Down from the Roof into the Garden

6-10 May 10, Boise

Coupeau, a roofer who occupied a 10-franc room on the top floor, had his tool bag on his back . . . “Say, what weather this is for May! It's biting cold this morning.”

– Emile Zola's L'Assomoir

Six am; the thermostat reads twenty-nine degrees as I happen to read this passage in Zola's novel and start at the coincidence; a little cozy reading before I go out into the cold to work on the roof and install siding on the neighbor's place. It's damn cold; how dearly I'd rather be reading about Coupeau's toils than have to go out and endure them myself.

It's been a blustery, dramatic spring. Whereas the winter was mild, with snow fall at sixty to eighty percent of normal around the state, its passing has been a convulsive death throe. There was one warm spell in March, but since then the weather has been at turns frigidly blue or stormy wet, providing only a handful of days warm enough to go out without a coat. The lilacs have bloomed early, their cones of purple and ivory held in the air pertinaciously as hail lashes down from torn skies. But if this sounds like a complaint, it's not. Yesterday, two stories up on scaffolding, I looked out over the greening trees at the tall white islands of cumulus drifting across the turquoise sky, the clouds shining and coved with shadow, the ranks of them going on as far as you could imagine to the west and possibly even to the sea. This last week our weather has arrived from Alaska, the chilled currents whipsawed down here by the jet stream.

A new friend of mine, M.L., who owns a modern furniture store here, loves the weather. He's from Boise and is accustomed to the usual warmer, more gradual springs. Yet being a gardener, he likes what this prolonged cool spell is doing to his garden. “The roots really get a chance to sink in, establish themselves, before the heat comes on.” I don't know much about that. I do know my hands are rough and split and the mornings require a hat, down vest, jacket and shell to keep the breezy cold from paralysing me up on the scaffolding. And that I'd rather be inside reading. But that's often my plight, regardless the weather.

And I know the Boise river is flowing high, nearly bank-full, though not as high as last spring. And if you go to the farmer's market on Saturday morning all you'll find for produce are hot-house varieties and starters and herbs. But most of the shade trees are in leaf now, their green a bright new shade that should darken in the coming weeks. Only the catalpas and sycamores in town and the alders and willows in the hills are holdouts. The warmth will come. And then the hard-driving heat. And hopefully by then we'll be inside doing the finish carpentry on the house.

- - - - - -

Yesterday we were the picture of domestic pastoral bliss: me mowing the lawn that had grown tall as alfalfa in the front yard, Anna pulling weeds from the flower beds and sweeping clean the sidewalk as Ada toddled about the mown portion of the yard, pushing up on three points while trying to put a stick in her mouth. The clouds had broken and the warm breeze tossed white shreds across the blue sky while we worked contentedly outside for an hour or so. I was tired from work, but nothing like a cold beer and a kiss from the wife to give you your pep back.

Going round the yard, ducking under the thick-leaved maple trees, watching Anna sweep, her fine brown arms showing from her blouse, glancing over to be sure Ada wasn't getting into trouble, I had the thought: “wow, we're Boiseans now. We're playing house and tending the yard and I've got a steady job and Anna has her routine and has found her way about town and it could be 1950, or even farther back, if it weren't for the cars passing on the street, and we're a little pioneer family settling the outskirts of the new town on the edge of the Rockies.” Or something a little silly like that. All we needed was a cow in her stall and chickens floating about the yard. (The neighbors do have chickens, by the way.)

There was such a serene and industrious pleasure in our all being at work together. I think that's my single greatest complaint about having a job: spending eight-plus hours a day with people who aren't my family, aren't even good friends. Certainly working with family has it's strains and dangers. But Anna and I work well together. We've got similarly proportioned senses of industry, completeness, aesthetics. . . and we've talked about going into business together. The field that keeps popping up is interior design. Anna with her artistic and design and color-consultant skills; me with my building, electrical and lighting and cabinet installing abilities, and my own decent eye for design. We might have something there.

Last weekend we went to the Boise Green Expo, where we made some good contacts that could provide a means of getting Anna more experience with interior design. Anna's big worry is that neither of us have any business sense: we're not coin-chasing capitalists, or even small-business savvy in the least. Of course that's key. But I think we've got something more than that. We've got taste. And the schooling and experience to back up that taste. And that's something most business types don't have. You see proof of it everyday here with poorly laid-out or decorated stores and shops (faux finish! faux finish!) and houses that cost half a million but look like they hatched right out of the suburbs. There are some good designers here, certainly. The question is whether there's enough demand to go around for them and ourselves, the new couple in town, looking like a pair of hayseeds in our front yard working away until the sky goes pink in the west and Ada starts to get fussy for dinner. We're all pioneers in some way or another, when you start out at something new.

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.

All This Emptiness in Return

15 March 2010, SF to Boise

After a hellish two-day odyssey of trying to pick up a tow dolly for our Subaru, circling from one Uhaul center to another, from Daly City to SF to two different places in Sacramento, the big truck loaded and ready to go, yet each of the centers having their own perverse malfunction of equipment or incompetence which kept us from hooking up the dolly and moving on, my poor mom driving the Subaru behind me as we squandered two days and an eighty dollar taxi ride and an extra night spent in a Lovelock motel and no small amount of curse words, some in Italian, between us, we finally hit the road.

High snow pack at Donner Summit, blue skies and steely snow-covered granite peaks of Yuba Gap, the basalt ramparts of Castle Peak shouldering out of the white slope, the adjacent saddle where I took Anna on her first back-country ski to the Peter Grub Hut, remembering the next morning skiing the fine powder of Pyramid peak while Anna rested in the sun outside the hut, remembering all the gorgeous Sierra climbs that now seem so long ago, another world before baby Ada, the new summit in our lives;

The swift descent down the sun-baked backside of the Sierra Nevada into Reno, following the fast-running Truckee River, housing tracts terraced above the banks and far back into the brown hills, the valley pocked with cheap developments, the glittering boxy highrises of Reno, the freeway swooping through the carnival town like a roller coaster ride and then, past the reservoir and the storage lots, the road rising a little out of the valley, gaining the burnt-colored hills to the east, you’re suddenly in the high desert, the river still with you to your right, blue and charging, wispy cottonwoods along its green banks running through a narrow slip of a valley scattered with houses and ranches and here and there a cement factory or gas power plant;

And then if you’re not paying attention, the river is suddenly gone, having bowed away to the north, and you’re alone on the freeway crossing the basin flats, wide and alkalai-stained before the bare ridges that lope like mountain lions as they slide past the edges of the flats; and in the distance the taller ranges like lone islands, dusted with snow, serene against the desert blue sky; and nothing is on the radio out here, nothing but preacher programs and bad pop music, and you don’t want or need the radio anyhow, just the quiet of the country rolling over and under you, the city falling away from you with each mile, the rental truck groaning in high gear as you take a rise, a car or semi passing by, and from the rise a new panorama of flowing brown ridges powdered with snow, the ranges shifting in view as you glide down into the next basin, the long aproning hillsides dotted with sage and bitter brush, but little else, no livestock, few structures but the random lone treeless sun-flashed house on a terrace, a king’s view of no-man’s land;

With night a motel room in Lovelock, an acrid odor of a nearby feedlot on the chill air as you walk to the casino restaurant, take a booth and order a $7.99 sirloin steak and potatoes, nod at the old boys chatting at the counter, the casino floor empty yet spluttering away with trinket lights and nausea sounds, the waitress brings a bottle of Coors and a glass of white and your steak is surprisingly good, probably fresh from the feedlot and the cutting room floor, you muse;

And as you walk back to the motel room, across the wide silent street past a semi that’s pulled over into the adjacent lot, the black chill night above the street lamps and the brittle cottonwoods of town, tired, aching some in your lower back from the long drive, looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the cardboard mattress of the cheap room, you think ahead to the next day’s drive, how it gets better from here, the turn north away from the interstate at Winnemucca onto the slender highway, the country rising and becoming less barren, more intimate, rye grass in the hills and willows along the draws and pines higher up in the Steenes Mountains, towering as ice-blocks and chevroned with snow above the tan valley floor, blue forests wreathing the white ridgelines, and then the country seeming to change all-together as you cross the Oregon border, the desert harshness falling away, just a little, and greenery along the creeks, ranch houses set back under shade trees against the hills, cattle grazing about the brushy slopes and in the cool mini canyons of pink sandstone and heaped rhyolite, the country rising and buckling picturesqely with volcanic rock, cliffs and plateaus making maroon crescents in the tawny slopes, a rising undulant feeling that is in fact movement on a geologic scale, the country flowing to and from the Owyhee Mountains to the northeast, the pine-dotted highlands coming into view now, another island on the journey, yet this one you know is in Idaho, those mountains are Idaho!, and the steep climb and pass and the long grade down will put you on the Snake River Plain, the wide slate-dark river and the bridge crossing at Marsing, the farmlands and apple orchards that lead the way to Boise, a destination that feels so close now as you study the small clouds in the blue sky above that last mountain range;

And you slow the truck as you near the last desert town along the way, and stop for lunch at the J.V Café like you always do, and sit in a booth and order lunch and talk with the old gal at the counter and the still older gal waitressing about your long drive and your big move, a story you wouldn’t have brought up but they’ve coaxed it out of you, the story they want to hear because it’s also theirs in some way, as they too have made this crossing, they too it turns out have lived in San Francisco and have delicious memories of that far-away city, and they too now need this emptiness more than all the fullness of the coast, need this space for memories, for stories brought in from the highway, and the one at the counter becomes quiet, and the waitress leaves you alone after filling your cup, and you drink the thin coffee looking out the window at the gas station and the glinting tan hills going back and you think how easy it could be to not start that truck up again, how easy it would be to stay here, to let go of everything and have all this emptiness in return.

The Rigged Game

11 Aug 09, San Francisco

“To write, nine tenths of the problem/ is to live.”

– William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Monday morning, fog as thick as a winter snow drift (and colder because you can't ski it). A wind-swept weekend of chores: changed oil on Subaru, 3 loads of laundry washed, a hurried haircut from Anna, a walk to grocery store, a run on the hill. Only a little time for reading on porch and smooching with Anna and baby. (Did get in a Saturday afternoon bbq at K. and C.'s place, where I met the editor of Zoetrope magazine and had a good talk about what they’re looking for in fiction.)

But didn’t get a damn thing done with the agent search. I'm pathetic when it comes to online work. Like taking roundhouse swings in the pitchblack. If only the mission involved hammer and nails, then I'd build myself a mansion of a publishing house with yours truly as their keystone author, bust in the courtyard and all. But online research? That ghost-realm behind the screen evades me every time.

Another good tumble at soccer practice on Tuesday, which hasn't helped my back, slightly pulled from loading 5/8's sheetrock solo at the yard. The usual pain in forearms after a day of hammering rock back from door jambs yesterday. I'm getting nearly too old for this. I've got, I believe, enough brains to move up and become a foreman, but I don't want that. I want something else, yet it seems I'm not quite clever enough for that and so I'm stuck on the lower rung of a ladder I don't want to climb. Twain's quote, which heads this blog, darts to mind. Never have I dived right in for the three year test, though. Started with sawing wood and kept at it as a backup, but now I wonder if it the old block hasn't acted more as an anchor than a buoy.

There is this idea of progress, getting a little further along each day or week, whether it’s with writing or work or the household or life itself somehow. But life itself can’t be progressed, can it? The material things that make life more interesting or vivid can be tinkered with and accumulated, but even there, you’re dealing with the ephemeral nature of things. And if your objectives are strictly objects, then at the end of a measly two-day weekend all you’ll have to show for it is a laundry line of clothes flapping in the fog, four greasy quarts of used oil that need taking to the recycle center.

Maybe it's the idea of progress that's rigged. Isn't getting by enough? Isn't getting by with your family and friends, day by day together, enough? It should be. But here I am acting the stone-age romantic again, pining for simpler days, when around here the Ohlone natives fished the bay and strolled from village to village, doing more hanging-out together than anything else.

But the fact is I'm stuck with the modern, perhaps very American, belief that I should not only be getting something more done each day, I should also matter somehow in this world, be important. And I'm selfish and self-driven enough to believe that poison; to want for myself a role more distinct than merely as progenitor of the human condition.

So then I have to ask myself, what is this extra thing? If I get my novel published, will I have the extra in my hands then? Will the sight of poplar trees drifting against the sky be any more beautiful or any more mine then? The small things that move me won't be any different, but there's the very real danger that I will be, and not see those things anymore. The extra things are already with us, aren't they? What more extra do I need than Ada smiling in my arms, gazing right back into my eyes, making funny sounds as she tries to tell me something more important than I could ever write myself.

(And as proof of it: late that night, a little whiskey in me, holding Ada as I pace the bedroom, she quits crying and suddenly looks deeply into me with her sweet watchful eyes; the wise little creature, her soul still dewy from the other side, and she smiles and chawls out some sounds trying to talk, trying to tell me something, and she's saying, it's going to be all right, it's going to be okay, funny daddy.)

Pushing the River

9 Aug 09

Last night was Anna's art opening at Four Barrel, and a fine night it was. Ada was a perfect ladybug, too entranced by all the people and din of the cafe to cry or fall asleep, gazing away at the paintings on the walls. The paintings looked gorgeous, given the big space they deserve by the long, whitewashed walls. Suzanne, the curator, arranged the paintings so that as you walk into the cafe the first works are the less focused, closer-cropped scenes of the River Series, and as your eye travels down the wall, the distant panoramas become less obscured (the Plain Series), so that the effect is as if you were far-sighted and your view corrects as you look out over the deepening landscape. I was really proud of Anna and her work, and secretly don't want any of the pieces to sell, as I couldn't stand losing one of them. Don't know how artists can handle selling off their babes.

So it was a great evening and good to see so many friends and folks of the art world crowding in. Looking around at all the people there who were doing their thing — artists Paul, Jeff, Victoria, Craig, Noah and Kris, writers Gravity and Rebecca, furniture maker Luke, handy-man extraordinaire Justinian, magazine editor Miki, Susanne herself — I had a grand feeling of camaraderie. All of them good people, talented and with taste, yet not a snob among them, hard-working and with particular visions for what they want to achieve in their mediums, and all of them, if not having "big" success, having the real success of carrying on with their art, despite the myriad oppositions that come at you from self or society or economics.

All of us carrying on, carrying the arts and crafts on our backs if only by caring dearly for the arts and crafts, each of us a part of a larger stream of artists doing the same; and we wash up at art shows and readings and openings and are amazed to see so many others we haven't seen for awhile, all the others who've been working hard and alone and sometimes forgetfully of the greater river we belong to. After a few glasses of wine it's like we've been holding our breath underwater we're so lightheaded with talk and giddiness and the passing ideas that seem all the more clever as the bottles empty, yet some of them stick, the ideas and the connections made, and especially the camaraderie, the knowledge that you're out there together in the artless world, persevering and pushing that river on.

Was a great night for Anna, though little Ada might have stolen the show. I told Anna if the Ertnoose (that's 'peanut' in Geman) costs us a sale it's going to come out of her college fund. If she gets one, that is. (I worked and paid my way through college and I'll be damned if . . . oh, right, I'm reminded by Anna, it's not the Depression Era anymore. . .)

Fortunately the wine lasted right up to closing. Afterwards everyone wanted to go for a drink, the usual gleeful extension of the night.

"Get a drink?" I said to Jeff as I collected the baby bag. "I'll be lucky to get home and get some sleep."

"Right," he said, and trotted off with Rebecca of the Short Shorts on his arm.