife of Mark Sanford, the governor of North Carolina, had filed for divorce. Good for her! She's certainly milking the governor's affair for all the publicity she can, but I admired her for not standing beside him as he confessed to all that he had denied, all the lies he had told his family and the citizens of North Carolina. I also read that Sanford, who is a conservative republican, would not be impeached. Being a liar and an adulterer doesn't mean much in the political realm (see Clinton, William). In South Carolina, however, democrat Cecil Bothwell, a city councilman in Asheville, is at risk of being impeached because he is an atheist, which his opponents say is a sin. Now, Bothwell may or may not be a good person, and I certainly don't know if he is either a liar or an adulterer. It seems like he's being hounded because of a pre-existing condition, though, since from what I've discovered in my tentative steps into Christianity, everyone is a sinner. Comes with the territory of being human, I think. Threatened for impeachment simply because he doesn't believe in god? Bizarre. What if he were Muslim--would that spare him?

I also do not especially care what the governor of North Carolina does when he's not hiking the Appalachian Trail, and far be it for me to say that maybe he didn't find love when he wasn't hiking there. Maybe Tiger Woods thought he had found love, as well, though from what I've heard and read, I'm doubtful. I once wrote a novel in which the protagonist thought he had found new love, too, but he was a jerk and wanted to keep both his wife and his girlfriend. His girlfriend's husband, come to think of it, was a professional golfer, and only at the end of the story does that protagonist realize how much of a jerk he is.

Me? I think I'll get over my separation with my Master Card. My Visa treats me well, but I did notice today that the card expires in less than a month. I wonder, Will they send me a new card? Or, do they, too, see my very low balance and lack of activity? Maybe they'll be the ones who want a separation.

From Here to Affinity

Before class I am sitting in a coffee shop. The course, pseudo-literature of the ilk only an educational subsidiary of a for-profit corporation could formulate, contains just 2 students. This is a mistake, and the only reason the course was not canceled is because the original enrollment was half a dozen. I saw 2 of those 6 on the first night, but from our second meeting on only a dynamic duo remains.

I usually make some time before class to go over my notes once more. The notes, however, were developed with the idea that I'd have more students and could actually teach for the requisite 4 hours. The school is serious about not leaving before 10 p.m., and if we sign out early, we are reported to whoever is our boss these days. Just what I need--more marks against me on my permanent record. I figure I'll have to do enough explaining about serious stuff if God and I ever meet, and if He's got an administrator that handles the small things, I may not even get a chance to enter the Corner Office to plead my case.

Both of my students are women, and they are troupers--hardly complaining, acting as though they don't mind being in the room with me when they would rather be home with their respective children. One woman, though, sent me a note before our third meeting saying she was not "feeling good" and did not see herself staying much longer than an hour. I resisted the urge to respond and correct "good" to "well." Odd thing about this woman: I discovered in our second meeting that her boyfriend is someone I've known for quite awhile. We coached our sons' Little League and soccer teams. We have a photograph of the boys when they were in elementary school, and they are holding a sign that reads "Best friends forever."

"I thought he was still married," I said to her, to which she responded, "He hasn't been married for years." This is strange because because his son and mine remain fairly close, and my son is also sociable with my friend's wife's former brother-in-law.

Over the years we have heard rumors and gossip, but we have heard nothing about a divorce. Coyly, I even asked my son about this, and he said he assumes that my friend and his wife are still together. Salient in all this, I think, are the words "not married," which do not necessarily equal "divorced." There is a distinction here, though perhaps not legally. And if God really cares about such civil things, he might not see the distinction, either. Frankly, I don't care much for gossip, and I believe that most aspects of people's lives are none of my business. When I was a kid, I'd heard a rumor that a young fellow down the street from us was a peeping tom. I mentioned to my mother that I had heard this, and she just nodded and continued on as though it was no big deal. Maybe the way she handled that affected me; who knows? Maybe she was, in her own way, trying to protect me from small-town secrets.

The woman never said anything about her boyfriend in our third class, and I did not ask. I assumed that she had told him about my being her teacher, and I wondered what he thought about that. Had he been found out, exposed? Or, did he even care? Whatever he thinks, I hope he is happy, that if it is right for everyone involved, the obvious affinity my student has for my friend is good and genuine. For many of the years I have known him his marriage has been somewhat troubled, though I have no idea how much he contributed to that trouble. I figure my students and I will all show up for our next meeting, and then we'll go our separate ways.

Looking over my notes again, I see there is nothing to be added; there are things only to be removed. I make a few changes, cross out some activities, and turn my attention to Phillip Levine's What Work Is. Somewhere in this book of poems, I know, is a stanza that contains just what I need right now.

Working Man

What I thought about on October 23, 2009

Sometimes a problem with being the main bread-earner is that the bread grows stale. On the cusp of changing jobs, I look at the previous 9.5 years with my current employer and wonder at which point the bread there became less fresh.


What I think today

Whew, doggies!

Starting my third week in a new bakery, I'm wondering if I bit off more than I can chew. If my career is toast.... Okay, enough of that! These weeks have passed quickly, and I'm still trying to work my way through a morass of people, policy, and procedures. And while I have always enjoyed learning something new, I'd forgotten the feeling of being jolted out of a comfortable bed and coming to rest on pins and needles. Every day now is a challenge as I build relationships with new people and acquire different skills. Some fun, really!

Batter Up & Hitting the Wall

Almost in between jobs, my second-oldest son and I get out of town early and head southeast for a 2-night stay in a canvas tent in Yosemite's Curry Village. The only other times I have been to Yosemite Valley were in winter. The first of those trips involved rain; the other 2 trips involved snow. All of the trips involved sleeping inside my own tent in Camp 4, the Valley's walk-in campground frequented by the frugal, the wall-climbers, and those who just want a place to sleep.

Previously reliant on friends who serve as guides, this trip is the first for which I am expected to lead and to know the answers. These are generally not good things, but I step up to the plate and swing the best I can. We find out tent, #559, which looks like this:


My son and I select our respective beds, fit them with the supplied sheets and wool blankets, then head out to find things. Over the next couple of days we will orient ourselves, figure out the Valley's shuttle system, learn some geology, spend time minutes prowling through the Valley at night, get into a brief and silly argument with someone who came too close to running us over in a parking lot, eat overpriced food, and generally play tourist. That night after dinner, we make our way to the visitors' center to watch the hour-long film Return to Balance by "world-renowned climber Ron Kauk," of whom I have no knowledge. We had purchased our tickets earlier that afternoon, and those tickets were, in turn, taken by a man who reminds me of my friend Shawn, someone with climbing experience in his own right. My son and I find seats, and just before the movie starts, the ticket-taker introduces himself as that same Ron Kauk. It's nice to see someone who is "world-renowned" taking tickets at his own movie.

I am too fat and cowardly to climb my way into or out of anything more than a bathtub, and I envy people who have the confidence to work their way up anything other than the corporate ladder. I also enjoy the film and Kauk's question-and-answer period afterward. Someone in the audience asks him if he has a "day job," and Kauk says that he once worked for 3 weeks as a dishwasher, but otherwise has been fortunate enough to not have had a day job. (Over the next couple of days my son and I will articulate how enjoyable life would be if we could call Yosemite our place of business.)

The second day includes a relatively short but, for us, strenuous hike toward Upper Yosemite Falls. Our destination is the Columbia Rock overlook, from where we get a very nice view of distant Half Dome, which looks like this.

Because we got a somewhat late start, we sweat a lot during the hike; my shirt will be soaked by the time we finish. The sign at the bottom of the trail mentions that there are 60 switchbacks to Columbia Rock. I hate switchbacks. I understand their design and efficiency, but I don't have to like them. More tired than I should be, part way into the climb I resort to mentally reciting lyrics to songs I know, trying to match the song's rhythm to my pace. I also think of what I read last night in Kominski's "13: Baseball Supernovellete":

Give me guys with passion for the game. Believers in unbelievable finishes. Go about their business never getting too high or too low. Hearts strong enough to last a whole season. The game gives you three strikes and 27 outs. You do the rest.

I'm not sure why this bounces into my conscious, but I'm glad it does. Somehow and in some way this little excerpt figures into hiking and backpacking: take what you've got, and put one foot in front of the other. Later that night when I reflect on the quote and revisit images of Kauk's movie, I think that Kominski's little quote applies to climbing, too--"Hearts strong enough to last the whole season." In some situations, after all, quitting mid-way through something really isn't a viable option.

In mid-afternoon we stroll leisurely with a Ranger-led walk during which we learn a bit about Yosemite's geology. Strangely, or perhaps just coincidentally, the Ranger covers material similar to what I'd read that morning and the night before in Mary Hill's Geology of the Sierra Nevada. It's a pleasant stroll, but my son and I both are nursing sore legs and stiff backs from that morning's hike. Then, after dinner, we venture out on the aforementioned "prowling," basically a guided tour with about 20 other people. We walk without flashlights, and after our eyes have adjusted, we all grow quite comfortable in light offered mostly by the stars. At one point my son and I can see what must be a climber's flashlight high up on a wall on the other side of the valley.

I slept very little the first night (which gave me time to read), but I sleep well the second. I awake as refreshed as I can be after sleeping in a bed not my own, and after breakfast we pack the car, lock the tent behind us, and head home. On the way out of the Park we stop across from El Capitan and look up. The granite face looks like this:

Looking up at this wall and searching for something that does not belong, I see light reflecting off something shiny. At least one climber, maybe two--too high for me to see clearly, and I lament my decision to leave the binoculars at home. I point to the spot, and I am glad that my son also sees something that does not belong there. We marvel. Later, outside the park and descended into a different valley, we listen to Beethoven's Symphony #9 for part of the journey, and my son takes over the wheel--I know he wants to drive, and I trust him to get us home. I consider the last couple of days and think that I should have taken him and his brothers to Yosemite many years ago, when they were more impressionable. But, I'm hopeful that I am not too late in showing them even little parts of the world. That they will know, in Kominksi's words, "...do the rest."

Range of Light

Toward the end of yesterday's bike ride I first noticed a change in afternoon light. Shadows lay differently on the pavement beneath my wheels, and in this summer that persists beyond its appointed months, I welcomed the change. The ride itself became somewhat interesting when I stopped after the first 20 minutes to telephone a woman with whom I have been trying to connect for a couple of days. Nothing like dripping sweat onto a notebook I had carried with me as I tried to take notes of bits of conversation I will have to remember.

Our connection was weak--she was in her car in Southern California, hundreds of miles away from me and my bike--but we managed to accomplish our purpose. She is one of a few people who might be instrumental in my own change of light, to use a poor metaphor. Late next week, after a couple of discussions and after weighing certain risks against potential rewards, some aspects of my life might be different. Most people who are old like me don't seem to make these types of changes, perhaps because we are fatter and slower and more comfortable than we remember ourselves being. We'll see.

Random Memories This Way Come

Fuel and fodder for the insomniac.

We're standing on the aircraft carrier's port catwalk, the ship sliding through warm still water somewhere in the vicinity of Guam. In the distance we see what looks to be a wave moving toward us in an angle that we gather will intersect the ship's bow. When the wave gets closer we realize that it is not water but something living--porpoises. There are 20 or so. They match the ship's speed and accompany us for awhile, then when they have satisfied their curiosity or quest for fun they slow down, change their angle, and are gone.

On the first day of a 5-day backpacking trip with 2 companions I step through a creek and let my leather Vasque Sundowner boots get soaked, and rather than stop to change socks, I keep hiking. By the end of the day my heels are marked by raw circles the size of Washington-head quarters, circles that ooze viscous liquid onto my wool socks. I have to pull strands of fabric free. Every painful step for the next 5 days makes those circles grow. The trip is one of too many miles each day, too many ascents and descents, and our water filter fails on the third day, forcing us to drink water when and were we find it during the day. Asprin does nothing to stop the pain in my feet, and I barely sleep because of it. The final day, 12 miles' worth of hiking, the 3 of us not only barely speak, we barely see each other. When we meet again where the car is parked, I show them my heels. "Wow," one of them says, "I didn't think they were that bad." When I finally get home I tell my wife I will never backpack again. I return twice more to that area in future years.

My cousin and I once stole silver dollars from a jar in my grandfather's house, and we used them to buy baseball cards and bubble gum. We haven't seen each other much in the ensuing years, but we both feel guilty about our crime. This is the same grandfather who enjoyed drinking bourbon, who, I have heard in other ensuing years, found it necessary to alienate his 3 children, one of whom was my father, and his wife. He probably beat the crap out of anyone he could, but I'm not sure about that. My grandfather visited our house every other Sunday when I was a kid in Illinois, before he died one January night, and he would bring doughnuts. He showed up in his yellow Chevrolet one winter Sunday and I ran outside with only socks on my feet to greet him, and he said "I should kick your butt" for not having shoes on. His wife, my grandmother, died in my cousin's house many years before we stole those coins.

For several years I have tried with little luck to attract hummingbirds to my backyard. First I put up a hummingbird feeder, but I tended to forget to keep it full of liquid. This last summer I have kept it full, and I have hung flower pots nearby as an additional attraction. My son noticed that, though we seldom see hummingbirds, the ones we do have seem to like the purple flowers in the pots.... The trail where I usually ride my bike is where squirrels like to hang out, and they seem to enjoy dodging my bike's tires. Lately, their mouths are full of what must be nuts--probably getting ready for autumn and winter. In my back yard the other morning, a dozen or so sparrows hopped about in the loose dirt, pecking with their beaks and flapping their wings in the dust. Is that flapping meant to disturb the dirt, to unearth something edible? Two robins joined them at one point, and though I did not have hummingbirds, I had other birds.... Are the birds, like the squirrels, getting ready for the end of summer? People should know these things.

The Long Goodbye

On the night before my oldest son leaves for a year in South Korea, the family minus one son/brother gathers around the table and feasts. For the 2 previous nights we also feasted--meat and vegetables and wine, even dessert; I feel as though Bachus and his friends dropped by for a visit. As a group we discuss my son's upcoming adventure, and those who have considered such things promise to visit him. I might have mentioned before that I once spent several days in South Korea, where various incidents contributed to my being stuck onshore, unable to return to the ship that had been damaged by a strong storm. My then-friend Kent and I found a bakery where we bought a chocolate cake and a couple bottles of Coke. We took these comestibles to our hotel room where we found we had neither bottle opener for the Coke nor forks for the cake. We managed to open the bottles using the shower head in the bathroom, and we ate the cake with our dog tags....

Today, my son has finished packing and done everything he can think of to get ready. The paperwork is organized and in a handy place; the clothing is separated and folded; the loose ends around town are tied securely to other ends. I have offered all the advice I can (probably offered too much, for that matter), but he seems to have things well in hand as any good juggler must. A wonderfully gifted solver of problems, he will do fine with or without my advice, and he is right to stop listening to me when I have said too much. Too often, it seems, we parents forget that most of what we have learned, we have learned on our own, that lessons learned carry more weight than advice taken.

At some level we have been saying goodbye for many months, separating in ways we need to, getting closer in other ways. His brothers, I know, will miss him, for he has treated them all well and has connected with each in the best possible ways. I enjoy seeing how they have developed their own histories over the years, how they have created and lived their own experiences without their parents in the picture. (They have secrets among them, too, and they have been prudent enough to disclose none of them to me.) I even feel a bit of jealousy--being metaphorically landlocked for so long finds me a bit antsy. Maybe that little thing, that sense of being tethered to one place, makes saying goodbye more difficult.

He's a lucky bastard, and I think I'll tell him as much.

Hook, Line, and Sinker

I would guess that my father was the person who taught me how to bait a hook, and often he would take my sisters and me to one or another local pond for a few hours of fishing. Mostly we used worms, though I remember my cousin taking me out one day and we used baloney surgically removed from my aunt's refrigerator. We got into trouble for that. And this was the same cousin who persuaded me that walking down the railroad tracks one sunny afternoon was a good idea--I was 4, he was 3--we got into trouble for that too. Someone found us standing outside of a bar, crying. That was my first ride in the back of a police car, and when we got back to the apartment we lived in, our parents fed us... baloney sandwiches. Then we got sent to different bedrooms to consider our sins.

But, back to fishing. I grew up using a bobber, probably because the small ponds we fished had nothing but small fish: blue gill, sunfish, the occasional catfish. I once hooked a turtle of some sort, which frightened me when I reeled it in. And once, fishing by myself, a muskrat surfaced, looked at me, and disappeared. That frightened me, too. My grandfather, though, was a true fisherman, and he and my grandmother took me to Ontario, Canada, when I was 12, and there we pursued walleye in the morning (no bobber, just a weighted line with a baited hook), which we'd then eat for lunch. In the afternoon we went after northern pike and muskie--big fish. We used lures for these fish, and though I quickly learned the art of casting and using my thumb on the open reel to stop the lure just shore of a log or the shore, too often I'd end up with a snag in my line. This, of course, caused my grandfather no small amount of frustration; he might have been embarrassed that I was even remotely related to him. He would turn out to be one of my true heroes, someone I could call a man's man. (I'd apply this to my father later, but only after years of battles and then, even later, deep contemplation.) We did not eat the pike and muskie, though I have photographs of myself holding them onshore. We must have given them to someone my grandparents knew.

Several years ago I stayed with my cousin at her family's cabin in northern Indiana, where we fished with worms and bobbers. I was happy to see that I could still remove a hook from a catfish mouth without getting my fingers pierced by the fish's whiskers, and I was even glad to see that I still felt some sadness for the greedy bluegill that swallowed a hook that could not be removed. I have fished other places, of course: for striped bass in the California Delta, for trout in Sierra lakes. I have not, however, delved into fly fishing, something my friend Shawn continues to both enjoy and write about. Shawn (and others I have known) possesses much more poetic patience than I ever will, a much better understanding of the art of fishing. I, on the other hand, am a plodder, suited to sitting and watching the white half of a bobber ride the crest of small waves.

I miss fishing. I miss watering the garden at night and getting up early the next morning to ply worms from the soft earth, and I miss casting a strand of filament out onto the water, hearing the plop of hook, line, and sinker as they begin their work, then feeling the first dip of the pole's tip as a fish samples the bait. And, I've come to miss watching my father remove fish from my hook, listening to my grandfather's admonitions as I sat in the boat, and watching my sons' faces when they, too, learned to fish. But, more than anything? I wonder just what the hell I was thinking a couple years ago when, on a quest to dispose of anything in the garage that was not being used, I disposed of a tangle of fiberglass poles and fishing line that had done nothing more than get moved from shelf to shelf for many years. Oddly, though, I did not dispose of my grandfather's homemade tackle box, which must be half a century old, or one of the open-face reels we used on that trip to Ontario.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

Look out, all you rock n' rollers....

Thanks, David Bowie, for giving me a starting point.

* * *

Maryanne was the first woman I ever made cry. It was the day I left for bootcamp, and she had driven me to the recruiter's office. Unsure of what else to do, I let her sob against my should for a few minutes as we sat in the front seat of her car, then said I had to go. She was still crying as I walked away, and just as I'd seen in so many movies, I didn't look back--something like that happens and you know what's going on behind you. Maryanne and I had been dating since we'd graduated from high school a few months before, and we pretty much were approaching the point of hot and heavy. (Sidenote: A few nights earlier we'd double-dated with my then-best-friend Gary and his girlfriend, and as we were driving back to my house for cocktails in my parents' Ford Maverick a dog committed suicide by running into the front bumper of the car.)

Before heading to the recruiter's office that morning, my sisters and parents lined up in a sort of receiving line to give their goodbyes. My sisters were eagerly waiting for me to get out of Dodge so one of them could take over my bedroom, and I remember that after I hugged my mother, my father said, "You can hug me, too." I probably wouldn't have if he hadn't said that--kind of a male-thing, I suppose. At least for us.

Then, I was gone for 9 weeks, returning home for 2 weeks before heading out to my technical school in Pensacola, Florida, a pit of a place if ever there was one. I learned to drink beer there, however, so maybe even the worst pit has value. Bootcamp wasn't much of a challenge, really--I was used to people telling me what to do, so I fit right in. In many ways that's all a person has to learn in the military: do what you're told, tell people what to do. Maryanne and I must have said goodbye another time, but I don't remember the details. I do know that it would be years before another living creature would run into the front bumper of my car.

But I do remember most of the flight to Pensacola on a Continental Airlines jet, how deeply sad I was as, conspicuous in my dress blue uniform, I turned my face away from the person next to me and stared into the darkness. I had a pen with me, and I found a scrap of paper and wrote new lyrics to Rod Stewart's "Mandolin Wind," lyrics I planned to show to Maryanne one day. I was 18 and immature and leaving home for the first time, and I was not especially happy. Months later when I flew to Japan where I would spend over 2 years, I didn't feel half as much sadness. Perhaps I was more confident and mature, and perhaps because Maryanne and I had finally parted ways meant I had less to feel sad about.

Of my many regrets is never asking my parents how they felt when I left. They had let me ride and walk and hike without overly protective supervision for most of my childhood, so I had a good foundation of independence. Still, I have often wondered if they wanted to talk to me about what it felt like to watch their only son walk out the door--not just to college, not just to his own apartment, but to someplace a good way around the world.

In the next few weeks I will try to imagine what they felt: soon, my oldest son will be heading out to nearly the same part of the world I went to. He's older than I was when I left home, probably smarter and more self-confident. He is approaching this journey with excitement and external confidence, and he, too, has been raised to be self-sufficient and free thinking. I want to tell him how he'll feel at different points: sadness, anger, frustration, loneliness, isolation--most at different times but now and then all at once. But just as I was concerned only about myself and my sadness aboard that Continental Airlines flight, now I am imagining how I will feel as my son walks through the security checkpoint in San Francisco's airport--walking through a type of portal that takes him both literally and figuratively from one world to another. At that point he'll truly be on his own, and I can only hope that his mother and I have succeeded in giving him what he needs.

Doldrums

I once wrote a short story entitled "Horse Latitudes," a little piece about a marriage that is, to use another nautical term, in the doldrums. This time of year in northern California, the weather seems perpetually dominated by high pressure that builds up above the region and bakes us. I feel like a lobster in a covered pot that the cook forgot to fill with water. It'd be death with or without water, but being boiled is more dramatic than being... what--baked?

This same ridge of high pressure dominates what little bit of creative mind still exists in my pea-sized brain. My most not-so-recent short story, "The Map Reader," languishes in the needs-to-edited file, while the latest novel-in-the-works is little more than scribbles in a Rhodia notebook and a couple of plot points in search of a unified theme. In an effort to reclaim a bit of creative fire, I've resorted to reading novels rather than nonfiction--perhaps using my imagination a bit more will stoke that fire. Of course, the act of reading keeps a person away from writing, but what the hell.

Part of the secret is to pay attention--little gifts of creativity abound if we keep our eyes open. In his latest post over at These Rivers, Shawn does a nice job of illustrating what can happen when we keep our eyes and feet moving. Even sailors eventually made their way out of the Doldrums, and though they might have cursed the weather (or lack of it), I doubt they actually blamed it for anything. They put the sails up and caught whatever wind there was and moved on.

Bad Stretch of Time

A week ago I spent a day with Lazlo Kominski and got to listen to a couple of stories, one of which included Kominski's current Bad Stretch of Time, or BST. Without divulging details, this particular story includes several dramatic plot points, not to mention a couple of plot twists, and a good amount of back story. We live long enough and each of us will experience a BST, though certainly one person's BST might not seem so bad to someone who has endured a worse one. I gave Kominski some details about my own BST, which occurred many years ago but still plays into nearly every decision I make. Then we went into San Francisco where we looked at some books and had a beer, and the story-telling and conversation continued along July 4th sidewalk traffic that seemed eerily light.

How we in fact endure strings of very bad things varies, certainly; some of us choose medication, some of us choos denial, and some of us choose nothing. My father once experienced a brief BST, and I remember him telling someone that "things like this always seem to happen close together." My father would one day have a starring role in my own BST, and he ended up being quite right about the "close together" part.

I think of all this BST stuff because a couple of days ago I was driving home from work and watched a car fishtail and skid across 3 lanes of traffic, remarkably without hitting another vehicle. I lost sight of the car for a moment, and when I saw it again it was resting on its roof on the side of the freeway. My informal calculations determined that there was no room for the car to have flipped only once at about 60 miles before a sudden cessation of movement. I have rolled a car off this same freeway, though I was going only 30 MPH. I bounced on my roof and ended up on my wheels in a carpool parking lot, the engine still running, the wheels splayed out. I put the car into reverse and backed into a parking space, and I thought, "That was not fun." Somone stopped to help me and let me use his phone to call my wife so she could pick me up and take me to where I had to teach that night. This was about a year after I confronted someone who was trying to steal my neighbor's car, and that someone got perturbed enough at my attempted intervention to show me the pistol stuck into the front of his pants while I was keeping my eye on the screwdriver he had raised above his head. That wasn't fun, either.

But, neither of those events were part of my BST; in fact, they aren't more than a reflective digression from that car that tumbled and twisted in front of me. I've kept an eye on the news stories since the accident, but I've not seen anything that would tell me what happened, if anyone was hurt. I keep wondering if that moment was the start of a BST for whoever was in the car, or maybe someone's family.

Power Trip

One of the fun things about writing fiction is choosing which characters live and which ones do not. Maybe, deep down, writers are narcissistic sociopaths who allow their submersible dark side surface through their fingers, but that might be something I'd have to ask a therapist. Of course, I also believe that, given free rein, characters make their own decisions, decisions that sometimes cause their demise.

I'm thinking of this now because, with a nice pen and a Rhodia notebook on the table in front of me, I'm at the start of a new novel and trying to figure out who the characters are and what they'll do for the next 90-thousand or so words. I completed the first chapter a couple of months ago but then got stuck figuring out how--and even why--one of the characters would die. The death itself is instrumental to the plot and the protagonist's life, but this how and why had me stumped. Then, while out riding my bike one day, I solved the problem: someone else, not my first choice, would die. Simple.

My approach to most of my writing goes against what many people have told me either in person or in their own writing: do the planning before you do the writing. Unfortunately I am not much of a planner when it comes to writing, though it wasn't until I figured out my second novel's ending was I able to complete most of the story. I do enjoy letting the characters develop on their own, and I often feel that planning too much of their lives makes them less real. That my success as a writer is nonexistent, however, probably means that I should have learned listen to people who know about these things.

A good day with Kominski yesterday further helped me with some possibilities for this latest work. I am now, for example, considering at least one new character, someone who can add some fodder to the story. Both Kominski and my friend Shawn are very good planners when they write, and it does me good to hear their advice and to learn about their work habits. Talking to people like these also helps me think things through, lets me try out ideas.

I'm spending too much time not writing, but I kind of like this part of the writing process: figuring out who the characters are be so I can get to know them before I send them on their way. And, of course, it's always fun to see who has the real power: the characters or the writer.