Newtown, Our Town

We stretch the skins across our skis, throw the hinges of our bindings, and with the snow falling in delicate curtains that hide the mountains, that make us forget the depths of loss that lie behind the lightness, begin our climb. A ravine of willows reaching out of the powder, red limbs fine and tapering into the gentle cascade. The snowy ridge dissolves in cloud, and when we gain it, the next ridge too is washed away. The faint squeak of our skis slipping through powder. Icicles hanging from the fir trees like Christmas ornaments, make cool suckers that wet the throat and slow your breath. 

We don't talk so much this time. The first climb we bubbled over like two college kids meeting on campus, talking in Italian and American, trading stories, translations of poetry, the pieces of our lives that show the whole. Now it's different. Now we are like old brothers who know already what the other is thinking. And besides there is little to say: the mountain decides our steps.

And beyond the mountain is a story we can hardly talk about. On the other side of that white and forested ridge, on the far side of the continent, is the classroom where it happened, the small winter town collapsed in grief, the parents hugging memories like shards of glass to their hearts. They are parents like us. Like us, not because we have lost like they have, but because we share the same great love, the same great risk. A love that holds open our souls to the pain of the world and makes us shake at even the smallest thought of suffering. Their children are our children, and our legs strain with the hard steps of the next turn, the hard doubt of its worth.

Random images sift out of the sky. Our wives and children asleep in warm beds as we unzip our coats to the thin cold. Rabbit tracks like pearls over a crest. A flash of the impossible, crimson on white, and then a shake of the head to clear the mind. Lanes of forest submerged in a charcoal sky.

The climb becomes a meditation, a practice of measuring the chill on your neck against the sorrow inside. The work of knowing loss while moving on, moving with it. Our capacity for love is a capacity for loss. The sensitivity of our hearts, of the hearts belayed to ours, is an awareness that at any moment, at any misstep, the beauty of the world can become an avalanche of suffering.

Yet we must carry on climbing. The next ski brought forward, weight shifted from one board to the other as you make the hairpin switchback, nearly falling back, catching yourself, a scent of fir brushed from heavy limbs.

A Drive with My Nonno

A drive with my nonno through the Venetian countryside: a cool bright morning of bare poplar trees, silt-dark fields that plane to the horizon, the grassy lane of a canal, fields tilled right to the edges of stone farmhouses. Everything is still but the rushing car. The exhilaration of the present. The countryside, ancient and smelling of woodsmoke, holds motionless for history to pass through. The narrow road curves through ranks of sycamore trees. In the distance we see the church spire of Ceggia, tile rooftops. Outside of town there's a crane and scaffolding – condominiums going up where a field once lay. My nonno gestures proudly with his cigarette at the progress. He is a boy again thrilled by the roads and machinery of Mussolini, the potency of speed.

We come to a small gas station so full of windows it could be a cafe. A lean kid fills his motor scooter at the pump. In suede jacket and defiant eyes I see my uncle in him: he's ridden right out of the Seventies and will find his gang of friends down a dirt road under the trees smoking cigarettes rolled with hashish, watching for the mountains to appear above the fields. A man in well-ironed coveralls steps from the station to help us, suddenly important in a day of boredom. The kid rides off, scooter whining, and I watch him grow small as the old men talk of the price of benzine.

We drive into town. The streets are quiet, banked by curving stone walls with the plaster pealing away; high forgotten windows that hold mysteries within their wooden shutters. A piazza fronted by bakeries, newspaper and clothing shops, a cafe who's small clinking sounds echo into the street. Bicycles left standing at the curb. A few people come and go on the narrow walk, passing each other with the polite brevity of family.

Inside the cafe, a coolness of tile floors, a faint sweetness of pastries and oranges from Sicilia wrapped in tissue paper. Before the hissing machina the barista works quietly. Young men read newspapers half standing in their stools, while the tables are taken over by retirees playing cards. My nonno orders coffee, but when I ask for a spritz a pause of disapproval narrows his eyes, not because I ordered wine, but because I ordered it out of season, the day's season.

He stands at the bar, the black potent drink before him, a cigarette held backwards in his cupped hand, content but noncommittal, prepared to return to the Alfa Romeo and the few errands that give our drive purpose, should he find the place lacking. He is a proud man, precise and controlled, with glinting blue eyes and good manners but never, you feel, one who truly listens to you. He is a man who knows very well how to do things, how things ought to be done, good with tools and gardens, yet his competency is limited to what he understands, and when the barista bumps his elbow while wiping the counter he smiles awkwardly to cover his disapproval. To improvise is to invite criticism.

Why is it, he once asked me, that the New World is not as good as this one? Why in a country so rich as America are the houses made of wood, the coffee made of water, the cars and women with no lines at all? I couldn't answer him, couldn't argue, in part because I didn't entirely disagree with the indictment, but mostly out of respect for him. He was as right as any old man deserves to be after living through the exactness of their lives. And who was I to say differently?

My disagreements are more subtle, there for him to narrow his eyes at or ignore. I order wine instead of coffee, I bicycle to Caole instead of taking the bus. But I try never to argue with him. That would be as pointless as arguing with the past. As cruel as waking someone from a dream.

And I rarely argue because I'm usually quite content. Like now, my elbow on the counter, a smooth euphoria rising in me with each sip of sparkling wine. Thin sunlight through the windows, shining the tables, the tiles at the feet of the old men playing cards. They play efficiently, leaving room between hands for more elaborate gestures. When the deck is finished a bit of laughter and kidding, then new rounds are dealt and their faces go serious: the unturned cards slim as blades on the table. We watch. The stillness of the cafe has made old men of us all. All but the card players with blood in them. Even the barista has grown ancient with watching; satisfied to let others make their moves, their mistakes. I could almost fall sleep in the ease of my contentment.

Then a click of heals on tile and everything changes. A dark-haired, slender woman has come into the cafe. She is not bad looking, she is fair game. The boys look past their newspapers, pleased to give up calcio and cards for that other more important sport. My nonno pretends not to notice her and here I couldn't disagree more with him. He returns to the card game and I watch my every move so as not to appear obvious. She sets her purse on the counter, smiles mildly at the barista, asks in a quiet but certain voice for a coffee, then searches in her purse for something that doesn't exist – a pause that gives her a moment to feel the eyes on her, to asses the room and how guarded or casual she must be. When she looks up it's with a slightly raised chin so that her eyes have the excuse of keeping above the men's glances. She takes in the street beyond the window. She's petite but her body carries a larger strength. She knows not to be flattered by the attention these men give, that to accept is to ask for more. Slowly, like tired children, the men's gazes fall away and return to the idle of their papers, their empty cups.

She watches the street earnestly now. She is alone and content. She is thinking of someone, perhaps, and does not notice the small white cup and saucer placed near her elbow. Her eyes crinkle with concentration, with recognition: an old woman walking past the glass, a thin skirt hugging her brute hips. She waves but the old woman is charging straight ahead. A moment of indecision, and just as her lips part to call she catches herself, unwilling to wreck the island she's made for herself. She finds her coffee and reaches for a packet of sugar. The little spoon clinks soothingly against the cup. She is alone now, belonging to the cafe, as forgotten as the old newspapers on spools hanging from the wall. When her coffee is finished she stands a few minutes longer, still looking out the window, before reaching into her purse to pay.

Midflight/Landlocked

1.

We lay in the hammock, a little shocked to be home.

In the September sky a lingering blue

of the coast,

of small white clouds and screeching sea birds,

the fizzing waves

of an ocean that only moments before

– wasn't it only moments before? –

held us by the ankles,

let us lean far out over that crinkling plane

and away

from the desert that awaited

our crossing.

2.        

Sebastopol, hazy vineyards and a brackish smell of the bay, Novato, Vacaville, ferocious traffic, a death race of freeways, Sacramento, Grass Valley, wispy foothills before the granite waves of the Sierra Nevada, then the fast dive to Reno, train trellises linking the cliffs, Lovelock, broken ridges sliding against a burnt sky, Winnemucca, a cheap motel room for the night. Then with morning, off the interstate and north through the sweeping desert, sagebrush and blond light, the dusty towns of McDermitt, Rome, Jordan Valley on the long shoulders of the horizon; the lone settler cabin on the climb over the Owyhee Mountains, the high broken rhyolite spine and down onto the Snake River Plain, sudden civilization, the river town of Marsing, apple orchards and withered corn fields, tractors pulling veils of dust into the sky, mint smell, the sprawl town of Nampa.

When we get to Boise the skies are milky with smoke from the forest fires in the region. The green of the valley after an endless desert; the trees of the North End cozy as a nest against the bare foothills. We begin unpacking the car while Ada sleeps in the back seat. The house feels vacant, like a face missing its eyes. I'm so disoriented, so doubtful, stunned as a bird batted out of the sky midflight, that after one bag I stand staring out the window at the horizon. I want to drink a bottle of wine and lay with old friends under the live oaks by the sea like we were doing another life ago. When Ada awakens I take her to the hammock and she nestles into my chest. The thought comes to me, Our souls haven't caught up to us yet. . . but they will . . . after a little work, they will.

Ada begins to get restless, to play the “Climb the Prow of the Ship Game”, shimmying high up onto the point of the hammock before tumbling back into my arms. Anna calls out the window for us to help with unpacking. We lay a bit longer, pointing out the wine colors beginning to show in the trees. “Will it still be automn when we get home home?” Ada had asked many times on our trip, excited to see Fall and very concerned the season would come and go before we got back. She was happy now to see the first colors, the fallen sycamore leaves and crab apples in the yard, the wilting garden. “What should we do,” I ask, feeling a bit restless myself, “go inside, or rake up the yard?”

And she shouts out her reply.   

At the End of the Tunnel

What Nick Garcia and The Empty Boat Theatre Company have done with his new play, There's Chinese Tunnels Under Boise, is create an archeological experience of the soul. Or rather, the soul of an Eighties hesher grappling with life, the loss of a girlfriend, and the wisdom burried in a video game. But I can't tell you anything more about the plot. For like any top-secret dig in the middle of the desert — yes, even the barrens of Boise, Idaho — Garcia's esoteric finds can't be revealed to the (unpaying) public until a deeper understanding of our memories and motives is decoded from the middens. Or from the Iron Maiden posters on the wall, the Schaefer beer cans littering the road. We may think we know the ghosts of our past, but what do they know about us? What do they have to show us about the false perceptions, the misplaced nostalgia, we pad around the clay-brittle edges of our most cherished memories? 

Like Elliot's The Wasteland, Tunnels floods the viewer's senses with cultural references only an initiate can fully appreciate. Yet this dizzyingly funny story runs deeper than it's cave paintings. Mixing comedy with tragedy, the play is a redemption song set to 70's and 80's rock and roll. And by the last scene we are left searching under the couch cushions for lost insights, broken joysticks, ancient clues as to who we think we are and why.   

The Experiment: Day Sixteen, the Lovely Wreckage

I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy.

                          – from Salter's A Sport and a Pastime.

Now another change. Gone is the ennui of the empty house, the clicking quiet of the wooden floors, the cool uncertain mornings, the faint despair that seeps in without having Anna and Ada with me. And while I miss them more than ever, I've gotten into a good dutiful rhythm of work and play: steady work at the house I'm remodeling, tending to the garden when I get home, a beer in the hammock with a book in my lap, or futball in the evenings with the immigrants at the park. All I seem to need – outside of my girls – is a simple life of sport and literature for work not to feel too pointless and for life to hold some beauty for me. My desires seems as reduced and refined as those of Salter's protagonist in A Sport and a Pastime; as simple and hearty as Turgenev's in Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

But of course that beauty is no more than a sugar high without the sustenance of my women folk. When I was single it wasn't that way. Beauty then was an ideal, an actual element on the chart, so real you could study it from every angle, pursue with your senses and know esthetically in your mind its existence from the materials and shapes of the world about you. I won't say that's changed. But somehow, with family, I have, or my pursuit of it has. I still value Beauty just as much, but have less time to approach it esthetically, yet more time, by demands of family life, to feel it in my heart. More time to know the beauty of my wife in the happiness and struggles of merely trying to make dinner or time to go for a walk; more time to know beauty through the dearness of my daughter growing and learning about the world. Perhaps it's a more grounded sense of beauty, a less theoretical one. Less prosody and more prose. Less prose and more pinch of Ada's plump cheeks, a cheeky question from her and a check on the old bachelor state of contemplative and sometimes self-indulgent interaction with life.

But interestingly, experimentally, it's been a state I've been able to slip back into these last weeks – which has been therapeutic for me, a good artistic relief. But now I'm ready for the lovely wreckage of family life again.

And knowing they're to return from Colorado in a couple days has had me kicking my heels in anticipation. For Ada's birthday I'm building her a playhouse in the side yard – five by five feet of salvaged lumber, two windows and a used door under a shed roof, clad horizontally in pine I'd salvaged from my job. I worked on it yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a blustery sky of chalk blue shaking the trees now and then and whirling sawdust up into my eyes. The little house came along, the framing slowly clad course by course like a sleepy girl pulling on her socks. I had meant, on my last big night solo, to ride off to a bicycle rally (the Hellodrome race put on Boise Bicycle Project), but the rhythm of work had me charging along, as did the suffusing excitement of knowing Ada and Anna were due home the next day. A beer and then a whiskey soda added to the suffusing, but not the saucing. Mixed drinks and miter saws go hand and blade. Yet I had that humming feeling, serene, that has you pausing to admire the windy light in the walnut leaves, the gliding shadows on the grass, the surging green of late spring over the valley and overhead like the whole world's a floating garden and you're just a chittering, nut-drunk squirrel tinkering away at your nest in the trees. Tinkering and sprucing and knowing your little fur family is soon to be with you, soon to be home.

While all that sounds a bit corny, it's true. And maybe that's what this three-week experiment has taught me: how much I've changed since my solo days – “grown” sounds self-congratulatory – to need my family close for any artistic effort to hold much meaning for me. Without Ada and Anna all the rest is a glorious sunset seen alone from a hilltop. That used to be alright, the being alone and the beauty just for me, perfectly alright. But it isn't anymore.

The Experiment: Day Eight

3 June 12

Who said, "History is what happened, but literature is what people thought about it"? Anyway, it's true. Reading Dos Passos' letters in the hammock under sifting leaves, a swollen blue spring sky; feeling connected not only to the world but to its history, through the time-capsule of Dos' missives.

At this point he's reporting for Life Magazine from Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and from his writing you get a real insider's feel for the subtleties and contradictions in the struggle between Socialism and Capitalism. Dos was perfectly on the side of the working man and Labor up through the Thirties. But what he and many, Orwell especially, saw in the Spanish Civil War was the divisive Communist Russian effort to put down any revolutionary elements in the fight against Franco. And later, when post-war Europe became a testing ground for “monolithic bureaucracy”, as Dos called it derisively, he grew wary of the Russian's designs on the rest of the continent. He was always for individual liberty and loathed any restriction put on it, whether by Capitalist monopolies or the one party systems claiming ground in eastern Europe.

Nowadays it's mostly conservatives on Fox News who do the clamoring for liberty. But the left has always been concerned about the matter, only from a different angle. The right's fear of Big Brother is so restricted to Big Government that it can't see how corporations have gotten a strangle-hold on our society. It won't even consider how government might be our only chance, through elections and civic participation, to have some say in the matter. (Other than doing all we can to buy local and avoid corporate production lines.) To the right, Government is just more oppressive bureaucracy, a hangover from twentieth-century Europe, while Business is the golden embodiment of Free Will trotting over the level playing field of the Free Market to deliver bounty to the masses.

But both gov and biz are just systems, intrinsically neutral until profit motives and human frailty are introduced. These days I'd sooner take my chances with a government of the people, one that must at least consider the results of the ballot box, than a massive corporate structure that feeds on profits and stock market value at all costs. What kind of “freedom” do we have when your choice in food stuff is a decision between CrackDonald's and Maulmart, when the radio plays an elevator music medley of classic rock and jingoistic country, when the only way out of your suburban coldesac is a drive and then an onramp and an offramp into another suburban culdusac, or when the only option politically is a right of center Republican and slightly less than right of center Democrat, both in the sway of industry interests. The few “freedoms” we see manifested these days are typically coming out of the left, alternatives to the “monolithic bureaucracy” of the corporate model in the form of non-profit and public radio, a return to small-scale organic farming, efforts to improve mass transit and healthy communities through bicycle facilities, etc. I point out the obvious only because I'm tired of the right's constant claim to protectorate of individual liberty when they're the ones in the driver's seats of the SUV caravan rolling over the little guys out front scouting for new paths out of this mess.

Now I'm beginning to rant, and make bad metaphors, and ruining a serene swing in the hammock. I don't know if the far right and far left can ever unite in their fight for “individual liberty.” But a mis-portrayal of the labor movement as merely the villain in the Cold War isn't helping. (See public sector scape-goating from Minnesota to Idahota.) Socialism was around long before the Cold War and what the Communist Party did under its banner, long before it became Reagan's whipping boy. A good read of the thinkers of the past century certainly does help one's view, though, and spirit. Twain said, History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. But, may I add, only if we're listening for its verses. And those tunes surely aren't being played on the corporate air waves.

The Experiment: Day Three

26 May 2012

Woke this morning with difficulty getting out of bed, due in part to soreness from soccer the other night, yet due in larger part to the lonesomeness of the house. A patter of rain on the roof, the flush green trees and white bell flowers of the courtyard. Where is my little Ada tramping about the rooms calling for us to make breakfast and start the day? Prying myself out of bed, the first thing to do was make a fire, give some soul to the house. I put on a coat and carried the wicker basket outside to the wood pile under the dripping eaves, came back in and made a snapping fire in the hearth. Then with Weekend Edition on the radio keeping me company, made coffee, eggs and toast, tidied up the kitchen and ate breakfast at a table very empty despite the newspaper sections scattered across it.

I have one duty today: to get out query letters for the novel. Duty lends structure, but not purpose. That must come from within. Oh where oh where is my Anna and Ada to distract me from it all?

The question we are faced with is the question that is always there, even if at times the noise of family life obscures it: what am I to do with my life? Practically speaking the question appears as: what am I to do today? But that is just an incremental exercise of the larger dilemma. And if, like most of us, you don't have a sure answer for the primary question, then merely spooning coffee grounds into the pot can feel like a colosol effort against the question of existence. This is where religious types might step in and coach faith and purpose found in god. But it's also where more skeptical souls might eschew those comforts for the hard-earned insights of doubt. Sartre's protagonist in “The Wall”, knowing that by not doing nothing he has condemned his comrade to death. In Buddhism there's a maxim: the roots of your doubt must be as deep as the roots of your faith. We can't get too cozy in our ideas about the world or our own existence. Discomfort is like a poker at the fire, keeping the logs turned over and the artistic flames snapping.

Speaking of discomfort, last night I wandered into something pleasantly strange. Tired as I was, I couldn't stand being in the desolate house and went for a walk downtown just to get some air, a drink, a view of the piled silver clouds left over from the rain, a catch at whatever randomness might throw at me. And for my efforts I found a band from Italy (from Treviso, in fact, not far from Venice) playing at a coffee shop on Main. Father Murphy is their name, and by how good and obscure they were, I couldn't help wondering what the hell they were doing in this tiny venue with only about thirty people watching them. The three-piece included a skinny guy on guitar, a woman who looked like Patty Smith on keyboard, and a mad genius on drums. Adjectives? Haunting, deconstructive, Noise but clean, cerebral, ceremonial, a continuous contorting dirge that comes at you in shearing waves that make you think of industrial warehouses on the outskirts of Milano. The vocals were more melodic wail than singing; the drumming more likely to convert the kit into a cello or a sheet of torn silk than to produce rhythm; the guitar a fiercely plucked harpsichord. It was all just dark enough to make you wonder how the musicians could endure their own lives.

But then after the show I talked with them and they turned out to be perfectly charming, kind, polite Italians. (It's so typical to meet some rough-looking Italian punk and they're the nicest cordial kid you'd ever want to introduce to your nonna. All good mamma's boys at heart!) I didn't catch the drummer's name, but we chatted about Treviso, the punk scene in Portguero, the six-month tour they were making across the U.S., the long stretch between Chicago and Seattle that had them stopping over in SLC and Boise, the friend of their producer who set up this weird little gig. I told him I'd never seen drums played like he did. Yes, he replied, he was trained as a violinist and always forgets he is playing drums. He was excited to see Seattle and Olympia, as Nirvana and Cobain were big inspirations when he was young. I met the other two band members, thanked them for the incredible show, and we wished each other a reunion in Italia.

And then I walked out into the quiet night. And for a little while I'd done it, forgotten my doubt, left my little patch of existence for the nether realms of a punk band from the land of my ancestors, the land of my escapism.

The Experiment: Day One

23 May 12

Now here's an interesting experiment: Take a rather solitary fellow, used to typing or striking it out on his own, make a family man of him – a full convert, doting dad and happy hubby – and then pull his wife and daughter away from him for a few weeks and see what becomes of him in the wake. A contented reversion to his original hermitic self? Or an eddying emptying soul unable to make up his mind if he should scramble eggs for dinner or rake the leaves in spring or type love-sick sonnets on the old Royal gathering dust in the toolshed?

Day One: driving away from the airport, wistful visions of Ada blowing me kisses from Anna's arms as they mill into the crowd of the loading dock; arriving at home, dumbfounded by the silence of the house, the placid order of things, no random toys underfoot to twist an ankle, no wild bawling or screeching or laughing to echo the walls and swirl the mind. A sparrow chirping in the yard, it's call sharp as glass in the quiet. What to do? And what for? Sit down to write a novel in the 18 days I've got to myself? In one go put down all the stories I've had pent up inside by the flurrying demands of family life?

Or put on the game? One game. Relax a little in the void. So I watched the second half of the Timber's versus Chicago soccer match, then, needing to move or sink entirely into oblivian, I bicycled to the gym, shot around, did a round of weights, then returned home and with a sad plate of dinner on my lap (reheated pasta, pan-fried Italian sausages, garlic-stuffed olives and strips of nori for “salad”, nothing that took any kind of effort, of course – oh, the great force required to pop a Peroni!) watched the Sounders match interspersed with runs of the Sixers-Celtics playoff game. When it was all pathetically over I showered and fell asleep reading Dos Passo's Adventures of a Young Man.

And that's who I was again, a young man. An older man idling in a younger man's track and the course was unsatisfying, boring as hell, in fact. Sports as filler? Books do so much more than fill, but still even reading seemed a prop against the vast lonesomess hanging like a Hokusai wave over the bead. I dreamt weirdly of Christopher Hitchen's voice, reading from an essay on his literary influences while rows of shelved dusty books flew by my nose.

Springing Through Us

Spring

The pear blossoms are pure

White against the blue green willows.

The willow cotton blows in the wind.
The city is full of flying pear flowers.

The petals fallen on the balcony look like snow.

How many Spring Festivals are we born to see?

         -- Su Tung Po (from Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems               
                                                                               from the Chinese)

Outside my window the crab apple tree is in full bloom – a hot pink that curls back the eyelashes. It's as if the old gnarled tree lifted her dress to show the fine legs and frills of a dancing girl in one of Lautrec's paintings, and I can't stop staring. The contrast between rough, earth-dark, knot-holed branches going every which way in a mess of neglect and the delicate heaps of mauve and rouge petals spilling both skyward and into you is a strange inducement of love and sympathy and sorrow. The kind of feeling you get when you see a picture of your grandmother in her lovely youth.

The poignancy of Spring, the rush of beauty that reminds us in its rushing of its passing. It's hard to take sometimes. The first crocuses and daffodils and tulips trickling in, and then the buildup of golden rod and pear blossoms and plums before the surge of magnolia and cherry, dogwood and locust, the sycamores dumping seed pods into the streets, the trees faintly green and faintly greener each day as you strain not to miss a leaf of it. You almost want to duck your head and wait out the flurry until the somnolent heat of summer arrives. Almost.

I like how the Japanese make a national holiday of the blooming cherry trees. To think it's actually a national past time to go out picnicking under the white blossoms and drink wine and read poetry and gaze out at the elements as though a kind of prayer, a kind of religious act, were being experienced.

And of course it is. Through that prayer, up in those snowy flowers, in the pale spring sky, is the life of all of us, from chittering squirrels to the spirit of long-dead gramps in the clouds, from the kids goofing in the grass to the woman beside you with her bare shoulders in the sun. If you take a moment to look, that's what you see and that's what hurts most in seeing it: the beauty of us all with the goneness of us all, the petals holding in their perfection their passing, revealed in the turn of the seasons, as we ourselves are, our families are, our loves and hopes and downfalls are, as the longest prettiest afternoon spent drinking wine and watching up at the clouds is, fading only to come through us again. Though somehow it's always the gone feeling that sticks, deep as the apple blossoms are bright.

Coyotes and Handkerchiefs

22 February

An afternoon of steady light snowfall, a good fire snapping in the hearth, Caruso singing from the record player, and Ada sleeping soundly in her jumper. (One moment she's leaping for the moon, the next she's flopped over her saddlehorn snoozing like a drunk cowboy.)

Yesterday we went to see La Boheme at the Egyptian Theater – a surprisingly good show that had the tears soaking my shirt collar long before poor Mimi's death. The soprano who played her, a Greek with a clear light-filled voice who looked not unlike Maria Callas, had me reaching for my handkerchief with every aria. It's pathetic how often one cries at operas, if only because as drama they're so goofy on the surface. If you only read the librettos you'd find the stories lacking, unrealistic, maudlin, verbose, etc. But add the soaring music, the compressed experience of a theater house that reduces all the world to a single poignant drama, the beauty of the human voice shaping cathedrals in the air, the loss of yourself in that beauty, and before you know it tears are trembling from your lashes and emotions and memories long put away are tremmoring up to the surface. In a way opera is good therapy. Was it Sophocles who said great tragedy must be cathartic in the end?

Opera is so peculiar, what with all its silly yet effective artifices. The mere movement of acts is a lesson in story arc. I love how you'll hear some famous, bittersweet passage of music and what is actually being said onstage is “my feet hurt, take my shoes to the cobbler.” Or “the old man has stamina,” or some other sexual innuendo that Italians can't refrain from. You're reminded of who opera was really written for back in the day – not just the ladies and gentlemen in the box seats, but the poor sops in the back row reaching for their flasks and hankies.

1 March

More snow! We're making up for a scoreless first half of winter. Yesterday it dumped all morning, heavy as a down comforter thrown over the neighborhood, the black trees silhouetted in white and looking very Victorian.

Here's news: have been working a desk job, the first in my life. I'm a project manager for a certain green building company in town and for once I'm not sweating at hauling lumber or a fire pack. Strange to see the hours go by and nothing of material mounting in front of you. Oh, things are getting done, but they're like spiderwebs, intricate and invisible until you walk through them and gunk up the works. The spiderwebs are built of phone calls and emails and bids coming in from contractors and more phone calls and meetings with clients and the only time you get up from your chair is to lean over the plans or pace the office like a house cat watching the snow tumble down through the wrought iron limbs of the maple trees outside the window, hoping to catch sight of the mailman.

Not that I'm not liking the job. It's great, actually; fine people and a good opportunity to learn something new. Something so new that the change in duties is akin to an anthropological experiment. I figure by the age of forty everyone should have swung a hammer or worked with their hands somehow; so to be fair, the same life-criteria must go for having worked an office job. I simply never knew what it was like. There's that restless feeling of a school boy looking past his books out the window at the day outside, envious of the squirrels, the delivery man barreling past in his yellow truck. I can stand staring at a screen when writing only because when writing I'm somewhere else. I'm skiing with or putting on motives or pouring a drink for one of my characters. I am on the other side of that window, leaving the school books behind.

But office work doesn't leave much play for the imagination. It's numbers and hard lines of plans and none of that Byronic stuff that so distracts a dreamer. It's work, and one must work doing it, and I welcome the chance to test my strength at it. Though this is no ordinary office job: I'm working with people in the trades who are salty characters any writer would be glad to know; and we're building something quality, a house not some pyramid scheme, and once this big remodel gets rolling I'll be on site much of the day, back to using my back, surely cursing enough to clear my soul of the abstracted spiderwebs, refreshed for the comforts of the office again, where I can save my hurting knees for the slopes.

7 March

Why is it we constantly want what we don't have? When we get older and look back that want is called nostalgia. And when we're young with the world before us the urge is romantic. But when we're somewhere in the middle, with fire still in us but the woodpile lowering, when we see how certain things are playing out and must decide whether to accept them with some contentment, or to fight on at risk of overlooking the good things one does have in life – what do we call it then? Sentimentality? A heightened tendency to bawl at the opera house?

Speaking of romance, in the early hours the coyotes and horned owls can be heard calling and hooting for each other longingly across the hills. A yellow warbler pair hovering at the bird feeder. First spears of crocus appearing in the yard. A waft of warm weather from the south and like a good bird herself Ada refuses to stay indoors. Springtime is her favorite new word. Though I want is the champion phrase of the day. Can't say I blame her, considering the season, the near end of winter when the faintest smell of sunshine drives the bugs to hatching, the redwings to trilling, and every species of teenager to wearing short-shorts in mid-fifties weather. I want is what nature puts in us to roust us out of winter, the season and the stage. The photo of W.C. Williams as an old man smiling among the plum blossoms comes to mind. And the yank of Ada wanting me to quit writing comes to hand.

Occupy Boise, Part 2

C. sat at a wooden picnic table sipping coffee in the wintry morning sun that warmed a corner of the Occupy Boise grounds. The sun lit up the tesselated face of the old state courthouse, its Deco tower rising with monumental grace above a quiltwork of tents and canvas structures and hand-painted banners. Across from C. sat M., who smoked a cigarette and nodded in agreement as she spoke.

“The police were pretty good, actually,” she said, fluttering long red-painted fingernails from her broad hands. “They blocked off the streets and guided us right through downtown. It was a march to remember all the homeless that died this year, twelve of them, and two counselors, too. Did you ever know —?” she mentioned a name I didn't recognize. “He was a sweet old man. I even tried to set my mom up with him. He just liked to go sit by the river, under the bridge that was his place. He'd have a drink and watch the river. So sweet. He was one that died.”

“Because of the cold?” I asked.

“No, that was in June. I don't know how he died. But it was for folks like him that we marched, to remember them.”

As C. spoke, her voice began to deepen with trust, her big brown eyes settled on me and her hands calmed in her lap. She found her coffee mug and took a pleased sip. “So you're a writer, huh? You know what someone should do? They oughta do a biography of everyone here. Everyone's got a different reason for why they came. You can't pin it on just one story. That's why I'm starting my nonprofit — for the mentally disabled. It's called Dream,” she glowed proudly. “I wanta talk about the issues we're having around here, and the politics that's going on. But I want it to be nice, you know? Not like Disneyland nice, but community nice, without the mean politics. I even got a television show I'm starting.”

“A television show?”

“Yeah, on community access. I'll get people from the community and counselors to come on and talk about stuff that matters to us.”

“You'll host it?”

“I will,” she said confidently, then laughed: “A friend said I'll be the Oprah of Boise.”

We got up to walk around and keep warm. M. had left us to get more coffee from the mess tent. Ada, who had remained cuddled in my arms, feeling shy before the strangers, now wanted down to walk too. The many different types and colors and conditions of the tents – some neat as a nun's habit, others wind-sunken with fallen leaves, were of great interest to her. “Look,” she pointed, “there's a funny man.” And sure enough, there was. Seated on a foldout chair was a halloween skeleton, the words “We the People” bandaged on his head, and “Citizens United” painted on a butcher knife burried in his ribs. “Yes, a very funny man,” I said, directing her attention to the stout stairway leading up to the courthouse foyer. Ada loves stairs the way monkeys love monkey bars.

While C. went ahead to the communications tent, where she hoped to show me their internet connection and library, Ada and I scaled the stairs and rapped our fists on the brass lamp posts. C. returned shortly and invited us into the communications tent. She held back the flap door, and the gamey smell of a season spent camping in the cold was enough to make me hold back a charging curious Ada. I looked in and nodded at the sullen young man sitting before a computer screen amid a small floorspace crowded with blankets and piled clothing and manuals and a forlorn guitar standing against a canvas wall.

“That electrical chord is coming from the courthouse?” I asked, stepping back into the cold clean sunlight.

“Yes, they been pretty good about it.” C. dropped the door flap, sensing my reluctance to enter. “We got to keep the place clean,” she said admittedly. “There's a rule against drinking. Of course, at night some of us go off to have a drink.”

We started to walk again. “There's the library tent, and the clothes tent.” A man strode by carrying two tall thermoses. “Hot cocoa, anyone?” he called. He stood the thermoses on the ground and removed two styrofoam cups from the stack in his arms, poured cocoa into the cups and handed them to us. I kneeled beside Ada, blew on the hot drink, and let her have a sip. “Made it myself,” said the man. “Ground the cinnamon myself too.”

The man, a fast-talking type, a pastor, I would soon learn, jumped into conversation with C. about the grand assembly the Occupy members were having in an office in the Capitol building. “So many ideas,” he said, “so many points of view. The problem with the left is we work at it from the outside. Everybody's on the outside working towards a common idea. The right is already in lockstep. They start narrow and work out from there.”

“David's working on a story,” C. informed the pastor.

“Yeah,” he studied me. “A story for who?”

“I won't know till I write it.”

“Well you better get it right! The other day a couple of journalists from Salon came down here, and there happened to be a bunch of Tea Partiers here too, and guess who they interviewed? The woman asked all the questions and the man wrote the story and got it all wrong.” The pastor began to rant, a little abstractedly, about politics and media misperceptions of the Occupy Movement. I liked his ideas but I didn't like his ranting, abstracted as it was.

Thankfully Ada, bored, squirmed away from us and ran back to the solid white stairs. The girl's instincts are sharp, alright. I thanked the pastor for the cocoa and excused myself. C. caught up to us. She put her big hands on her knees and bent forward to Ada. “This is for you, Ada,” she said, and handed her a small cloth American flag on a stick. Ada watched C. to make sure the gift was indeed for her to have. “That's right, you keep it,” smiled C. Ada looked at me. “Can we put it on the bike, daddy?”

A Short Posting

Ski season is here. After months of arid blue skies we've finally been hit with a series of storms across the Northwest. Six inches of snow in the Boise valley were slushed away with days of rain, but the Front is still white and billowy. I had the afternoon off, and Ada being with her grandmother, I jumped in the truck and sped up to Bogus Basin for a few hours of skiing. To the south, the valley was hidden in clouds, but the backside of Bogus was in sunshine. It's a great feeling to look down on clouds: clouds threading apart in the rosy afternoon light, nearly within hand's reach; the sky opening to the north above rolling white-blue mountains and the white shards of the Sawtooth Range some sixty miles away.

It was Monday and just about nobody was up skiing. There was a four to six inch layer of new powder in the trees, enough to make my legs forget that this was the first telemark venture of the year. Perhaps the nice thing about the late snow arrival is its nearness to Spring. We don't have months and months of snow to dig through, and the tinge of warmth in the air gives both an elated spring feeling and a sense of urgency, even sentimentality, to those of us who love being in the snowy mountains. Of course, the dry winter will cost us. Summer and its fires will come. But for now it was good to have a dose of the white stuff, watch the spinning gold of the clouds against the pale blue, and forget the concerns below.

Occupy Boise, Part I

18 December 2011

Yesterday Ada and I went to visit the Occupy Boise campsite, located downtown on the grounds of the old state courthouse. As we entered the patchwork of tents and canvas structures, some trimmed out festively for the holidays, others bearing cardboard signs (Pardon our dust – we're building a better world), a small group standing by the mess tent noticed us and waved. I waved back, and Ada, in my arms, felt emboldened to do the same. One of the group approached us. She was a smiling, dolled-up middle-aged woman who might have stepped right out of a PTA meeting. Following behind her were two others: an old thin black man, and a scruffy white guy who looked tired and dowdy as if he'd just finished a long shift in a factory. Through the tent flap I could see a man stooped over a griddle cooking breakfast for others huddled at the tables. The morning was frigid and except for the breakfast being made, the grounds were quiet, the private tents closed protectively against the frozen sky and the thicket of bare trees overhead.

The dolled-up woman reached out her hand and brightly made introductions. I sensed in that moment their ownership of the grounds, as well as their hope that here was someone — a someone who would bring their young daughter here — who had sympathy for their cause. But politics was not the first thing out of their mouths. The woman looked polished for a reason. She had dressed up to come down here and support the Occupiers, and despite the cold, wasn't it a great day to be alive?

“I don't stay here during the week,” she said. “I only come down weekends to help out. Isn't it great? It's important for our country. So I come down and do what I can.” I asked what that was. “Oh, mostly talk to people. Get the message out. There's a big march on Monday, from the Anne Frank Memorial. You should come, bring your girl,” she enthused, glowing like a cheerleader. I asked what she did, and she upended my expectations by telling me she was a real estate agent, living in the small town of Marsing, an hour away by the Snake River. “We've all got to do what we can,” she nodded at Ada, as though acknowledging the child was doing her part just by being here. “All of us, to take back our country from the corporations and the rich who control it. You know, we've all got more in common than you think. The other day a guy came down here, a tea-partyer, and after we talked awhile he realized we were in the same boat. You just gotta focus on the same problems we all have. This one here's a tea-partyer, too.” She motioned to the white guy, who was talking earnestly with the black man. You had the feeling that all about the grounds quiet determined conversations about the betterment of the country were simmering in the tents and over the breakfast tables and among those standing about slapping their sides to keep warm. “Or he was a tea-partyer. He was just looking for something to grab on to, politics-wise. Then he lost his job. And here he is.”

The men joined us and for a while we talked politics while Ada, to my surprise, watched on without boredom, intrigued by these characters. We began to stroll, compelled by the cold to keep moving. There was a big common tent for gathering and socializing, an open tent which held clothes racks full of sweaters and second-hand garments, a row of port a potties, and other tents situated for the common needs of the grounds. A thick-gauge electrical chord ran to the common tent from an outlet at the side of the courthouse, and I remembered something I'd read about the city, to the dismay of many on the right, allowing the Occupiers to use their power. In all, the city had been fairly accommodating to the Occupiers, compassionate, you might say, to their suffering in the cold.

The old man and I fell back and I asked him where he was from. “San Francisco,” he said. When I told him Ada was born in the City, how we'd lived there for many years, he paused, his face lighting up, and smiled grandly into Ada's eyes. “You from San Francisco too!” Ada can be very cautious around strangers, but now she returned the old man's deep smile.

“You know,” he said proudly, “I have a boy, too.”

“Does he live out here?”

“Well, he was in Snake River,” he waited for me to recognize the name.

“The river?”

“The prison. Over by Ontario. He done seven years there.”

“And that's why you came out here, to be near him?”

“Yes.”

“But he's out now? He's doing alright?”

The old man's face lit up again, a radiant sad joy: “My boy is doing good. My boy is doing good.”

We walked about under the leafless oak and silver maple trees. The old man talked dreamily of San Francisco. Boise had been good to him — “the people are very nice here” — but he longed to be back near the water and hills of the bay. He spoke slowly, precisely, and the space between his words was the dream space of the open road, the careful space that one develops around themselves after years of being alone and wandering. I could tell the old man had a great love, or at least a great memory of love, for his boy, and he needed to be near his son in order to give body to that love. His son was living in San Francisco again and soon he meant to move back there. I hoped that he would, but I couldn't help feeling that it was all just more dreaming, the story he told himself and strangers to give some narrative to his life, some texture just out of reach.

As we circled around to the mess tent, Ada began to get cranky. She was cold and restless. The other two had gone inside the mess tent for breakfast, and the old man and I stopped to say our goodbyes.

“So I guess you'll be leaving for SF soon?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said adamantly. “I got work to do still. I'll be here till spring, at least.”