Several months ago, on the recommendation of a friend, I dedicated something like seventy hours over several weeks to watching a television series in its entirety, the first two seasons on dvd and then, because I'd become a junkie who couldn't wait for inter-library loan, on streaming video. That show was The Shield, and other than the brutal and heartbreaking kicks in the gut that come when the sins of the father are invariably visited upon the sons, I had no regrets. It was fierce and funny and smart and, in surprising ways, human. When it was over, though, it felt like the end of one of those ten day, no holds barred affairs that come out of nowhere, where it's all risks and laughs and sweat and unexpected, usually poorly timed, outbursts, and nobody gets hurt because you're both too dazed to know the difference. Usually there's a scar, always there's a story or two (or twelve). You know the ones I'm talking about. When they're over, you hit pause, draw the shades, pull back and take stock. That's where I was after The Shield: I wasn't willing to leap into another torrid month with Dexter, Homeland, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad. I needed some time alone.
The Bear Lair is a humble abode. To paraphrase They Might Be Giants, it's austere, severe, it holds few furnishings dear. What we do offer, however, is a rather nice television, a damned fine couch, and some pretty comprehensive cable. We've also experienced a fair number of aw-fuck-it time here at Casa del Oso: the long-day-at-work-so-aw-fuck-it, the took-a-day-off-and-it's-fucking-raining-aw-fuck-it, the visit-with-my-daughter-was-cancelled-aw-fuck-it, the too-brief-visit-with-my-daughter-just-ended-aw-fuck-it, and so on aw-fuck-it. Aw-fuck-it is generally a prelude to visiting the couch, cracking a beer, and reaching for the remote.
There's a protocol of sorts to this. I usually start by punching up the channel I think I want to watch, and then I hit the guide and start scrolling. That's a ruse, of course. I'm trying to con myself into believing, even for just a few minutes, that I'm not going to press the On Demand button. I scroll and scroll, the remote almost literally winking at me. It's nice to be able to play these little games with inanimate objects. I almost said "non-sentient," but let's not kid ourselves: I'm sure by now my cable box and, by extension, the remote, perceive plenty about me. Wink. Wink. On Demand.
I don't remember exactly when it was, but I do know this: it was a rainy day when I first clicked on The Newsroom on HBO's on-demand series page. It rained, there was thunder and lightning, and I wasn't going anywhere. I also know I was supposed to be doing something else at that time: laundry, or digging through an as yet still not unpacked box for a piece of paper I needed for some reason, or editing a story I should've finished editing a year ago but goddamn does it make me want to punch kittens every time I look at it. So aw-fuck-it, I pressed some buttons and a few seconds later I was watching season one, episode one.
As tempting as it is, I'm not going to tell you everything you always wanted to know about The Newsroom. I'm not a reviewer, and this isn't a review. I'll say this: I like the show. In fact, I find it a little irresistible. I was a big fan of The West Wing back in the day, so it's fair to say I'm a Sorkin devotee. I used to plan my week around that show. I cared about the characters and I cared about what happened on the show, which means everyone did their jobs. In particular, I'd say the writer did his job: I don't suffer bad writing, not for anything. Aaron Sorkin is a good goddamned writer, period. A bit sentimental, sure. In the tradition of It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this is unabashed Capra-corn: high ideals being fought for in the face of boundless cynicism. He's also a shameless emotional manipulator. Sorkin's like a male, thinking person's Jodi Picoult, using your investment in the character to stretch the tension to the point where, when that character's moment of clarity pops, you're complicit. (I give the actors and directors credit for that, too, because only war and keeping secrets require a greater collaborative effort than ensemble performance art.) It's easy to take potshots because, as The Newsroom's protagonist points out, "Snark is the idiot's version of wit." My best angels remind me that ideals aren't just worth fighting for, they must be fought for, or they'll get trampled by the herd, which asks for little more than to just get from here to there. We've walked on the moon and roved the surface of Mars. We've cured diseases and, for better or worse, split the atom. I'd call that promising. I'd say our ideals, tarnished though they are, mean something.
There are truths in this show too. There is the truth that networks -- cable networks included -- are owned by people who intend to make money and are thus beholden to the advertisers whose dollars fill the shareholders' coffers. Likewise are they beholden to politicians, because politicians, once elected, are responsible for enacting (or blocking) the rules by which those organizations make their money (or don't). There is the truth that the people responsible for reporting the news are human and therefore subject to the caprices of human life: distractions and enticements and blindspots and biases and desires and disappointments. At bottom, though, is the message that it is still better to try to do it right and fail than to know you've done it wrong for the sake of being popular and therefore profitable. It's better to report on the insidious nature of a political movement like the Tea Party than to offer up nightly voyeurism like the Casey Anthony trial. Why? Because the former is a collection of lies with lasting impact, while the latter is a spectacle of conjecture and manufactured outrage. One's an easy sell, and the other most people don't want to hear (sadly, not respectively).
But I'm really not here to talk about a television show. I'm here because my state's governor, Paul Lepage, recently made a joke. A few days ago while sitting in a fighter jet simulator at Pratt & Whitney, our governor quipped that he wanted to blow up the Portland Press Herald (our state's largest newspaper). A little later he reportedly added the Bangor Daily News (our second-largest and, for my money, the only good paper in the state) to his list of targets. Obviously the man was joking, regardless of the tastelessness of the joke (a bit of a trademark of his): he was in a flight simulator, for christ's sake, he couldn't even blow himself up (sadly). But the sentiment is genuine: Paul Lepage doesn't like news outlets that speak in less than glowing terms about him, and he makes no secret of that. Last year he told a gathering of school children that newspapers are something to be feared. When I say school children, I mean kindergarten to sixth grade. This is a state governor telling children as young as five that newspapers are bad. I wish I were making this up.
During the same Q&A, Lepage told the students that, by the time his administration concludes, "education in Maine is going to be great." His solution to making education in Maine great? He wants to utilize a voucher system to leverage private education against public education, thus creating a competitive environment that will -- in the spirit of pure capitalism -- elevate the standards and practices of public education. I'm not a socialist. I think capitalism fundamentally makes more sense: it is, ironically, more human, in that it is more in keeping with human nature. I think in its purest form competition is better for the consumer, as long as everyone's playing by the same rules (I'm talking to you, Walmart). But education isn't a consumable. And beyond that, you can't simply disregard the vast per-capita disparity in funding capacity between public and private education. If you could, I wouldn't feel like this is actually just a sinister way of hamstringing a substantial union that doesn't typically vote Republican. Here's something else: many years ago when I first heard the details of the bastard lovechild of the George W. Bush administration, "No Child Left Behind," my first thought was, "This sounds like a tremendously effective way to build a lasting constituency." Any educational system that cares more about teaching to the test than it does about compelling students to apply reason to problem-solving is not about education, it's about programming. There's a reason why evangelism is so popular: thinking about stuff is hard; having a book of answers, regardless of how implausible most of those answers might be, is easy. Super fucking easy. Similarly, having a test that says you know the stuff you're supposed to know, and making sure your educational system does nothing so much as it drums the supposed-to-know into your head: also super fucking easy. And it's a double-bonus, because when those children who weren't left behind reach voting age, many of them won't be smart enough to see you're selling them a bill of goods. I grew up dirt poor, so I feel safe saying that if you're poor or working-class and you've voted for clowns like Paul Lepage or George W. Bush, you're fucking stupid. At best, you're horribly misguided.
Paul Lepage started out on the shitty streets of Lewiston, Maine, fending for himself from an early age, and somehow he grew up to be a mayor and then a governor. It's no surprise he's among the ignorant masses who have, their entire lives, hated the smartest kid in the class. Goddamn must it chap Lepage's ass to see some pedigreed journalist write an article using his own words to demonstrate what a dumbass he is. His off-the-cuff remarks are rife with threats and empty rhetoric and (as demonstrated in the fighter jet simulator) tasteless jokes -- how dare a reporter use those against him. Not to mention his personal attacks on other lawmakers, like Troy Jackson, whom Lepage accused of giving it to the people without vaseline, and who Lepage suggested should go back into the woods to cut trees and send someone with a brain to Augusta to do some good work. Being accused by Paul Lepage of not having a brain can only be a shade better than being accused of the same offense by, say, a spoon.
I have the dubious honor of living in the small city where Paul Lepage served nearly two terms as our titular mayor. I say titular because, the way the city charter is written, the mayor doesn't have any real power, other than to break the occasional tie in a city council vote. Well, that is unless he happens to be a bully and a monumental prick, in which case he has, essentially, all the power you give him. The one time I ever encountered Paul Lepage, it was a little over a month after the gubernatorial election when he wandered into one of our local drinking establishments and seated himself at the bar not far from where I sat with my friends. I was in a bad way at the time, not long removed from several weeks of taking a baseball bat to most of the interior walls of my house, and even less removed from a stay in the looney bin that was only technically related to the wall battering. Needless to say, I was in no mood to suffer fools, myself included, which is another way of saying I had absolutely nothing left to lose, so I was a bit mouthy. My friend Ron met my Lepage rant with the challenge that it was easy to sit there and grumble, and suggested I go up and tell him what I thought of him. I shrugged, rose from my chair, clapped the governor-elect on the back and said, "Good luck being governor." He turned and offered me a broad smile that vanished the instant I finished with this: ". . . because you were a shitty mayor."
He probably thought I was a reporter. He probably still thinks that. Sadly, I was just a drunk asshole in a bar. Sadder still, he's just a dumb asshole in the governor's office. Based on his record, I'd say that's worse. But if he wins another term, I won't be taking it out on him. There was a joke going around after John Kerry lost the presidential election to a floundering George W. Bush, and it was cruel but apt: Kerry was like a non-retarded person who failed to win a medal at the Special Olympics. Democrats, get your house in order and stop playing to your imaginary strengths. You're not that special, and working people have plenty of reasons to think you suck. If you can't put a candidate out there who can beat the third-party independent, let alone the incumbent, have the strength of character to step aside. And journalists: stop being pussies. Lead every day, for as many days as it takes, with the ineptitude of the Lepage administration. He's writing your script, all you have to do is print it, every day, without fail. Short of that, you'll all get what you deserve, and you'll have no standing to bitch about it.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
I suppose so
Recently I found myself rereading The Great Gatsby, a book I've come back to countless times since I first picked it up more than thirty years ago. I was reading it this time because, after all these years and entirely unbidden, a thought that had never once occurred to me crossed my mind with alarming clarity: Daisy Buchanan is a vapid, empty bimbo. This was disconcerting because, of course, my image of Gatsby as a genuinely and meaningfully tragic character depended upon Daisy: without her, Gatsby is little more than a cynical perversion of the Horatio Alger mythos, a shameless, unscrupulous social climber for whom the means are entirely justified by the irrepressible allure of the gilded mirage at the horizon's edge. Daisy gives direction to Gatsby's odyssey, and if she is lovely and pure and deserving of his intense affection, Gatsby's ascension from Jimmy Gatz of North Dakota to Jay Gatsby of the glittering palace on Long Island Sound can achieve a sort of nobility. "The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption -- and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by." That was Nick Carraway's assessment upon wishing Gatsby good day for what turned out to be the very last time. In the book's opening pages, Carraway also offered this: "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."
As I stretched out on the couch with the book open in front of me, I imagined I was looking for a scene, a passage, as little as a brief phrase, that would prove me wrong about Daisy. I believed that was what I was doing because my own history tells me I am just such an idealist, just such an incorruptible dreamer. Sadly, though, I suspect my true intent was to prove myself right. Regardless of my motive, I found nothing that caused me to reconsider my newfound opinion of Daisy Buchanan. I saw that she is pretty and stylish and rich, that she is anxious and self-absorbed and disappointed, that she is selfish and weak and, in her way, cruel. In a word, I found her unworthy. The character of Daisy Buchanan is, without a doubt, lacking in anything that could even remotely be called character. What, ultimately, can be said about an abiding affection that has no basis in the character of the beloved?
Perspective is trigonometry: the sine of what you know now and cosine of what you thought you knew then creating the arc of how you see the world right now. Once upon a time I met a girl in college and thought, because we were all grown up and out in the world, "This will be the girl." She wasn't. A few years later I met another girl, and we changed diapers together and read bedtime stories and talked late into the night about plans and fears and hopes, and I thought, "This will be the girl." She wasn't. A lot of years went by before I met the girl who claimed to be so torn she could cut off her hands and feet and wrote text messages like, "I was brushing my teeth, thinking of how to say I love you in an oblique way," and god did I hope she was the girl. What can I say -- she wasn't. They were all devastating losses in their own particular ways, but except in the case of the last one, my mind's eye doesn't recollect the dark and desolate days nearly so much as it does the sorts of images that accumulate when two people find some measure of delight in each other. I used to sit in an overstuffed leather armchair in the grand marble lobby of the bank where Charlotte worked, reading a book while I waited for her to get off, and on the best days I would look up just as she passed under the sprawling archway and see her face break into that perfect smile, the one that said, "Let's go home, just you and me." When I first lived with Michele, there were nights when I walked the mile and a half home through howling blizzards, and when I stepped through the door, she'd throw her arms around me before I'd even shaken off the snow. Those are the kinds of things I tend to remember.
A few days ago I found a package addressed to me sitting on my desk at the library. Inside were three books I'd lent to someone in 2010. No note, not even a return address, just three books I'd long since given up on ever seeing again, my name scrawled in the corner of all three title pages. I sat and stared at them for I don't even know how long. It didn't seem possible, after all that time, after everything that had happened in the years since I'd last seen or spoken to her, that they could just one day arrive in the mail like any old thing. I picked up the top book -- Drown, by Junot Diaz -- and flipped through the pages, looking for some sign of her. She has a tendency to circle words she doesn't know (based on my copy of Gatsby, which she also borrowed long ago, she was unfamiliar with, among others, the words supercilious, rotogravure, impetuously, vinous and punctilious). Twenty, thirty, forty pages in I found nothing. I stuffed the books into my shoulder bag and shuffled off to a meeting. I don't remember one thing from that meeting.
In the ensuing days it started to bother me, this simple act of finally returning my books to me. If it could be done now, why couldn't it have been done last year or the year before that when I asked for them? And what about the courtesy of a note that simply said, "Sorry it took me so long." I mentioned this to my buddy Hank, who wisely pointed out that there was nothing she could say that would make me feel better about any of it. He's right about that. In his inimitable way, he often is. But it's not as simple as that. It's not just about making me feel better about any part of it. When you've run out the string on anything, nothing that is so obvious is nearly enough. It's still a long way to vindication.
Which is why I started with Gatsby. That poor, sad son of a bitch. Upon departing on what will be the last afternoon of Gatsby's life, Nick says, "I'll call you up," and Gatsby, desperately, pathetically, offers, "I suppose Daisy'll call too."
Nick replies, "I suppose so."
I hate to ruin the ending for you, but she doesn't call.
As I stretched out on the couch with the book open in front of me, I imagined I was looking for a scene, a passage, as little as a brief phrase, that would prove me wrong about Daisy. I believed that was what I was doing because my own history tells me I am just such an idealist, just such an incorruptible dreamer. Sadly, though, I suspect my true intent was to prove myself right. Regardless of my motive, I found nothing that caused me to reconsider my newfound opinion of Daisy Buchanan. I saw that she is pretty and stylish and rich, that she is anxious and self-absorbed and disappointed, that she is selfish and weak and, in her way, cruel. In a word, I found her unworthy. The character of Daisy Buchanan is, without a doubt, lacking in anything that could even remotely be called character. What, ultimately, can be said about an abiding affection that has no basis in the character of the beloved?
Perspective is trigonometry: the sine of what you know now and cosine of what you thought you knew then creating the arc of how you see the world right now. Once upon a time I met a girl in college and thought, because we were all grown up and out in the world, "This will be the girl." She wasn't. A few years later I met another girl, and we changed diapers together and read bedtime stories and talked late into the night about plans and fears and hopes, and I thought, "This will be the girl." She wasn't. A lot of years went by before I met the girl who claimed to be so torn she could cut off her hands and feet and wrote text messages like, "I was brushing my teeth, thinking of how to say I love you in an oblique way," and god did I hope she was the girl. What can I say -- she wasn't. They were all devastating losses in their own particular ways, but except in the case of the last one, my mind's eye doesn't recollect the dark and desolate days nearly so much as it does the sorts of images that accumulate when two people find some measure of delight in each other. I used to sit in an overstuffed leather armchair in the grand marble lobby of the bank where Charlotte worked, reading a book while I waited for her to get off, and on the best days I would look up just as she passed under the sprawling archway and see her face break into that perfect smile, the one that said, "Let's go home, just you and me." When I first lived with Michele, there were nights when I walked the mile and a half home through howling blizzards, and when I stepped through the door, she'd throw her arms around me before I'd even shaken off the snow. Those are the kinds of things I tend to remember.
A few days ago I found a package addressed to me sitting on my desk at the library. Inside were three books I'd lent to someone in 2010. No note, not even a return address, just three books I'd long since given up on ever seeing again, my name scrawled in the corner of all three title pages. I sat and stared at them for I don't even know how long. It didn't seem possible, after all that time, after everything that had happened in the years since I'd last seen or spoken to her, that they could just one day arrive in the mail like any old thing. I picked up the top book -- Drown, by Junot Diaz -- and flipped through the pages, looking for some sign of her. She has a tendency to circle words she doesn't know (based on my copy of Gatsby, which she also borrowed long ago, she was unfamiliar with, among others, the words supercilious, rotogravure, impetuously, vinous and punctilious). Twenty, thirty, forty pages in I found nothing. I stuffed the books into my shoulder bag and shuffled off to a meeting. I don't remember one thing from that meeting.
In the ensuing days it started to bother me, this simple act of finally returning my books to me. If it could be done now, why couldn't it have been done last year or the year before that when I asked for them? And what about the courtesy of a note that simply said, "Sorry it took me so long." I mentioned this to my buddy Hank, who wisely pointed out that there was nothing she could say that would make me feel better about any of it. He's right about that. In his inimitable way, he often is. But it's not as simple as that. It's not just about making me feel better about any part of it. When you've run out the string on anything, nothing that is so obvious is nearly enough. It's still a long way to vindication.
Which is why I started with Gatsby. That poor, sad son of a bitch. Upon departing on what will be the last afternoon of Gatsby's life, Nick says, "I'll call you up," and Gatsby, desperately, pathetically, offers, "I suppose Daisy'll call too."
Nick replies, "I suppose so."
I hate to ruin the ending for you, but she doesn't call.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Thinking of Home
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Rain fell on a strange roof over my head in Brooklyn the first time I read that line. It was the summer before my junior year in college and I'd managed to wangle a low-paying summer internship with a New York publisher and a rent-free place to stay in Flatbush. At the end of my first day of work in the city, I boarded the wrong train and ended up not in Brooklyn but in a particularly unnerving part of the Bronx. I don't know why I thought leaving the tunnel for the street would give me a better chance of figuring out where the hell I was, but that's just what I did, without either a dime or a subway token in my pocket. The sight that greeted me wasn't all that different from some of the more benign but still harrowing pictures that would come out of Sarajevo a few short years later, the distinction being only the matter of degrees that separates devastation by bombs and bullets from decay by poverty and despair. Two cops stood on the corner, and they glanced my way as I climbed out of the subway. The looks on their faces when they saw me expressed what I already understood: I was lost in a bad way. Fortunately, that fact wasn't lost on the woman in the booth when I quickly descended back into the tunnel and started to explain my predicament: before I could even finish, she slid a token through the slot below the glass and wished me luck. I rode the rails for more than an hour, eventually making my way to Newkirk Station, all the while, and not nearly for the last time, thinking of home.
Two years later, a freshly minted college graduate, aspiring writer and accomplished malcontent, I boarded a plane with my pixieish college girlfriend and crossed the country to that city of perpetual rain, Seattle. We had a housesitting gig for a month, after which the plan was to find an apartment and live happily ever after a while. Less than a week in, she announced that she didn't think we should live together, and almost instantly I felt the sands shifting under my feet. In a sense, she wasn't wrong: we were ill-suited to each other. I was guided and therefore limited by the only three things I feared in the world: sharks, sinkholes and homelessness. She was (and presumably still is) thoroughly suffused with a patently upper middle-class perspective that means almost nothing to me, a perspective the primary quality of which is what can only be called social grace: polite agreeableness at all costs. One evening we had dinner at an upscale restaurant with friends of her family, and just after the entree was served the matriarch turned to me and said, "So, Charlotte tells us you're a writer," at which point I swallowed the hunk of salmon I'd been lovingly chewing and said, "Actually, Charlotte and I have a deal: she doesn't tell anyone I'm a writer, and I don't tell anyone she's a stripper." You'd have to know Charlotte to understand why that was funny, but you probably don't need to know any more than what I've told you to recognize why she didn't find it funny. That was a long, icy night, the prelude to a long deep-freeze that would eventually find me climbing Capitol Hill to my friend Q's house, where I'd spend many night sleeping under a rain-spattered roof, thinking of home.
In the ensuing twenty years, there have been a god-awful lot of homes. There were five alone with my daughter's mother during an eight year span: the toxic three-story with the gay baker on the third floor; the big move to Portland, upstairs from Silly's, where we lived when our girl was born; the desperate dash to the Revere House in East Vassalboro when the baby blues kicked in; an equally mad dash back to Portland to an ill-fated apartment downstairs from my best old ex-friend; and finally, three years later, half of a duplex here in the 'Ville that, one fine morning, was raided by the police (neighbor's side, not ours, but that's not exactly how the kid announced it in kindergarten that day -- "The police raided our house for drugs this morning!"). The three years between High Street in Portland and our crack house in the 'Ville, I lived in a narrow top-floor apartment with a progressively leakier roof. I almost loved that apartment, but that's entirely because I spent almost every weekend there with my little girl. It's the place where I learned to be a dad. Of course, it's also the place where I learned there's a difference between being solitary and being alone. It is the very depth of bittersweet. But then the rains came in earnest, and the girl's mother moved with the girl back to the 'Ville, and I found myself thinking this was no home.
And then there was the house where I say I lost everything in the fire. But of course there was no fire. To paraphrase As I Lay Dying, there was no me: I was not is. I had left the building long before the boys came along and trucked me off to the emergency room. Perhaps it's telling that the summer I started to lose my way entirely, it rained nearly every day. I'd lay stretched on the couch on the screen porch, listening to the drops pounding down around me, waiting for something to change. A year later I lay stretched on the same couch beside a young woman who didn't want me to love her but didn't want me to leave her either. By then I was morbidly unwell in a way that made it impossible to resist futility, particularly the sort that might well guarantee a glorious immolation. And so I marched, step by predictable step, into the flames. And thus is the metaphor apt. But, as I say, there was to be no fire for me. The people whose occasional misfortune it is to be my friends and family gathered like a volunteer fire brigade, tossing bucket after bucket on the flames, remaining until the last ember faded into harmless soot.
It takes time, though, to rebuild after a fire. It took, in fact, until pretty much right now to put the final pieces in place: the bricks and glass and plaster and wood, the chair to sit on, bed to sleep in, the pictures of the girl on the night table. It's a good place, this Bear Lair, that looks out across the city's downtown and faces the light from sunup to sundown. It's a place the girl can visit -- the girl who, as of a month ago, is now technically a grown-up, and poised to begin embarking on her own adventures away from home. I picture her listening to rain on strange roofs, and hope she'll always have someplace to think of as home. I know I do.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
The Invincible Province of Why
It was the last hour of the last day of what had been a grueling tax season: countless W-2s, 1099s, K-1s streaming across my desk as mindless and relentless as a horde of zombies. More than a handful of clients I'm convinced actually were zombies. But we were within sight of shore, and all that was left was to make one final sweep to be certain we hadn't missed anyone who needed a filing extension. I could almost taste that first celebratory beer as I rattled off name after name to my buddy Karl, who flipped through the master list, found the name and confirmed: "EXT." We paused only briefly for Karl to pop down to his office to check his email. When he came back, he had terrible news.
The words "bombs" and "Boston Marathon" took some time to settle into my brain. With all that was already up there clogging the network, words like refund and estimate and extension, numbers like 8879, 7004, 4868, there simply wasn't room for what those other words conjured. I shook my head and sighed and, half a beat later, read off the next name.
I'm not a runner. Not even in my younger days of perpetual sport did I ever aspire to tackle any distance greater than the section of left field I had to cover to track down a long fly ball, or the ninety feet from one base to the next. But I've known distance runners, and over the years I've seen the coverage at the finish lines, particularly of the Boston Marathon, watched the masters of the sport competing against each other, followed by the multitudes competing not necessarily against but for a panoply of reasons as broad and mysterious as the human heart can conceive. And always I am struck by the same thought: it is so very far to go, and so very hard to do.
But this almost certainly wasn't about a foot race, was it? It was about thousands of people standing in one narrow corridor, cheering and laughing and celebrating a sense of achievement that is both singular and collective, on a bright beautiful day in a northeast city only recently thawed out from another arduous New England winter. An hour or so earlier the hometown team had walked off with a win in the ninth inning. It was Patriot's Day, that day set aside for denizens of Massachusetts and her formerly conjoined fraternal twin to the north to reflect on events that started in and around that very city and, ultimately, contributed to shaping a nation. It was a day replete with delight, leaving no room for thoughts of despair. Just happy, sun-warmed people of all ages, stacked six, ten, a dozen deep all along the sidewalks.
I've read and watched and listened to the coverage. I've seen the faces of the maimed, of the brave, of the stunned, and in my mind, suspended just below the outrage and the sorrow, flickering like a faulty fluorescent bulb, lies that sickening, maddening feeling of deja vu. It's Oklahoma City and Columbine and 9/11 and Aurora and Newtown and on and on and on and on. It is someone who doesn't know your name, has never looked into your eyes or so much as said hello, strolling away down the street, having left a satchel full of gunpowder and ball-bearings behind to blow off the leg of a five-year-old girl, and kill that little girl's eight-year-old brother. What politics, theology, or philosophy could ever reconcile the intent with that result?
Of course, when something like this happens, all we ever have are the questions. We hear them phrased every which way, these questions that beg to understand how it's possible for any one man's humanity to burn down to nothing but a coal-black cinder, leaving him utterly indifferent to the humanity of others. In the end those questions can all be distilled into that remarkably short but most densely fraught of all questions: why? And I, as I'm sure are so many of you, am so terribly, terribly tired of why.
The words "bombs" and "Boston Marathon" took some time to settle into my brain. With all that was already up there clogging the network, words like refund and estimate and extension, numbers like 8879, 7004, 4868, there simply wasn't room for what those other words conjured. I shook my head and sighed and, half a beat later, read off the next name.
I'm not a runner. Not even in my younger days of perpetual sport did I ever aspire to tackle any distance greater than the section of left field I had to cover to track down a long fly ball, or the ninety feet from one base to the next. But I've known distance runners, and over the years I've seen the coverage at the finish lines, particularly of the Boston Marathon, watched the masters of the sport competing against each other, followed by the multitudes competing not necessarily against but for a panoply of reasons as broad and mysterious as the human heart can conceive. And always I am struck by the same thought: it is so very far to go, and so very hard to do.
But this almost certainly wasn't about a foot race, was it? It was about thousands of people standing in one narrow corridor, cheering and laughing and celebrating a sense of achievement that is both singular and collective, on a bright beautiful day in a northeast city only recently thawed out from another arduous New England winter. An hour or so earlier the hometown team had walked off with a win in the ninth inning. It was Patriot's Day, that day set aside for denizens of Massachusetts and her formerly conjoined fraternal twin to the north to reflect on events that started in and around that very city and, ultimately, contributed to shaping a nation. It was a day replete with delight, leaving no room for thoughts of despair. Just happy, sun-warmed people of all ages, stacked six, ten, a dozen deep all along the sidewalks.
I've read and watched and listened to the coverage. I've seen the faces of the maimed, of the brave, of the stunned, and in my mind, suspended just below the outrage and the sorrow, flickering like a faulty fluorescent bulb, lies that sickening, maddening feeling of deja vu. It's Oklahoma City and Columbine and 9/11 and Aurora and Newtown and on and on and on and on. It is someone who doesn't know your name, has never looked into your eyes or so much as said hello, strolling away down the street, having left a satchel full of gunpowder and ball-bearings behind to blow off the leg of a five-year-old girl, and kill that little girl's eight-year-old brother. What politics, theology, or philosophy could ever reconcile the intent with that result?
Of course, when something like this happens, all we ever have are the questions. We hear them phrased every which way, these questions that beg to understand how it's possible for any one man's humanity to burn down to nothing but a coal-black cinder, leaving him utterly indifferent to the humanity of others. In the end those questions can all be distilled into that remarkably short but most densely fraught of all questions: why? And I, as I'm sure are so many of you, am so terribly, terribly tired of why.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
I Win
A few years back when I left the job I'd held for several years and suddenly found myself with money to live on and the time to do as I pleased, I dove back into writing with the expectation that, finally, in my fortieth year, I would write the book I'd been promising myself most of my life. That first year of well-subsidized unemployment was a monumental failure for a handful of reasons, but mostly because, each time I sat down to write, I somehow expected to catch lightning in a bottle, hit a home run with my first swing of the bat. In the beginning, that tacit notion was simply hubris, but as the months wore on and the bank account dwindled, clinging to the hope that any given day would bring that stroke of unprecedented artistic genius became a matter of necessity: I grew more and more desperate for a win. That is a terrible way to approach anything in your life, but as you sink deeper into the mire you've created, the blob of neediness devours more and more of your perspective, until every single thing before you appears to present only two options: a big win, or an epic defeat. It doesn't take a Vegas bookie to recognize the foreseeable consequences of this scenario.
Today I find myself, for the first time in quite a while, with a few hours on my hands, and when I first flipped open the laptop and peered at the screen, I felt that familiar niggling itch to hit one over the fence. It's an itch that started earlier in the week, when I stumbled upon someone else's blog, one that features some exotic casual cooking and baking (just simple stuff they throw together when they get home from school, like cream-puff swans), as well as photos of an effeminate German fellah and a bulimic-bobblehead female grad student. I poked through their pretty little blog and was immediately reminded of the scene in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in which Bill Murray demands of a gum-chewing Cate Blanchett, "What do you want?" and she, languidly chomping her gum, replies, "Nothing," to which he responds, "That's so arrogant. That's . . . Screw off."
The impulse to rattle off something quick and pithy was strong, but as it happened I needed to shut it down just then and head to work. The subsequent days were likewise filled up with work, and as is often the case, the short stretch of time created by the immediate need to show up and be responsible offered the possibility to reflect on the nature of my initial reaction. Ostensibly, there's no good reason for me to care in the least about either of these two recreational bloggers. The girl exists as no more than a memory, and the German is, for all practical purposes in my life, a cardboard cutout. So why was my ass so swiftly chapped by this otherwise benign, entirely fatuous entry in the blogosphere?
Admittedly, I didn't spend a lot of time pondering the question: I have two jobs, both of which I enjoy and appreciate, and neither affords me a lot of self-absorption time. But I picked it up as I lay in bed at night ready for sleep. I turned it over, scratched the veneer and found myself scrolling backward, like a reel-to-reel film run in reverse through the projector, the images flickering unnaturally on the screen, a blunt display of regression. It was a history of loss: of things and people and places and, most shamefully, self. After the last frames flashed by and the film flapped on the still-spinning reel, it occurred to me why I found those artful desserts and well-used leftovers, that grinning German and, especially, that too-thin smiling graduate student so utterly offensive. Viewed forward, that imaginary movie is also about redemption and heart and no small measure of integrity. It's about the hard slide to somewhere near the bottom, and the much more arduous scrabble in the other direction. And I say this all the time: I know I'm lucky, and I'd always rather be lucky than good. But I'm also fond of saying luck's for the Irish. So fuck it, I'll say it: I am more good than lucky. I blew myself apart into an unrecognizable mess, and yeah, it took years to scrape together those widely scattered pieces, but I did just that. I had plenty of help along the way, but in the end, as with anything that truly matters, you have to do the heaviest lifting yourself, or it's not worth a damn. So there's that: I earned this place where I now find myself; all she ever did was stick her finger down her throat and make herself pretty. She laid down a bunt single to break up a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth inning. I reached out and stroked one into the right field corner, busted it out of the box and outran my own shadow around the bases for an in-the-park home run. I'll take a win like that over a bush-league play any day.
Today I find myself, for the first time in quite a while, with a few hours on my hands, and when I first flipped open the laptop and peered at the screen, I felt that familiar niggling itch to hit one over the fence. It's an itch that started earlier in the week, when I stumbled upon someone else's blog, one that features some exotic casual cooking and baking (just simple stuff they throw together when they get home from school, like cream-puff swans), as well as photos of an effeminate German fellah and a bulimic-bobblehead female grad student. I poked through their pretty little blog and was immediately reminded of the scene in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in which Bill Murray demands of a gum-chewing Cate Blanchett, "What do you want?" and she, languidly chomping her gum, replies, "Nothing," to which he responds, "That's so arrogant. That's . . . Screw off."
The impulse to rattle off something quick and pithy was strong, but as it happened I needed to shut it down just then and head to work. The subsequent days were likewise filled up with work, and as is often the case, the short stretch of time created by the immediate need to show up and be responsible offered the possibility to reflect on the nature of my initial reaction. Ostensibly, there's no good reason for me to care in the least about either of these two recreational bloggers. The girl exists as no more than a memory, and the German is, for all practical purposes in my life, a cardboard cutout. So why was my ass so swiftly chapped by this otherwise benign, entirely fatuous entry in the blogosphere?
Admittedly, I didn't spend a lot of time pondering the question: I have two jobs, both of which I enjoy and appreciate, and neither affords me a lot of self-absorption time. But I picked it up as I lay in bed at night ready for sleep. I turned it over, scratched the veneer and found myself scrolling backward, like a reel-to-reel film run in reverse through the projector, the images flickering unnaturally on the screen, a blunt display of regression. It was a history of loss: of things and people and places and, most shamefully, self. After the last frames flashed by and the film flapped on the still-spinning reel, it occurred to me why I found those artful desserts and well-used leftovers, that grinning German and, especially, that too-thin smiling graduate student so utterly offensive. Viewed forward, that imaginary movie is also about redemption and heart and no small measure of integrity. It's about the hard slide to somewhere near the bottom, and the much more arduous scrabble in the other direction. And I say this all the time: I know I'm lucky, and I'd always rather be lucky than good. But I'm also fond of saying luck's for the Irish. So fuck it, I'll say it: I am more good than lucky. I blew myself apart into an unrecognizable mess, and yeah, it took years to scrape together those widely scattered pieces, but I did just that. I had plenty of help along the way, but in the end, as with anything that truly matters, you have to do the heaviest lifting yourself, or it's not worth a damn. So there's that: I earned this place where I now find myself; all she ever did was stick her finger down her throat and make herself pretty. She laid down a bunt single to break up a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth inning. I reached out and stroked one into the right field corner, busted it out of the box and outran my own shadow around the bases for an in-the-park home run. I'll take a win like that over a bush-league play any day.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Solace
Like a lot of people -- most people, I suspect -- I've spent the better part of the last several days immersed in a tragic story from which I couldn't easily avert my eyes. As you may well imagine, I have a multitude of thoughts about what happened, but I feel as though they are for another time and perhaps another place. After untold hours of refreshing my browser, seeking every raw and fresh nugget I'd hoped, on the most basic level, might draw me closer to grasping some tangible shred of sense out of the chaos, I finally did shut it down, looked away, and found what felt like meaningful ways to pass the time. These were my diversions.
I don't remember how this book first came to my attention -- I must have stumbled upon a review of it somewhere, and I recognized the author's name because I'd read his debut novel, An Underachiever's Diary, shortly after it came out in 1998. I was living in Portland then and still adjusting to the particulars of my life at the time, the most profound of which were these: I worked forty-plus hours a week in an office, I made barely enough to survive on, I had most definitely stalled in my ambition to be a writer, and I lived alone a few blocks away from where my daughter lived with her mother. I say I lived alone, but in truth I shared my narrow apartment with an aging fluffy orange cat I would describe as tremendously needy and occasionally churlish. I was trailing the remnants of four remarkably difficult years then, like a big old American car dragging its muffler and tailpipe down a long road with no service station in sight. One afternoon on my lunch break I ducked into a bookstore in the Old Port and found myself holding this spare little hardcover by a writer I'd never heard of. I think there was a blurb from Ann Beattie, a writer I've always admired, and so, in spite of the fact that I wasn't earning new-hardcover money by any means, I bought it and took it home and read it. I remember that I enjoyed the book, perhaps in part because it was heartening to see someone roughly my age write a book and get it published, but now, almost fifteen years later, I can't say I recall much about it. With the exception of the times I spent with my daughter back then -- commonplace, everyday activities that are nonetheless etched on my mind -- most of what I did and saw in those days is, in my memory, dimly illuminated by the sort of bitter grey-yellow light cast by a low-wattage bulb nearing the end of its filament's life. I was mostly just going through the motions. However, the name Benjamin Anastas stuck with me, and so when I saw he'd written a memoir, and when I learned precisely what form this memoir had taken, I decided I needed to read it.
The title is Too Good to Be True, a reference you'll understand if you read the book. In the briefest of terms, I'll tell you that circumstances and his own failings conspired to make Anastas' life an unsettling and noteworthy mess. With two well received books to his credit, his writing ebbed. At around the same time, he cheated on his fiancee. As their wedding date neared, he sought to unburden himself of the guilt his affair had engendered, and so told his fiancee what he'd done. In spite of the indiscretion (a word I despise, especially in this context, but I use it for economy's sake), she forgives him and they proceed with the wedding. Less than six months later, she has stepped out on him, and she is also, it turns out, pregnant with their child. In the months that follow, Anastas moves out and is, by his account, quite literally immediately replaced by his wife's new man. All of which is terrible, of course, but things get much worse in short order. His writing career now entirely stalled and his employment prospects bleak (as he points out in an interview, the spotty work history of a once full-time writer does not present the sort of resume that screams "Hire this guy!"), he slides deep into debt and, eventually, relative poverty. Against this backdrop, of course, falls the bittersweet reality of part-time fatherhood, rendered, I can assure you, with painful honesty. The book, overall, is a good story and Anastas is an outstanding writer. My one lingering criticism is that he seems to try to claim a peculiar slab of moral high ground after his wife cheated on and then essentially left him. He is at first incredulous that she has not, as she'd assured him before they were married, actually forgiven him: that, to me, is simply naive. As time passes and he is forced to accept this new reality, his bitterness, I would argue, exceeds its limit by giving insufficient weight to the fact that he had, after all, cheated on her first. He acknowledged this fact, I just don't think he was capable of absorbing it in the context of that with which he was left. Whether or not anything would have made a difference to these two people's relationship, the fact remains, it is far easier not to cheat on someone you claim to love than it is to live with the consequences of doing so. And if you do stray, you've relinquished your right to the high ground. Period.
Much of this story, of course, cut pretty close to the bone for me. I've found myself, in my early forties, floundering miserably, broke to the point of impoverishment much of the time, having to shuck and jive my way through more situations than I care to recall, with brief instances of joy separated by long stretches of morbid discomfort. As I mentioned to a friend, it takes little effort on my part to imagine how Benjamin Anastas' shoes would feel on my feet. It's interesting to me, though, that I responded less to his accounts of a brand of poverty I recognize all too well, but instead to the more substantial role we share in common: far-too-infrequent dad. There is unmistakable warmth and joy and affection in the way he talks about the time he spends with his son. In fact, the voice of those scenes is notably different from the rest of the narrative, and I recognize it for what it is: a whisper. The network of invisible strings that holds together these brief, isolated bursts of time with your child is so tenuous, your inclination is to speak of them in hushed tones. I used the word "bittersweet" earlier. I've known no other experience in my life that more starkly crystalizes the essence of that word than Sunday evenings after my daughter returned to her mother's -- to home, it's fair to say, because home is where you live most of the time, and every other place in the world is simply a place you visit. Benjamin Anastas captured that aspect of being the other parent, and if for no other reason than that the book succeeded in my eyes. I recommend.
The other satisfying distraction from my weekend was a movie I'd been meaning to see for years, a film written and directed by a man who happens to own the film rights to a fine book written by my very good friend, a fact that pleases me even more now that I've seen this film. It's called The Lives of Others, and I'm not going to tell you any of the particulars of the story because I don't want to sully even a moment of it for any of you who (wisely) choose to see it. Suffice it to say that it is a perfectly wrought piece of film art, charming and compelling and heartbreaking, beautifully shot, stunningly performed, expertly told. I sat frozen in front of the screen after it ended. Do yourself a favor and see this film. You will not be disappointed.
And so, as you can see, I went far afield from the story that has been on everyone's minds since Friday. I'm glad I did because, of course, when I woke up this morning, that story was still there, as it will be for days and weeks to come. There is no language adequate to the sorrow and confusion and anger we are all left with in the wake of such ruinous madness. Which is precisely why it's important to be reminded that there are places to seek solace, if only for a little while. For me, it was a book and a film. I hope you have found yours, too, or will soon.
I don't remember how this book first came to my attention -- I must have stumbled upon a review of it somewhere, and I recognized the author's name because I'd read his debut novel, An Underachiever's Diary, shortly after it came out in 1998. I was living in Portland then and still adjusting to the particulars of my life at the time, the most profound of which were these: I worked forty-plus hours a week in an office, I made barely enough to survive on, I had most definitely stalled in my ambition to be a writer, and I lived alone a few blocks away from where my daughter lived with her mother. I say I lived alone, but in truth I shared my narrow apartment with an aging fluffy orange cat I would describe as tremendously needy and occasionally churlish. I was trailing the remnants of four remarkably difficult years then, like a big old American car dragging its muffler and tailpipe down a long road with no service station in sight. One afternoon on my lunch break I ducked into a bookstore in the Old Port and found myself holding this spare little hardcover by a writer I'd never heard of. I think there was a blurb from Ann Beattie, a writer I've always admired, and so, in spite of the fact that I wasn't earning new-hardcover money by any means, I bought it and took it home and read it. I remember that I enjoyed the book, perhaps in part because it was heartening to see someone roughly my age write a book and get it published, but now, almost fifteen years later, I can't say I recall much about it. With the exception of the times I spent with my daughter back then -- commonplace, everyday activities that are nonetheless etched on my mind -- most of what I did and saw in those days is, in my memory, dimly illuminated by the sort of bitter grey-yellow light cast by a low-wattage bulb nearing the end of its filament's life. I was mostly just going through the motions. However, the name Benjamin Anastas stuck with me, and so when I saw he'd written a memoir, and when I learned precisely what form this memoir had taken, I decided I needed to read it.
The title is Too Good to Be True, a reference you'll understand if you read the book. In the briefest of terms, I'll tell you that circumstances and his own failings conspired to make Anastas' life an unsettling and noteworthy mess. With two well received books to his credit, his writing ebbed. At around the same time, he cheated on his fiancee. As their wedding date neared, he sought to unburden himself of the guilt his affair had engendered, and so told his fiancee what he'd done. In spite of the indiscretion (a word I despise, especially in this context, but I use it for economy's sake), she forgives him and they proceed with the wedding. Less than six months later, she has stepped out on him, and she is also, it turns out, pregnant with their child. In the months that follow, Anastas moves out and is, by his account, quite literally immediately replaced by his wife's new man. All of which is terrible, of course, but things get much worse in short order. His writing career now entirely stalled and his employment prospects bleak (as he points out in an interview, the spotty work history of a once full-time writer does not present the sort of resume that screams "Hire this guy!"), he slides deep into debt and, eventually, relative poverty. Against this backdrop, of course, falls the bittersweet reality of part-time fatherhood, rendered, I can assure you, with painful honesty. The book, overall, is a good story and Anastas is an outstanding writer. My one lingering criticism is that he seems to try to claim a peculiar slab of moral high ground after his wife cheated on and then essentially left him. He is at first incredulous that she has not, as she'd assured him before they were married, actually forgiven him: that, to me, is simply naive. As time passes and he is forced to accept this new reality, his bitterness, I would argue, exceeds its limit by giving insufficient weight to the fact that he had, after all, cheated on her first. He acknowledged this fact, I just don't think he was capable of absorbing it in the context of that with which he was left. Whether or not anything would have made a difference to these two people's relationship, the fact remains, it is far easier not to cheat on someone you claim to love than it is to live with the consequences of doing so. And if you do stray, you've relinquished your right to the high ground. Period.
Much of this story, of course, cut pretty close to the bone for me. I've found myself, in my early forties, floundering miserably, broke to the point of impoverishment much of the time, having to shuck and jive my way through more situations than I care to recall, with brief instances of joy separated by long stretches of morbid discomfort. As I mentioned to a friend, it takes little effort on my part to imagine how Benjamin Anastas' shoes would feel on my feet. It's interesting to me, though, that I responded less to his accounts of a brand of poverty I recognize all too well, but instead to the more substantial role we share in common: far-too-infrequent dad. There is unmistakable warmth and joy and affection in the way he talks about the time he spends with his son. In fact, the voice of those scenes is notably different from the rest of the narrative, and I recognize it for what it is: a whisper. The network of invisible strings that holds together these brief, isolated bursts of time with your child is so tenuous, your inclination is to speak of them in hushed tones. I used the word "bittersweet" earlier. I've known no other experience in my life that more starkly crystalizes the essence of that word than Sunday evenings after my daughter returned to her mother's -- to home, it's fair to say, because home is where you live most of the time, and every other place in the world is simply a place you visit. Benjamin Anastas captured that aspect of being the other parent, and if for no other reason than that the book succeeded in my eyes. I recommend.
The other satisfying distraction from my weekend was a movie I'd been meaning to see for years, a film written and directed by a man who happens to own the film rights to a fine book written by my very good friend, a fact that pleases me even more now that I've seen this film. It's called The Lives of Others, and I'm not going to tell you any of the particulars of the story because I don't want to sully even a moment of it for any of you who (wisely) choose to see it. Suffice it to say that it is a perfectly wrought piece of film art, charming and compelling and heartbreaking, beautifully shot, stunningly performed, expertly told. I sat frozen in front of the screen after it ended. Do yourself a favor and see this film. You will not be disappointed.
And so, as you can see, I went far afield from the story that has been on everyone's minds since Friday. I'm glad I did because, of course, when I woke up this morning, that story was still there, as it will be for days and weeks to come. There is no language adequate to the sorrow and confusion and anger we are all left with in the wake of such ruinous madness. Which is precisely why it's important to be reminded that there are places to seek solace, if only for a little while. For me, it was a book and a film. I hope you have found yours, too, or will soon.
Monday, November 26, 2012
If a Bear Shits in the Woods . . .
This afternoon as I trekked down my parents' long, sloping driveway with my backpack slung over my shoulder, not quite three hundred yards into the two-mile walk to the public library, I looked down just in time to keep from stepping in a pile of bear shit, dead center in the middle of the driveway. Now, shit is shit, and I'm glad I didn't step in it, but shit though it be, the sight of it delighted me because it was bear shit. I've seen neither a bear nor any sign of a bear around here in almost thirty years. I must have been fourteen or fifteen, a friend was giving me a ride home on a late summer evening, and as we crested the hill there he was, a big ole black bear, ambling across the road between the two blueberry fields that used to sit at the top of the hill. He was a handsome sonofabitch.
We moved up to the hill in 1976, when I was seven years old, and it's fair to say that for everything home lacked -- lights and indoor plumbing and space and comfort -- the land where home squatted lacked for absolutely nothing. The particulars of our home certainly contributed somewhat to the fact that we spent so much time out of doors when I was a kid, but to a larger extent that's just what kids did back then. We didn't have cable or Atari or computers or smartphones, all the things that entice this generation's kids to kill their days indoors in chairs and on couches or sprawled on the floor with handheld electronics. Not that I'm passing judgment: if those things had been available to me, I would have gotten sucked in with the best of them. I'm glad they weren't, though. Knowing what I know now, I don't believe I'd trade those wild days even if it had meant a much more comfortable life.
It's amazing to think how much pleasure we got out of so little. Snowy days we'd cart our shitty plastic roll-up sleds out into the field and spend hours sliding down and trudging back up. Summers we spent more accumulated time on the seats of bicycles than we did with our heads on our pillows. The only reason we had bicycles at all is because our father, who was the keeper of the town dump, brought home the bicycles people had thrown away, and there were dozens of them, which my brother and I harvested as needed to construct our Frankenbikes. Flat tire? No problem, this tube's still good. Sick of that seat? Here, try this banana seat with the flames down the sides. They looked like shit but they rode like champs, until they didn't, and then we'd just dig through the pile for usable parts and start over.
What I remember most about those days, though, is the landscape, and the time I spent in it alone. There were plenty of occasions when my brother and I would wander off together, deep into the woods behind the house, or skipping rocks across the pond that sits just below my parents' field. But I was even then content with my own company, and often enough I would strike out on my own. There was an ancient oak tree that stood on the property where my grandparents' farm once was, a thick branch jutting out parallel to the ground about five feet long before it curled upward at almost a ninety degree angle -- the perfect spot to lounge and gaze out across the field. That's almost certainly where I was sitting when I first contemplated what I came to know as existentialism, a dozen years before I encountered Sartre and Camus. I also spent hours sitting beside the pond, watching turtles sunning themselves on rocks, frogs poking their heads up between the lily pads, the rare catfish scurrying through the shallows. And of course the great blue heron, for which I developed an affection that remains to this day.
I was thinking about all this as I walked down the hill to the library. The bear shit got me started, but there was more: as I walked that familiar road, my eye took in all the spots I used to know so well. The pond, which is a shell of its former self. My best friend Terry Gwazdowski's house, which for two years was my second home. His parents divorced, and his mother moved them to Windsor, which isn't so far, really, but back then it might as well have been the moon. The house where my aunt used to live, where we played war and tag and cowboys and Indians and everything else for hours with my cousins and the other kids who lived on the road. Between my aunt's old house and the house where she lives with her second husband, there's a wagon path that leads to what was once an apple orchard, land that, like half the land on the entire road, was owned by my grandfather. I remember the day I learned it was my grandfather's property, I wandered down the wagon path, plucking crab apples off the ground and hucking them at the rock wall as I went. It was deep and secluded and felt like I'd stepped into a secret world that had been hiding there in plain sight all along. Of course, when I came out I caught hell from my mother: it was hunting season, and like a knucklehead I wasn't wearing a speck of orange. Only my idiot uncle hunted there anyway, and he was crazy enough so that draping myself head to toe in orange and not being in the orchard wasn't necessarily a guarantee he wouldn't shoot me. I had no regrets.
Anyway, it's all still there, if somewhat diminished. The pond is a tragic swamp. The houses are decades and multiple families removed from the memories I have of them. The orchard is overgrown with scrub brush and devoid of apple trees. Yes, it's all there, but yes, it is less than it was. Still, I can imagine my long-ago self finding there now what I looked for then. Except not only is there no more long-ago me, there doesn't appear to be a present-day anyone: there are no kids. No kids running around, digging holes, skipping stones, riding bikes, building forts. No kids daydreaming in trees. I don't know where they are, but I can guess: they are being held close, so that little Timmy doesn't wander off into the woods and get lost, or little Susie doesn't catch a cold. And that is how a place truly dies: all the magic and wonder, if there's no one there to take it in, slowly but inexorably fades, and in time is forgotten. What a waste. What a terrible waste.
And yet, today I stumbled upon the unmistakable sign that a bear -- mythical, haunting, solitary beast -- crossed the path I'm on these days. He probably dipped a paw in the pond I loved so well. He probably climbed up into the field along the same track I used to slide down on a piece of blue plastic, and quite possibly curled up and slept in the seclusion of the ring of pine trees I planted with my brother when I was nine. It is a strange but not unsatisfying comfort to think it. And it all came from a walk on a cold day and a pile of scat.
You can take the bear out of the cave, but there will always be bear shit. Always.
We moved up to the hill in 1976, when I was seven years old, and it's fair to say that for everything home lacked -- lights and indoor plumbing and space and comfort -- the land where home squatted lacked for absolutely nothing. The particulars of our home certainly contributed somewhat to the fact that we spent so much time out of doors when I was a kid, but to a larger extent that's just what kids did back then. We didn't have cable or Atari or computers or smartphones, all the things that entice this generation's kids to kill their days indoors in chairs and on couches or sprawled on the floor with handheld electronics. Not that I'm passing judgment: if those things had been available to me, I would have gotten sucked in with the best of them. I'm glad they weren't, though. Knowing what I know now, I don't believe I'd trade those wild days even if it had meant a much more comfortable life.
It's amazing to think how much pleasure we got out of so little. Snowy days we'd cart our shitty plastic roll-up sleds out into the field and spend hours sliding down and trudging back up. Summers we spent more accumulated time on the seats of bicycles than we did with our heads on our pillows. The only reason we had bicycles at all is because our father, who was the keeper of the town dump, brought home the bicycles people had thrown away, and there were dozens of them, which my brother and I harvested as needed to construct our Frankenbikes. Flat tire? No problem, this tube's still good. Sick of that seat? Here, try this banana seat with the flames down the sides. They looked like shit but they rode like champs, until they didn't, and then we'd just dig through the pile for usable parts and start over.
What I remember most about those days, though, is the landscape, and the time I spent in it alone. There were plenty of occasions when my brother and I would wander off together, deep into the woods behind the house, or skipping rocks across the pond that sits just below my parents' field. But I was even then content with my own company, and often enough I would strike out on my own. There was an ancient oak tree that stood on the property where my grandparents' farm once was, a thick branch jutting out parallel to the ground about five feet long before it curled upward at almost a ninety degree angle -- the perfect spot to lounge and gaze out across the field. That's almost certainly where I was sitting when I first contemplated what I came to know as existentialism, a dozen years before I encountered Sartre and Camus. I also spent hours sitting beside the pond, watching turtles sunning themselves on rocks, frogs poking their heads up between the lily pads, the rare catfish scurrying through the shallows. And of course the great blue heron, for which I developed an affection that remains to this day.
I was thinking about all this as I walked down the hill to the library. The bear shit got me started, but there was more: as I walked that familiar road, my eye took in all the spots I used to know so well. The pond, which is a shell of its former self. My best friend Terry Gwazdowski's house, which for two years was my second home. His parents divorced, and his mother moved them to Windsor, which isn't so far, really, but back then it might as well have been the moon. The house where my aunt used to live, where we played war and tag and cowboys and Indians and everything else for hours with my cousins and the other kids who lived on the road. Between my aunt's old house and the house where she lives with her second husband, there's a wagon path that leads to what was once an apple orchard, land that, like half the land on the entire road, was owned by my grandfather. I remember the day I learned it was my grandfather's property, I wandered down the wagon path, plucking crab apples off the ground and hucking them at the rock wall as I went. It was deep and secluded and felt like I'd stepped into a secret world that had been hiding there in plain sight all along. Of course, when I came out I caught hell from my mother: it was hunting season, and like a knucklehead I wasn't wearing a speck of orange. Only my idiot uncle hunted there anyway, and he was crazy enough so that draping myself head to toe in orange and not being in the orchard wasn't necessarily a guarantee he wouldn't shoot me. I had no regrets.
Anyway, it's all still there, if somewhat diminished. The pond is a tragic swamp. The houses are decades and multiple families removed from the memories I have of them. The orchard is overgrown with scrub brush and devoid of apple trees. Yes, it's all there, but yes, it is less than it was. Still, I can imagine my long-ago self finding there now what I looked for then. Except not only is there no more long-ago me, there doesn't appear to be a present-day anyone: there are no kids. No kids running around, digging holes, skipping stones, riding bikes, building forts. No kids daydreaming in trees. I don't know where they are, but I can guess: they are being held close, so that little Timmy doesn't wander off into the woods and get lost, or little Susie doesn't catch a cold. And that is how a place truly dies: all the magic and wonder, if there's no one there to take it in, slowly but inexorably fades, and in time is forgotten. What a waste. What a terrible waste.
And yet, today I stumbled upon the unmistakable sign that a bear -- mythical, haunting, solitary beast -- crossed the path I'm on these days. He probably dipped a paw in the pond I loved so well. He probably climbed up into the field along the same track I used to slide down on a piece of blue plastic, and quite possibly curled up and slept in the seclusion of the ring of pine trees I planted with my brother when I was nine. It is a strange but not unsatisfying comfort to think it. And it all came from a walk on a cold day and a pile of scat.
You can take the bear out of the cave, but there will always be bear shit. Always.
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