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.”

Starlight from the Coming Through

23 June 09

It isn't so much a shortage of time that prevents you from writing when you have a newborn, but a shortage of discipline. You go all soft over the little monkey flower and there isn't much hard left in you to get going in the dark early morning – to say nothing of turning away from the cooing cuteness by day light. But if any writing is to be done it has to be at the crack of dawn, the hour of peace before the world avalanches down on you. Still have only a little inspiration for fiction. Am in a state of the "present", a very enhanced present, and fiction, with its escape-doors into fantasy, doesn't appeal to me now. I've a feeling like being on the cusp of a wave and the sheer uprolling wall below me will take all the attention and agility I've got to get down it; a feeling of impending greatness, not mine, but the great hair-raising joyride of life itself. What that means for writing or my next writing project I don’t know and don't want to worry too much over.

Still, am frustrated over carpentry, my inability to find purposeful work outside of the trades, my lack of vision beyond the quotidian. Of course writing is a vision beyond pounding nails. But writing, mine anyhow, doesn't pay the bills. And that whole working class fiction of bettering your family's standing through a life of wage-slavehood doesn't sit well with me. The trades: as in, trade in your life. The trades as craft, sure, I get that. It's why I like building. But trades as social step-ladder? First of all, I don't want to step up anywhere. And secondly, job security, pensions, company health insurance, union cohesion, all of that is going fast, and throw in illegal workers undercutting wages – the whole damn ladder has turned into a slippery slide. Makes Russell Bank's Continental Drift look like a world of Fifties progress and prosperity by comparison.

But the other night . . . that look an infant gives you, when in the middle of the blackness after a long inconsolable bawl, they go suddenly quiet and gaze into your eyes – that searching and fearful, yet serene and reassuring look as they calm and concentrate their souls upon yours, eyes blue by the starlight of the window. They know something, still know it from before, still feel the connection from the other side – their eyes still damp with starlight from the coming through. And they look into you seeking that same connection, the understanding that they're going to be all right, that they've made it across and arrived in loving arms, in the company of souls whom they've known for a very long time now and are getting to know again. And sometimes in the middle of the night, it's them telling you all that, reminding you of where you've been together and where you're going; her sweet tired smile telling you not to worry too much, telling you it's going to be all right.

The Wintry Seas of Summer

16 June 09

Low, dismal clouds this morning. Going on weeks now of the old SF summer doldrums. The length of the coast trundled over with clouds by a sustained trough; t-storms radiating across the west and northwest. A few afternoons of the sky breaking pink and pale gold and towering as a Kauai’an sunset. I think of Kauai of course, being where Ada was conceived. Three years of the fertility computer working like a charm, then just because we're on our honeymoon and the world is as gorgeous and perfect as can be the thing decides to take a week off. The other theory being that no hurdle was going to hold back the little charging spirit, not with such a grand entry before her, those sunsets spilling over Hanalei Bay and gilding the hotel room and sparkling our whiskey-ginger drinks and gold-dusting Anna's dark eyes.

Ada and Anna in the bedroom now, cooing and talking. Fixed them scrambled eggs and toast and tea before prying myself over here to sit and peck away about the weather. The view from my writing room like that of the cabin of a boat, looking west at the dark-clumped trees and rooftops of the far ridge awash in the morning grey. A winter feeling of hunkering in, especially now with Ada. It's a kind of floating world we're living in, up here on Bernal Hill, drifting above the sea and the city and whatever it was we called our lives below.

But in another week I'll be back swinging a hammer, and it'll hurt pretty bad to think back on this. Somehow I thought that during these two weeks I'd get some research done on the novel. A ridiculous expectation and I've dumped it out the window with all the others except the one about loafing around the house with family. But really, I'm pathetic when it comes to any kind of research. If a door needs hanging I'll jump to it and have it done by the hour. But ask me to dig up an agent on line and I'll tangle myself in the web faster than a fly could do and with more struggle. I'm just no good at it. I might as well go at the keyboards with hammer and cat's paw, for all the good it does.

Tomorrow is Anna's 33rd birthday. Bought her a summer dress from Nisa and today will truck over to Flora Grub to buy a lemon tree for her. Sunshine for my sunshine; sunshine dreamed of or drooping from a leafy branch, in spite of the leaden skies.