By Art, Faith, or Cunning

4 April 2010, Boise

Easter Sunday. A cold bright morning, glinting with raw winds out of the north swooping down over the snowy front. Being Easter, the Italian in me wanted to go to church, if for only the ceremony of the day. There is a beautiful towering sandstone cathedral in the neighborhood where, when I was a boy, my mom would take us for the occasional church outing and always for Christmas Eve and Easter masses. The cathedral dates from the turn of the century and I always loved looking up at it’s stained glass windows and painted vaulted ceilings and the echoing voices of the ceremony combined with the incense and the grand feeling of the place to make me feel I was in Italy again. My mom experienced the same affect, and going to St. John’s was always a small nostalgic trip home for her.

This Easter, no different from others, the cathedral was gloriously crowded. We had to stand in the foyer to take in the mass, which turned out all right as other parents were doing the same, keeping back of the pews with their fidgeting kids and straining babies. Ada squirmed in my arms to be let down, relenting only when she had another little girl or boy to exchange gazes and squawks with. I was watching down the center isle at the priest swinging a chalice of incense over goblets of wine when I noticed a man waggling his finger playfully in Ada’s face. He had unkempt hair and a wild, wry look about him that belied his respectable Sunday duds of sport coat and slacks. For a moment I wondered who the hell the crazy cad was messing with my kid, and then I recognized him. I almost swore in church: it was B.N., old friend and Boise artist from way back.

“You’re back in town,” he said as we shook each other by the shoulders, trying to muffle our enthusiasm. He wiggled his fingers at Ada, “And you brought this cutie with you.”

I quietly introduced him to Anna and Ada, who kept her eyes on him, captivated by the man, sensing his enigmatic charm. “I was in the front pew,” B. whispered to me as we returned to watching mass, “but I couldn’t take it. It’s too close for someone like me.”

“The slightly unfaithful.”

“That’s it. Finally I had to find an old lady to give my seat to.”

A hymn was being sung as the priest and alter boys were arranging for communion.

“You going up?” I whispered.

“Don’t know. You?”

I shrugged. “There’s always that moment of doubt before communion.”

“About yourself or the whole show?”

“Both.”

“No,” said Bob, “I’m not going. They won’t let me. The last time I did I said to the priest, “thanks.” Guess that pissed him off.”

Just then Ada started to bawl. My dilemma was solved for me. I conferred with Anna and it was decided I’d walk around outside with Ada until she fell asleep. I carried the girl out the tall wooden doors and stood atop the steps a minute letting my eyes adjust to the brightness. Ada went quiet feeling a gust of cold sharp air. From the top of the steps I could see the mountains above town, white with snow and blue forested along their ridges; the snow level, after days of storm, coming right down over the foothills to the tan edges of the plain. I walked down the steps and turned onto the next street and walked a few blocks under the leafless maples and elms. Forsythia and daffodils were in bloom, lacing the yards and the front porches of the houses. When I arrived back at the cathedral, people were pouring down the long steps and gathering on the street. I waved at Anna and B. and they joined me on the sidewalk.

“Did you go to communion?” I asked Anna.

“Communion is for sinners,” she said.

“Don’t believe in all that, do you?” said B.

“No. It’s all too heavy for spring. David wanted us to go for the ceremony of it.”

“That’s why I go. Once or twice a year, just to hedge my bets.”

“Pascal’s wager,” I said.

“You should try a different church,” said B. Which was weird, as I never imagined B. as the church-going type, let alone the church-going-encouraging type. But then I saw the bullshitter's gleam in his eyes.

Anna must've seen it too. “How about the church of go-for-a-hike-in-the-hills instead?” she quipped.

“How’s the painting coming?” I asked B.

“It’s okay. I was looking at that painting of Maria de Guadalupe, thinking how I don’t know how to paint anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“You see, I never really knew how to paint. I knew tricks and ways of faking it. But since the m.s., my hand shakes and I can’t pull off those one-stroke slight-of-hands anymore.”

“Learn new ones.”

“It’s not so easy.”

“How are your eyes?”

“The left is okay. The right is good for seeing ghosts.”

“You can’t see out of it at all?”

“Just a blur of light.”

Then his eyes widened, and narrowed shrewdly as something occurred to him. “Hey, that’s going to be my next series. You saved my career. Half-finished paintings. That’s my new trick, that keeps anybody from seeing I can’t really paint.”

The steps and sidewalk were crowded with churchgoers now. We recognized some other friends and they came over to say hello. There was an element of surprise at seeing each other here. Here with kids and family on an Easter morning at church. I could sense us asking each other in our minds if any of us actually believed in this stuff. But it didn’t matter. Each of us was there for our different reasons, which most likely had less to do with the teachings of Christ than the sentiment and ritual of the day. If nothing else, we were there for each other, for the steely sunlight and chill air tossing the clouds and the reminder that all of us have to learn a few new tricks, of faith or art or cunning, now that life was catching up to us.

Ada began to cry from sleepiness and the cold.

“So you’re here now,” said B. as we made hurried goodbyes. “I’ll see you around?”

“Of course. Great to see you, B.”

He stopped me and waggled his fingers before Ada’s eyes. She quit her crying and for a moment, as though a spell had been cast on her, smiled at him.

Sleet, Snow, or Shine

1 April 10, Boise

Yesterday got away for a morning ski up at Bogus Basin. Ten inches of powder, much untouched in the trees. Snowy Ponderosa pines and flanges of granite leaning against a pale blue sky. Towering cumulous above the loping mountains to the north, and to the south, the Owyhees white and chiseled above the tawny plain. Except for my legs going watery after a dozen dips, requiring me to rest and take in the view before starting off again, the tele turns felt good and the body knew just what to do. All that powder didn’t hurt, either.

It’s been ten days now since Obama signed the Health Care Reform Bill into law, and while I’m glad the thing went through, am feeling some regrets about it. Why couldn’t we get a public option in the mix? When Democrats knew they were going to use budget reconciliation to push the bill through on a straight majority vote, they could have thrown in the House’s public option and still rallied the fifty-one votes necessary for Senate passage. That’s what the GOP would’ve done. Those fuckers aren’t afraid to ramp up their legislation to ideological heights when they see an opening. But democrats? They won’t play hardball if they’re afraid of losing a few seats in the coming fall election. But when will another opportunity like this come again? Another two or three or ten decades before both houses and the executive branch are under dem control? This was our chance, and we played it center and safe. Well, how safe is the future of our health care now? Not much safer than it was before, as the same gatekeepers are at the gate, albeit tempered by a few more restrictions on their behavior. We need not only new keepers, but new gates: public option gates. All this talk about consumer freedom is ridiculous. Real freedom would be an option to get out of the capitalistic, pro-profit route and have a healthy, fair, decent way of getting not health coverage, but health care for all of our people. You know the right is shaping the argument when a basic ideal such as that has you sounding like a radical.

- - - - -

Sleet and snow all morning, coming down in white clumps that gloss the streets. The bare trees etch a somber thicket against the grey sky. Shades of brown and grey and winter greens, against which the first colors of spring stand out delicately: budding leaves lacing the elm trees along the center of the street; forsythia in yellow bursts from the sodden yards; thumb-thick pale green buds opening in the lilacs; daffodils as brightly ridiculous as plastic flowers stuck in the ground.

So we’ve found a house to rent, and we’re not sure the April Fool’s joke isn’t on us. After all the slap-together rentals we’ve seen, this one is a jewel, perhaps a stolen jewel for the mere 900 per month in rent. The catch is that the place is still on the market as a short sale, and we’ll have to move out on thirty days notice should the house sell or go into foreclosure. But that’s a roll of the dice we’re willing to take at this point, a gamble that compliments our need to be free of a lease in case we find a house to buy. Our fear, though, is that after growing accustomed to the fine surroundings here we’ll get booted out and have to settle for one of the lesser rentals we’ve seen about the neighborhood.

From what I can guess, the house was built around 1910, as it lacks the gables and angles and frills of a Queen Ann, yet isn’t as fine-lined as a craftsman. All the rooms get great light, and the living and dining room windows look out onto the stately, tree-lined street of Harrison Blvd. You look down the wide street through a canopy of huge oaks and maples that lean out from spacious yards and islands where lamp posts stand like sentinels from the Victorian age. At night, the lampposts glow among the long interwoven limbs of the bare trees, and you can imagine the shadows of horse carriages slipping past, clippity-clopping their way down the long boulevard, carrying riders homeward or into town for opera shows and dinners in gilded restaurants or perhaps a covert rendezvous in the secret tunnels below the capital building.

Our Spirits Catching Up to Us

19-23 March 2010, Boise

Early morning on the back porch of the house of my good buddy R.H. Cold clear sunlight warming the porch boards, a cup of coffee in my hand, the house quiet with everyone off to work or school, the cat twining figure-eights between my legs as I stand looking out at the frosty blue sky. And above the thicket of leafless trees and pitched rooftops that is the North End of town: snow-white mountains, blue with pines along their ridges, buff-colored lower down where the snow-melt-soaked hills are beginning to bloom with ground flowers.

After the verdant coast, everything looks brown here, from the sage hills to the dirt alleyways to the skeletal canopies poking at the sky. But a dormant energy is rising in things. You can feel it on a morning like this, a spark in the sunlight, a sliver of warmth in the chill air, the green spears of iris pushing out of the ground at the edge of the yard. Three days ago, in Jordan Valley, I saw a wedge of geese flying north. The birds know what’s going on. And we’re not unlike them in migrating northward with the season. But it’s taking my spirit some time to cross that high desert and catch up with my body. I don’t feel here yet; I don’t feel anywhere yet. Maybe that’s because Anna and Ada aren’t here, staying as they are in Denver with Anna’s mother as I scout ahead. San Francisco feels long behind me. And Boise is a land of doubts and roaming for me, jobless and on the hunt for a house for us, waking in the middle of the night with that gut-empty insecurity that you feel sometimes when on the road, that you felt as a kid the first time you slept away from home; the anxious daring fearful dreaming feeling that is the constant companion of gypsies and children and mountaineers and migrants and I dare guess birds flying north at the front edge of spring. But I’m certain that along with those birds, and the warming days and the first blossoms softening the trees, and Anna and Ada arriving by plane this afternoon, my spirit will soon catch up to me.

_________

We are house-hunting and tired for it. Seems most of the cute bungalos around the North End are only genuinely cute if they're for sale or already under ownership. Should you want to rent one, and dare step inside with all the anticipation inspired by the rental's outward appearance (or photos on Craigslist), the setting you encounter will surely dismay you; will more likely please a ground squirrel holing up for winter, or a college student or starving artist doing the same, than it would a young family looking for a clean, decent place to let their kid roam about in. Everywhere we go we see the craftiest Craftsmans and the coziest Forties bungalows, all of which are already owned, with families outside working in the yard or kids swinging from the trees. So we’ve got house-envy pretty bad.

(I can’t believe I just wrote that last line: me, who’s lived how many seasons out the back of my truck or the depths of my backpack? Yes, life works on you, shapes you like a living piece of sculptor, and what the hand of time doesn’t get around to, the baby-fist of your first-born will smash asunder.)

On Sunday we took a break and went to a crafts fair in the Linen District. (The area was for decades where all of downtown’s laundry and linens were produced, washed and pressed.) The single-story brick and cinderblock factory buildings have innate modern lines to them, a minimalist style which has been picked up by the new shops and cafes that now occupy the two-block section of downtown. A mid-century era motel, renamed The Modern, has been sharply renovated with contemporary touches. The upper level of the Linen Building houses an art gallery, the high-ceilinged space with exposed timbers showing through the white walls and long views over town from the windows. After looking over the paintings, we toured the crafts show downstairs. While the old photo booth didn’t work, the rest of the participants in the show had some interesting products that did. We bought a bottle of good riesling from Holesinsky Wineries, located in Buhl, Idaho, out on the Snake River Plain; and a bar of oatmeal/lavender soap and lavender flowers from a nice old impeccably dressed man from a farm in Nampa. Anna nearly bought a pair of ear-rings that looked like they could've been hanging from a tree in San Francisco’s Candy Store. The young jewelry-maker belongs to the Visual Arts Collective, located in Old Boise, which is where we promised to find the artist and her wares once we had a little more money to spend.

After the show we wandered over to the café next door. Big City Coffee, with all it’s black and white photos and vintage signs on the walls, feels more like a roadhouse on the way out of town than a big city café. The place was lively and crowded with a mix of young and old, newspaper readers and onliners, hipsters in pegged jeans and ancient geezers in worn Wranglers. We shared a massive sandwich of thick slices of honey-glazed turkey and peals of green-leaf lettuce and tomato, sipped our coffees, and watched with hands-free delight as Ada, lodged in a highchair, made friends with three young girls who had gathered round from the next table to play with her. The girls were very sweet with her, fawning over her and twirling her hair. Ada loves other kids, is fascinated by older girls, and being a rough-and-tumble girl herself, she was in hog heaven as the girls became more courageous in their play, taking her hands and hugging her and pressing their funny faces into hers. She was so thrilled she about danced and howled herself out of the high-chair. We apologized to those nearby for our daughter’s obnoxiousness, but nobody seemed to mind. It was great to be able to sit back and eat and let the village kids do the baby-sitting. A similar experience happened a few days earlier when we were at the playground and some kids came over to play with Ada, all of them having a ball while their parents took advantage of the time to relax and relearn their English.

So despite our uncertainties and mid-night anxieties over whether we've made the right decision, it feels, most of the time, good to be here. Our apprehensions are mostly of the mind, while our bodies are beginning to feel at home here. Just as spring is meandering it's way north, so our spirits are catching up with us.