At the job site my first day back, all the Latinos wanted to know how la bambina is, clapping me on the back and grinning proudly, knowingly. Even the few guys I don’t get along with too well were genuinely congratulatory. Then all the cheeriness dissipated and it was back to work, muchachos.
Started out the day taking measurements for some stair stringers coming off the back deck into the yard. Number crunching, which is something I usually prefer. But some days, the down ones, I’d just rather be doing a mindless task. I was back at work and the bleak foreverness of toil was all around me again, steep against my nose like a stone wall, built stone by Sisyphean stone. For those couple of delusional weeks of domestic softness and infant sweetness I was actually beginning to think that work was just the dream of a past life; that now with Ada things had changed miraculously and the grind of labor couldn’t touch me anymore. Yet here it was again, a cruel devil that had never left me, stepping out from the trees.
Yes, back to work, boy. The weight of my bags around my waist like the sodden tug of ropes mooring a ship at pier. But hadn’t I been set adrift? Hadn’t the seas changed, calmed, and the weather was fine and the coast a ribbon of brown mountains leading north or south for us to follow as we pleased?
I wake to feel the heft of a hammer in my hand, the snap of a recoiling tape measure, my boots pivoting in sawdust on the ground.
It’s good, these sensations, right? I’m using my hands, I’m alive and my body is a fine-working tool. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. Just get through to lunch. Just get through today. And then another day. And then the next. And that is how a day of work becomes a life of labor. Becomes just another passing shift. Another ship missed.
______
After work I had to shake off that grim feeling before going home, so I rode my bike around the neighborhood. Stopped into Adobe Books and there was A.M. behind the desk, smiling benevolently with those champagne eyes of his. Now that is a man who could cheer up Nietzsche. We shook hands and right off he asked of Anna and wanted to know how the baby was doing. “My gosh,” he opined, “you’re a father. It must be grand.”
He motioned for me to lean my bike against a bookshelf. The store was nearly empty so I made myself comfortable in an old upholstered chair beside the desk. I always feel cozily at ease in the bookshop, as ramshackle as it usually is. It’s only when a knot of hipsters fills up the place during an opening that I ever need to get outside for air. But with A.M. around he makes you feel like royalty. He must be the most charming, gentlemanly fellow in the Mission. I imagine him stepping out from the pages of a Graham Greene novel, suave and of another century. And he has a gift for never forgetting a name. The combination of his social graces and the store doubling as a gallery of contemporary “Mission School” artists has made Adobe Books a hub of what’s happening in the neighborhood, and indeed the city.
“So tell me what it’s like?” he urged. “I wouldn’t know, but it must be wonderful.”
“Well, more than anything, it feels natural.”
“Yes,” he sighed, his eyes sparkling with imagination. “That’s the way it should be. Natural. You’ll have to bring little Ada in some time. Does she look like Anna?”
“She does.”
“Those lovely eyes of hers. Does she have her eyes?” he caught himself, “I mean, your eyes are beautiful, too.“
“It’s alright,” I laughed, letting him off the hook.
“And how’s the writing coming?”
“Not so good.”
“No. I don’t know how anyone could do it. But they do, I suppose. You’ll come around again.”
“I hope so.”
“Oh, you will. You’ll have to, and you will. Just come up with some Idaho stories to tell her. Dream up some Big Sky stories for Ada and the writing will come right back again.”
A.M. and I share what about nobody, to my knowledge, who hangs around the bookstore has: a love of Big Sky country, the mountains and high desserts of Idaho and Montana. His father lives in Butte and he routinely drives out there to visit him while making the rounds buying up books at estate sales and used book stores and such. “It’s beautiful out there,” he sighed, nodding to himself. Above all, A. is a romantic, a class A-1 dreamer. You get the feeling when you’re in his store, with the art on the high walls above the shelves and the old jazz or classical playing on the stereo, that whatever you want to dream up is possible; or at least has a place, a stage of possibility, where you can exercise your imagination to fill out that dream, detail by detail, with some great books to aid you, should you need them. I asked him when he was going to make his next trip north and we talked about Montana some more.
“I want a to get a house in the country,” he mused. “A big house where everybody can come out and get away from the city. We all need that: to get away from all this and relax and make big dinners together. I could have some studios there so people could do their art. You could come out, too. You could come out and write.”
“That’d be nice. Anna and I have talked about that, too, actually.”
“It’s a grand idea. Maybe up in Nevada City. It’s pretty up there and they’ve got a little scene going. But it’s expensive there. How about Montana? Or Idaho?”
“I’d go for that.”
His round face beamed and then he clapped his palms together with inspiration. “I know. You head up there and scout it out for us. Find a big plot of land for cheap and we’ll get this thing going. You know it up there. A place for big dinners and art and a chance to get away from the city. You’re our man, David.”
I told him, in the playful spirit of the moment, that I’d get right on it. Everything was possible in that bookstore, and money and work and babies fresh out of the heavens were no obstacle to whimsy. In fact, the more romantic the notion the better. And why not? The SF summer was grey as cinderblock, and being back at construction felt awful and leaden to me. It was summer, we had a baby now, all was supposed to be as sunny and warm and spacious and languid as an afternoon picnic under the trees by the river. What could be done about it? A little place in the country? Don’t we all dream of that? There’s something archetypal about the vision. Nearly every city dweller I know has in their back pocket the fancy of a country spread somewhere, a refuge from the sirens and concrete and dubious stains on the sidewalk. A place to dream of, a place in which to dream.
Something like that vision has been drawing the rest of the country out West since the Louisiana Purchase. Whether it was the Spanish seeking the Seven Cities of Cibola, or the English their Northwest Passage, or Dust-Bowlers coming out for dreams of orange groves and sunshine, we’ve all had high expectations of the Far West. In most cases delusional expectations. But now the California Dream has been directionally inverted, into state and federal parks, and outside the state entirely, as the crowded conditions here have us seeking elsewhere for our high hopes. Maybe it’s still here, that Eden, that Homestead Act quarter-section, that perfect Hollywood set. Maybe, past the hours of traffic and flashing billboards and box store sprawl that lacerate the California countryside, you can still find that place. It’s there, if you drive far enough. The surer bet though, for us living in the city, is to find it within: in your art or writing, or the view from your park bench, or your romantic plans hatched in a gallery bookstore in the midst of the heaped-up city. Or maybe the still surer bet is to leave all together. A scouting trip up to Idaho sounded like a tempting idea.
“Would you come up and stay awhile if I find us a place?” I asked.
“Stay awhile,” beamed A. “I’d stay forever.”
