Little Traveller

18 July 09

Sometimes Ada moans frightfully in her sleep, or catches her breath like she’s wrestling with a nightmare, then wakes with a startling cry. It's a bit haunting, actually. We try to wake and calm her before things go too far. It makes us wonder what a baby could possibly have to dream about, and why nightmares? What could they dream of, except those things they carry into this life: the knapsack of their subconscious full of the relics of past lives.

Late last night Ada cried convulsively, as though from some deeply pained place, all the hurt of humanity twisting up from it — the poor girl red-faced and arms snapping. Anna and I took turns with her, both too tired to curse. Where does the convulsion come from? Or is it nothing more than a bb of gas passing through? That tiny pain a holocaust to her? Or some ancient memory of a holocaust?

Then a calm night's sleep, and in the morning she's curled against Anna softly as a rabbit, awake as her mother sleeps, cooing to herself, big eyes looking about the room contentedly, studying the old painting of poppy flowers above the bed, a smile hooking up one side of her mouth, our room a world of beautiful fantasy to her. I don’t know what tires you more as a parent, the lack of sleep or the course of emotions you’re run through.

Anna’s mother Claudia is here for the week. After busy days of helping us with chores about the house, we called it quits and made a trip to Montara Beach. Ada’s first visit to the ocean! The wind was blowing so we set up my one-man tent as a refuge and made a picnic lunch. Afterwards I carried Ada – to mild protests from mother and grandmother – down to the water's edge. She strained to look about at everything, the sandy pock-marked cliffs and the pale cloud-shredded sky, the tan beach arching away before the crashing waves tumbling in like falling mountains. I went in shin-deep, reached down and brought up a palm of water, which I lightly poured over Ada's head. Her face soured and she began to cry as I put my pinky into her mouth so she could taste the water running down her cheeks. Then I said a little prayer aloud to her and the thrashing sea, asking for it's blessing, that the waters of the world be with her and grant her their steady strength. I'm not a religious man, and if I was I'd fall closer to animist than any other. But I'm just superstitious enough to want to cover my bets and keep the sea on our side. Call it a pagan baptism. Soon Ada quit crying and began looking about again, her blonde lashes sparkling as she blinked against the sharp light. I gave her a kiss, told her she was a good girl, a good tough water girl now, with all the world and its waterways of travel before her, and brought her back to momma.

The Work that Shapes Us

13 July 2009

Work. The dream/invention/invented dream of modern man is to escape from work. Work transformed into something cruel and unnatural and shackling by the Industrial Age and its smoke stacks and assembly lines and fourteen-hour work days. A mechanical degree of separation between one’s life and one’s self-sustenance. And so what was once natural and dignifying becomes toilsome and deforming, becomes work. A wall to be climbed or crushed against, daily. Yet it’s not only the worker who dreams of freedom from toil, but the artist. To be free not merely of work, but of the mundane. Free to make something more of life than survival — in short, free to make something beautiful.

I sometimes wonder if the guys on the job feel the same everyday burden of work as I do. It’s interesting that the stereotype of Mexicans was once of the loafer, sombrero pulled down over his eyes as he dozed in the afternoon sun, because nowadays the stereotype has swung to the other extreme, of tireless worker, day laborer or migrant farmer or landscaper in the August heat, willing to toil for longer hours and cheaper pay than his Anglo counterpart.

The Latinos I work with rarely complain about the task at hand, even on Monday mornings, which for me is usually the grimmest sharpest point of the workweek sword. I find myself wondering if they aren’t more genuine workers than I am. Or if they aren’t “workers” to their core being, who don’t mind at all doing what is merely in their nature. But I know that’s bullshit, an enlargement of the new stereotype. It’s something the upper classes have been telling themselves for generations: the lower classes love and live to work.

The reality is, outside of disparities of pay and conditions, that work is work for all workers. Work is hard, usually dirty, sometimes painful and dangerous, and unless the job is of your own enterprise, only occasionally rewarding.

The other day I was doing a job with S., sistering up 2x6’s to the existing rafters in the roof. It was a difficult task, but we got after it, and the feel of the hefty lumber in our hands and the strength in our shoulders as we climbed the ladders carrying the boards and wrangling them into position, flat alongside the old rafters, straining to hold them there until the jack, extended by a post, was cranked up to drive them the extra inches, the new 2x6 and the old stiff rafter creaking upwards to the string line we’d pulled taught to establish a new level line, and the pop pop pop of the nail gun riveting the boards together, making them one, until all of those motions were a rhythm that made us forget our toil and the passing hours. That’s not entirely true. We didn’t forget the toil, as much as the rhythm of work became an exercise that felt good to our moving bodies. The toil became a half-pleasant task. And the day became a good one because we began to enjoy the job.

But the morning had not started out that way. The morning, for me, had started out with a gloomy Monday resentfulness over being forced back to work. I could tell S. was in a low mood too, though I didn’t know if it was for the same reason. I said something derogatory about the “pinche rafters” we had to hoist.

S. laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Everyday trabajo,” he said.

“Everyday. You don’t get tired of it?”

“Si,” he smiled pitifully. “But every month, the bills are coming, no?”

That seemed to sum it up, both matter-of-factly, and philosophically. The bills are waiting and so is the work to be done. What escape is there from the cycle? And why must the cycle exist at all, or be so cruel to our human natures? If we don’t like such a life, why have we created it for ourselves?

I have a love/hate relationship with work. It’s been the coal in the furnace of my engine, feeding a long train’s drive towards that ineffable something — art, writing, beauty — which in turn has been an escape, or a diversion, from the demands of economics. The blue collar in me both believes in and loathes work. The good kind — using your hands, shaping materials that in turn shape you, getting a little dirt under your nails and sweat on your brow — is healthy for you. The good kind restores something primal and necessary and animal in us.

My first jobs, started at the age of twelve, were lawn-mowing, baby-sitting, sweeping up construction sites after school, and I paid my first income taxes when I was fifteen and working as a dishwasher for a restaurant in downtown Boise. Since then I’ve done everything from bartending to carpentry, wildland firefighting to river guiding, landscaping to bailing hay. The work has been good for me, and probably there’s a healthy heap in store for me still. But it’s one thing to be working to pay your own way, sticking through a season or two in order to save up pay so that you can cut loose for a stretch and travel and loaf and have time to write or do your thing. Work then is a very practical and direct means to not having to work, to economic liberty.

But when you’re a father and your family depends on you to pay the rent and car insurance and groceries for the week, the sudden $1000 hospital bill, then work is no longer something you can just take or leave, but something that has you by the balls. Then you don’t see the sunny end of the work season, where you’ll be sitting in cafes in Milano, or skiing the peaks above Lake Tahoe, free for a long while to roam and write and flirt with life. No, you don’t see that now. You see one long ongoing epoch of indebtedness and indenturement. How can a workingman make enough money to pay for his family’s well being, when his own includes a fundamental need for time off? For art and life, writing and family, leisure and travel? We all need that, not just the writers and artists of the world. It’s part of our human nature to loaf and observe and fiddle about in the world around us.

I think of how good pre-agricultural peoples had it, and especially the natives of North America, with this vast and beautiful landscape around them. It’s estimated that most hunter-gather societies spent an average of two or three hours a day on subsistence. Three hours of subsistence a day? Leaves a lot of time for pot making and basket weaving and story telling and stick sharpening, doesn’t it? It’s too simple and reductionist to glorify those faraway days. But then, I’m not so complicated after all. All I need is to get satisfaction from what I must do, and to have plenty of time for the things I want to do. Plenty of time for family and art. And having those things, when the time comes to lift new rafters into the roof, I’ll be more than happy to put my shoulders into the job.

The Baby-Faced Gangster

19 July 09

Ada is as cute and sweet as all get out. I’m sure she’s no different from other babies in her ability to charm her parents. There's an evolutionary reason babies are so darling: to keep crazed sleepless parents from putting the screeching kid outside the cave door at night. Evenings have been tough. Ada gets fussy and requires constant attention, bouncing in arms and an impromptu song or whistled melody as I trot up and down the hallway, acting organ grinder and dancing monkey at once. Was going to write about how down I've been with stress of work and having no time to myself, and even less time to read and write. The chained feeling of suddenly having to work for three, and my own lack of creativity and insight causing me to lumber under the weight of daily survival, slouched and ground-staring, from here to long past my remaining green days. But then the thought of that darling girl made me laugh and forget my selfishness.

Ada is actually laughing now, an abrupt little cough of a laugh, her big-cheeked smile cocked up on one side like James Cagney, eyes narrowing dubiously. In fact, many of her expressions have a wry quality, sly and scrutinizing. She's the baby-faced gangster seeing through your cheap moves, pushing away that pathetic unloaded pistol of a bottle, ignoring your hapless pleas, unmoved by your late-night dancing pantomimes for peace. For a while we weren't sure if her smiles were anything more than mere facial experimentations. But that laugh of hers is the real deal, a crack of lightning through the clouds.

Rivulets

17 July 09

My friend O.V. wrote me the other day about how now that he and his wife have their baby boy he feels — not in a morbid, but rather, in a liberating way — that it’s safe for him to die. Not too soon, of course. What he meant to say is that he’ll now live on through his son. And I think he feels some relief in that assurance. By living on he didn’t mean only by blood line, but by story line, the family lore, the memories and tall tales and history that is something larger than our own period of living, yet to continue it must be carried on by our children, just as we’ve carried, and cared for, the stories of our parents and grandparents.

I don’t know if I described that properly. Another attempt: should my writing go nowhere else, it’ll have been worth all the effort that Ada might someday read my journals and know something more of our lives and her history; her back story, as they call it in novels. From my writing, and the family remembrances we recall to her on long drives and mountain hikes and evenings staying up late, she becomes our tale-bearer, our story-carrier. Our memories will be retold and thereby outlive us.

I believe that’s what O. meant. He’s a writer also and I know he thinks along such lines. All the published books in the world are great, but without readers, they’re merely tombstones on the shelf. Similarly, what becomes of the family history if there are no children to pass it down to? The image of a stream trickling out onto an arid plain comes to mind. A child is a dashing river, into which you can never pour too many stories, good or bad, factual or fiction, so long as there is truth to them.

I like how Steinbeck puts it: fiction is a true story about something that didn’t happen. But that’s another idea for another day. Or is it? I think of all the fireside stories my nutty grandma used to tell us when as kids my sister and I used to stay with her at her cabin: bears that came around in the night and ate children whole; a great aunt who died because she’d never fart in public and so got her intestines in a terminal tangle; her insane brother who should have been in a state hospital but instead sat in his wheelchair in the front yard masturbating and babbling at passersby; how the marijuana plants she was growing on the front porch were just for looks and how she was growing them as a favor for her Mexican friend who liked the smell of them; how our grandpa was in fact gay and she had proof of the men he ran around with . . .

I don’t know if I can sift any truths from these tales, but I remember them well, and perhaps the larger truth I learned as a kid was that sometimes people tell you crazy things that shouldn’t be believed on the whole, and sometimes those people themselves are crazy, and sometimes the crazy person is your grandma, and the love you feel for her shouldn’t be confused with the troubling things she might say and do.

But confusion there is. A good history always contains a dubious or dark or debated strain, doesn’t it? Anyhow, I’m not sure my grandma was too concerned with family history or the teaching of any larger truth. She was getting her kicks shocking her grandkids with gritty lessons, Grimm’s-like cautionary tales about masturbation, insanity, homosexuality, drug use, and the cruelties of social mores. She was at once hazarding us against being, and telling us it was alright to be, crazy.

She did teach me something about story, though, whether she intended to or not. Story and family lore. And so long as I have a say in it, my long-gone, gone-in-the-head grandma will continue coursing through this world.

The Ides of Summer

13 July 09

“Human Greatness . . . the direct shooting mind . . . is incompatible with a man’s lying to himself.” Ezra Pound in Kulcher

Fog sifting in from the coast, up through the trough that leads to Pacifica, south of the dark-blurred cypress trees of the Twin Peaks ridge. A raven flops into the misty distance and is gone, past the bleak rooftops of the cloud-encased city.

Is there anything as chilly as hung laundry flapping in the fog?

Your weaknesses are yours alone, and can't be alleviated by friendship. Friends see your flaws and faults, and true friends forgive you those. But if you try to explain the weaknesses that run like fissures all the way down, not only does the attempt sound pathetic and self-indulgent, your friends will simply dismiss them. They’ll think, "well, those things may be half true, or hardly true at all, but old so-and-so is such a great guy anyway, what's he worried about?"

Good friends don't believe your fears. They believe in you, at all costs, and love you too much to split hairs. And so your weaknesses remain yours alone, subterranean to those closest to you. Fault lines, tremors you can't talk about. To do so would be self-indulgent in the least, and disillusioning at the worst. Your weaknesses are yours alone.

Maybe it’s the weather has me down. Hell, it’s July and I’m wearing wool socks and a blanket over my lap as I write this, gloomy from the view from the cabin window of my study, my cozy skiff riding the incoming waves of grey. I refuse to crank on the wall heater. It’s mid-summer and not only that, it’s a Saturday morning: something has to give. When the girls get up we’ll make a big breakfast and the sun will seep in, then splash through heroically, and for a few hours we’ll be reminded of what season it truly is.

By late morning the sun does come out and Anna, toting Ada in the wrap-around, hangs more laundry from the line above the patio. The potted olive and lemon trees do their best to look summery in the mist-strained light. The plants like our city-potted lives: root-bound, pending, eager to uncoil into the country earth. But what binds us isn’t so much the city as our fears of leaving the city, moving away from the intricate connections of career and friends, habit and true affinity.

But having Ada makes me want summer more than ever. Warmth and gardens and shade pooling under leafy trees; nakedness, simple primal nakedness both of body and of our lives. The girl is getting cuter and more enchanting by the day. She isn’t a baby. She’s a mysterious critter coming into being before our eyes. The looks and depths of soul in her eyes, that of an old soul arriving here from another place, gazing around with a mixture of astonishment, curiosity, scrutiny, and happiness at this new dwelling place. And I want it to be summer for her, and not a few months of rooftops floating in clouds.

And I want her to be happy, and for us to be happy, and for the fears which all of us have and accumulate in the dark hours to get a proper airing, like laundry in the sun, that they can be felt for what they are, and not heavier for the dampness of the season.

The Raggedness of Our Parts

12 July 09

At soccer practice last night, charging for a ball I split open my brow against the head of another player doing the same. Didn’t come home from the hospital until one AM, starved for dinner, stinking of practice, and stitched across the top of my eye. Poor Anna. She was still awake when I got in. She knows how important sport is to me and is willing to watch Ada into the night for it, but this, combined with her usual ongoing worries, really had her exhausted. Makes we wonder how the ski season is going to turn out, if at all.

All parents make sacrifices, yet women make more of them, if in ways men don’t always see. A father curtails his activities, goes on a few less fishing trips or stays in on a Friday night. All the while the mother is changing most of the diapers, waking in the middle of the night to breastfeed, fretting over the best ways and means of caring for the child, reading books and comparing notes with other mothers, concerned to her core over the smallest detail of car seat and baby rattle. Men think, oh, the baby’ll be fine. One way or another, the kid will turn out all right, as long as we give her plenty of love and keep her from running out barefoot in a snowstorm.

The next morning, wrecked as I was, it was the least I could do to wake and get to work on time — both because we need the money and because I’d brought the situation on myself. That was my sacrifice. Anna wanted me to sleep in. But what was a touch of discomfort all day if it meant not losing a few hours wages? A touch of discomfort: isn’t that what parenting is all about? A skin-deep sliver of pain or anxiety or sleep depravation, ameliorated by the infusion of love you feel for your babe? The love that keeps you going, that larger force, despite the raggedness of your parts?

Heard Obama on the radio defending the effectiveness of the bank bailouts, how without Fed chairman Bernanke shoveling dough at the banks that were “too big to fail” the whole show would’ve caved in on itself and the recession would’ve become the next Great Depression. Part of me says, Oh, yeah, let’s see about that, let’s try that experiment. Obama won’t admit it, but Bernanke’s plan is but a continuation of trickle-down economics. I’d like to see some flood-up economics. Give that 900 billion to the working people (by way of tax breaks, WPA style work programs, reinforcement of social institutions, or hell, straight cash in installments) and I guarantee you the stuck economy will get moving again, from the ground up. People who can’t afford to invest money, but must spend it on rent and real goods to get by, will do the greasing of the gears that “credit flow” ostensibly does. Let the upper towers tremble a little. Those fat cats climbed up there, let them get down on their own. So long as our economic foundation — village economics — still has bricks and mortar with which to rebuild itself, I don’t fear a little glass falling out of penthouse windows. Let the mega-corporations and chain stores and the big banks crumble. The people will still be here; and they just may rediscover the old American can-do spirit that has, up until the infantilizing effects of corporate takeover, made this country strong.

But now I’m sounding like a radical. Nothing like a whopping hospital bill in the mail— nastier than the cut that brought it on — to get your blood up and push you over the edge.

Mountains Leading North and South

10 July 09

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.”