Combustible Turnip

Jimmy West's Hands: Johnson City 1969

2011-09-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

Jimmy West was the only guy I knew in both Jonesborough and Johnson City. (We didn't really live IN Johnson City, but outside of town in a small development off Antioch Road, among the walnut trees and the tobacco farms.) He was a country boy, Tennessee style. And what I recall is a time in, I think, 6th Grade, when he had come to the county school--Cherokee Elementary--and he knew me so we hung out a bit, and I noticed his hands. His hands were--and this is a 12 or 13 year old boy--they were are gnarled and dry and full of deep creases. And I asked him about them and he confessed that the skin hurt but he didn't know what to do about it. I said, simply and quickly, put some lotion on them. He looked at me. He said that was what a girl would do. I looked at him, shrugged, saying So What and Who Cares. And he seemed to appreciate that wordless response.

Even in the small world of 6th Grade, I only saw Jimmy in the school now and then. I don't think he was in my classroom. But later I sat at lunch with him and he showed me his hands. They were no longer gnarled. They were smooth and looked like regular, comfortable hands. He told me he'd used lotion. I was glad for him.

But what this says to me is how people will harm themselves sometimes, or will follow ides or norm to their detriment, unless someone else says, C'mon, who cares. I was never a kid with a whole lot of insight, at least the practical kind, but I'm glad Jimmy realized that you don't have to give in to what other people think.

Now that I think of it, Jimmy and I had a certain intimacy because in Jonesborough he had contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. H had squeezed a tick off his dog and contracted it. He was out of school for months and--I don't know why or how--he called me on the phone a few times. I talked to him, talked for maybe an hour or less at a time, and this seemed to be meaningful to him. I can't say that's what I thought at the time, that Jimmy needed some other kid to talk to, but it's what I think now. And I guess I see the hand lotion thing in the same vein. And I think I took pleasure in being nice, or in being helpful in some fashion.

July Fourth: Ft. Lauderdale 2002

2011-07-04T19:05:00.000-07:00

When I think of the Fourth I mainly think of Vancouver, Washington in the early to mid Sixties: Going with my older brothers up the street and around to where the little fireworks stand was, Washington an early state banning anything extreme, and getting all those snakes, poppers, Smokey Joes Cabin, sparklers, roman candles and firey cones, Piccolo Petes==loud whistling little black things that we learned if you pinched its base with pliers it would explode at the end--and those soldiers with parachutes that shot up in the air. Simple things but great enjoyment. I don't recall much of July Fourth in South Dakota. I know we celebrated, I knew of sparklers and snakes and cones but I cannot recall a specific thing about the Fourth from Sioux Falls. The same goes for Tennessee: don't really remember. Iowa, sure. I recall July Fourths in Urbandale clearly, both with family (climbing up on the roof of the house to see the suburb city fireworks) and with my pals of high school (going to Lions Park with blankets, meeting up with girls). Of course there was that Fourth in Iowa City where we all got drunker than drunk and drove around in Matt's Uncle's big work truck dumping trash around the city . . . And Fourths in other places, from Santa Fe to Missoula to Grayton Beach.

But I'm thinking of a Fourth in Fort Lauderdale, me and my wife and my kids in the only house I've ever owned. Neighbors were there with us--Billy, Michele and Silvio and Alana, maybe Abdul, maybe Marge, Cheryl and Denny were there, maybe Andy and Lisa and Dakota. I had gone to Neptune Fireworks and bought a bunch of stuff. In Florida the big bad fireworks are illegal, yet, just down US 1 in Dania Beach, there's a year-round fireworks store that sells all the illegals. Some loophole or another. That's Florida. So I had that good stuff and we had a party and everyone was happy and pleasant and excited to see the things I shot off outr in the street.

I don't really know if it was 2002. I don't know who all was there or that it was only one specific Fourth (I bought stuff from Neptune many Fourths in a row) and had a number of parties on that day. I do know it was before my wife became ill and my daughter also and we were all laughing and together and more or less happy.

Was Just Thinking #1

2011-05-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking of Grayton Beach. Walton County. Florida. The panhandle. I was thinking how I lived on the beach--off and on, sometimes in ancillary towns--that I lived without air-conditioning or heat. I also remember the sand. We had sand on our feet, on the floors, in the sheets, in our food. Always. And when it was cold it was cold and when it was hot it was hot and we wore few clothes, or many clothes, and ceiling fans and electric fans were important to us most of the year. And I was happy.

The Undead Squirrel: Fort Lauderdale 2007

2011-05-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

The royal palm tree in my backyard was not that tall when we first moved into the house on SW 18th Street in Fort Lauderdale. That was in 1997. Now, it was a big tree, but when the fronds died I could reach them and pull them down by hand. Even then there was a squirrel who lived up in the green fronds--after a while he'd/she'd have to rebuild the nest higher up. Now, a royal palm's trunk is not like the trunk of a coconut or cabbage or fan palm. It's like a smooth concrete pole, in many ways, and even a squirrel can't scurry up it, so the animal has to jump to low hanging fronds and get up that way.

Jump to ten years later: the squirrel or a different squirrel is still nesting in the royal palm. But the palm is quite tall now and the squirrel has to climb up the nearby travelers palm then make a leap onto the low fronds of the royal to get to his/her nest. It's a precarious operation but must have been a safe place to live. Well, one day I go out in the yard and there's this squirrel on the ground beneath the royal palm. It's splayed out in grass/sandydirt not moving. I think it's dead. I think it fell from the palm. I left it there and went about my business for a while and then, maybe an hour later, it's gone. It's back jumping up to its nest.

Ah. The squirrel fell and was out cold.

Now it's later--maybe a month or two--and again I go out and again there's the squirrel out cold on the grass/sandydirt. This time I approach it. I stand over it and inspect it. I nudge it with my foot. It doesn't move. It's dead, I think, but I leave it be for a while.

When I come back, the squirrel is still there. I nudge it again.

Nothing.

Dead.

This was before we got our dog and we had raccoons and opossums and such come into the yard at night. So, I get my shovel, dig a hole by the back fence. I use the shovel to scoop up the dead squirrel and carry him/her and deposit her/him in the hole. I cover the squirrel up.

So much for that.

That evening I'm outside again. I go check on the royal-palm-squirrel's hasty grave. But, she/he is not there.

Instead there's the hole.

The squirrel had dug itself out and up.

Zombie Squirrel!

Well, guess it wasn't dead.

It still lives up in that tree to this day but I don't know how the hell it gets up there.

Biking to Jester Park: Des Moines 1975

2011-04-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

This is what passed for adventure back then. A group of my friends--most of my core friends, Bob, Bill, Larry, Dave, Randy, Jim and I (perhaps others or perhaps not all mentioned)--decided to bike a few miles north of town to a park called Jester Park. I don't know if it was a state park or county park but it was a ways out of Des Moines and Urbandale, maybe five miles or so. We brought along tents and bags and food to stay the night. It was summer, hot, pleasant, and it was our first real trip anywhere as near-adults.

The planning of it was pretty simple. Yes, we were driving by then but we wanted to bike it, so we knew where the park was and how to get there by experience. Were our bikes in good enough shape to make the trip? Who knew--we weren't worried about that. And remember, this was before cell phones and Internet and GPS and constant connections. So, one we packed our bags and filled our measly water bottles (this was before the selling of water as a drink also), we were on our own.

My parents were unconcerned as were most of my other friends. The only parent who seemed worried was Bill's mother and--sure enough--halfway on the long bike ride down rural roads under the sun, here came Bill's mother in her car checking up on us. Ah, what supreme embarrassment for Bill. But also not a big deal--we didn't tease him about it.

It was a fun ride, though hot and thirsty. It was good to be out there and have the world and Iowa landscape slow down, to enjoy the minutes and the farm fields and the trees.

Then we got to the park, set up camp (I think it was free) and wander around. No one else was there, it seemed. We hunted for firewood, played cards, talked, played catch with Frisbees, baseballs, footballs. We wandered the woods, went to the Des Moines River and got in the water, swam and walked the bank and swooshed around in what is a pretty big river. We cooked hot dogs and canned chili and made sandwiches, had chips and cheese--I don't know how we brought all of that on our bikes, but we did.

Bill's mother did not show up.

Night came and we had a fire and told stories and fell asleep and got up the next day and did it again. Then we rode home--long, hot, thirsty--and the adventure was over.

We were not young teens then. We had a year left of high school.

And you know what we didn't do?

We did not drink beer or smoke cigarettes, we didn't smoke a joint or eat shrooms or talk about female conquests.

Perhaps we were behind the times a bit. Or maybe we missed that memo that that was what we were supposed to be doing at 16 or 17. I don't know. But, that wasn't us. It wasn't like we were goody-goody kids, that we went to church and looked down on "bad" behavior. Not at all. It just didn't occur to us that there were other options. For whatever reason, we were not interested in such things . . . But now that I think of it, I think Jerry Lamb went on that trip with us. Jerry was one of those guys that was sort of part of our group but sometimes not. He was one of those guys who saw the other options and had no doubt tried them a bit, had tried to hang and fit in with a rougher crowd than us but was either not fully accepted or was on the fence about who to be: nice boring boys like us or one of the "bad" boys. (Of course, there were many options in between, too.) Jerry Lamb. I'd forgotten about him.

Anyway. It would still be a few years down the road when drugs, drinking, driving cross-country and sex became the idea of fun. For then, an independent bike ride to Jester Park, goofing around in a river, stopping in the shade of a tree on a hot day in central Iowa with friends--that was fun.

Jack The Cat: Missoula 1990

2011-04-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

His name could have been Zack, but when we heard the neighborhood kids call his name as they came home from school, my wife and I heard it as Jack. This is when we lived in the little cottage on Rollins Street in Missoula. Jack was--we assumed--a stray. He came to hang out at our place all the time, even coming inside and spending the night. He had no collar. But, I admit, he didn't look like a stray.

He was a comical-looking cat. He had the markings of a siamese, including very blue and very crossed-eyed eyes. But he was big and fluffy--sort of Persian, Himalayan, Raccoon Cattish. he was funny and friendly, maybe not that bright but gregarious. I never saw him run from a person or even a dog for that matter. he was a good cat. He was an annoying cat.

he looked a lot like our cat, M.R., though she wasn't quite as fluffy or big or cross-eyed. When we first saw him we thought M.R. had somehow gotten out of the house, but then saw it was not her at all. He began to come around all the time, then demanding that we let him inside. And we did, reluctantly at first. he had a bad habit of climbing screens, the door at least.

I still remember the story Fru has told about him. I worked afternoons and nights at the University of Montana and Fru would be home by herself. One day Jack came by and wanted inside. Fru didn't want to have to deal with him. So, she walked around ducking at all the windows so the cat would not see her. She was in the kitchen and saw home on the porch from the window there and so she ducked again. She was hiding from Jack the Cat. So, as she huddled close to the kitchen floor, Jack jumped up onto the screen and stared at her. So, she had to let him in since he saw her. he was a determined animal.

By the summer of 1990, Fru and I knew we were leaving Montana. She had a job offer back in Illinois and--being quite poor in Missoula--she took the offer. We drove back in her car, leaving my truck, with the idea that I would return, rent a U-Haul and get our stuff to bring to Illinois.

And, that's what we did.

But after my return to Montana, after my renting and packing and loading and goodbyes said, one of my last acts in Missoula was to grab Jack the Cat (M.R. was already gone). I picked him up and put him in the rental's cab with me--I was towing my red pickup. We had a flat in South Dakota (or maybe it was south of Sioux City, Iowa) and the cat had to wait in the truck while I walked to an exit and a phone. But, we made it to Champaign, IL.

Jack the Cat and M.R. settled in as we did. Jack liked to go outside and caused a little trouble by jumping on neighbors' screens, the--when we moved to the place on Miller Street from West Union--he developed the habit of wandering, even crossing the busy street of Church to visit people in that neighborhood: I got calls from people asking if I was missing my cat. Jack had a collar now, with my name and phone # on it.

Yes, we doted over the two cats. Held and Xmas for them and took tons of photos. Yes, they were our surrogate children. But then we had a real child and the cats went back to being just cats very quickly. Still, they were family and they liked First Daughter's crib and she liked them.

I had a job working at Agriseed. I often would go in at night to water the hybrid corn plants in the greenhouse there. It was on such an evening as I left and turned on Church that I saw Jack. he was in the side of the road and his gut was split open. Dead. I had to go back and get a box and a shovel and scoop him up. I didn't go to work that night.

Fru and I were, of course, full of grief. Grief tempered that he was only a cat, but still real grief. And it still bothers me to this day that I had taken him. He no doubt did have a home--lack of collar or no--and I had, essentially, stolen him. And if he had remained in Montana, no doubt Jack or Zack would have lived a long life.

Getting Hit: Urbandale 1973

2011-04-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

I played football in junior high and high school. I was a good football player--but not so much in organized ball. While a star in sandlot ball, I was always a second stringer when I put on pads and helmet. Why? Some of it was my own general timidity and foolishment, some was that I saw football as a game of finesse not one of brutishness--as said: foolishment. Anyway, I quit football my senior year (the year the Urbandale Jayhawks won the state AA title--my usual luck, though can't say being a member of the 1976 State AA Champs of Iowa would be one of my biggest accomplishments).

But what I'm recalling is a short episode during practice one day when on junior varsity. It was during punt coverage. I was on offense and, best to my memory, ran downfield after the ball was kicked and almost got in on the tackle. So, there I was standing after the play was over when--WHAM--some kid comes and slams me from behind. Blindsided. After the whistle. I get myself up and look at him, some guy I knew but did not know, and he yells at me that the coach said I should have done this or that on the coverage.

I was bewildered. Not because of the hit but because of the penalty enforced upon me--this blindsided wham by coaches orders. I didn't get angry (one of my many failings in the game of football, but I didn't know that at the time). I just looked at the kid and then at the coaches who were yards away and shrugged it off, went back to practice. Yet, that stays with me. It was demeaning and embarrassing. Who was this kid to just come knock me off my feet when I was completely unaware and defenseless? Who was that coach (not the head coach of varsity who was a nice guy--for a football coach at least) to think of and then order such a thing?

Man.

And that incident is one of those incidents where I wish I could go back in time. I'd like to go back and when I got hit I'd like to pick myself up and--first off--yank off the perpetrator's helmet and smack him in the goddamn nose. Then I'd like to run up to the coach and tackle him and smack him in the nose. Perhaps that would have impressed them. maybe that's what they wanted from me.

But, though a big guy, I wasn't that kind of guy.

Here's what kind of guy I was: I was a wide receiver, but due to my lifelong bad hearing and general shyness, I got in the wrong line for practice and became a lineman instead. I was big enough to be a lineman and that's where they kept me. So, one practice as a lineman--tackle--and again during punt drill where I was blocking the rush, I recalled the instructions which was hit your man but if the man next to you misses his block, pick up that man. On the play the person next to me was one of my good friends. When the ball was snapped, I saw him miss his man and so I came over and picked him up. My man was not picked up and glided in to the punter, almost blocking it. For this I was yelled at, by both coaches and teammates. They asked why I didn't pick up my man. I said nothing. I didn't want to blame my friend for not picking up his man, so I just said nothing.

That's the kind of guy I was.

Changing Friends: Iowa City 1979

2011-03-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

So, I moved around a lot as a kid--and around a lot as an adult. So, I became used to change, to saying goodbye to states and towns, to houses and neighbors, to friends. But this was a bit different, in Iowa, as we had stayed in the Des Moines area for a good nine years or so. I had gone through half of seventh grade on through all of high school in one place, in one state. I had developed good solid friendships with quite a few people and intimate friendships with a core of maybe four or five people (basically all guys--I had yet to understand that you could be friends with "girls", something the younger generation seems to understand better than mine). But them we all graduated and most of my friends went to Iowa State University in Ames, maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, from Des Moines.

I didn't go to college. No right away.

Yes, I stayed in touch with them, visited etc. I worked full time and made new friends from that job. But then a year later (and after a short stint in Key West), I did go to school but I went to The University of Iowa, in Iowa City, not to Ames. Ah. In the state of Iowa, there is a big distinction between the two . . . and as the years went by, my new college friends began to replace my old high school friends.

I know, I know, nothing new there. And it wasn't like I didn't stay in touch with that core group of pals, but I soon quit coming home on weekends while in school, then quit coming home in the summer and then quit all together. Not quit school, but coming home at all . . . But by 1979 the situation was evident that my college pals--Matt, Brock, Mike and others--had replaced Bob, Kevin, Larry and others as my closest friends. And they--college pals--remained my main contacts for the next ten years or so. Then I got married, started a family and the closeness to all friends began to fade a bit.

But here's the thing. Jump ahead another, say, another twenty years, closer to today's date: I'm still married, my kids are venturing into college (about the same age I was in 1979) and my closest friends are not from Urbandale High or the University of Iowa. I still have a core group of four or five good guy friends but the are scattered about. And, I'm still sort of in touch with some of the people from my past. But--of those old friends, it is my high school buddies I talk to the most. My college pals, my best friends who I was closest to, rarely contact me and I, in turn, rarely contact them. Do I know where they live, do I have their phone numbers and know what's going on in their lives? Yes--sort of. The same with my high school pals. Yet I've talked more often and have physically seen the older group more often in the last ten years than the latter. I don't know why this is.

But I think we--my college friends--are about due. I think we will resurrect the old feelings and make an effort to see each other. No doubt we will all realize why we have other friends but, still, it would be good. It will be worth the effort.

Okoboji: Urbandale 1975

2011-02-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

Ah, we took numerous trips up to Lake Okoboji which is in the northwest corner of Iowa (more or less). By we I mean Bob, Kevin and I. I don't recall the first time I visited the place--Okoboji a rather renowned spot in Iowa due to its natural lakes and natural beauty, to its original theme park in Arnold's Park and some other small claims to Iowa-centric fame--but I do know it was with Bob (Bob my first real friend in Urbandale who lived down the block from me on 65th). We were old enough by then to be on our own. I believe I was able to drive, but perhaps the first time it was just Bob and I with his parents. I know his parents bought a little plot and had a trailer--maybe not that first time but after that--where you could walk down to the lake. There was more than one lake. There was Lake Okoboji itself, then there was East lake Okoboji, or maybe East and West lakes, and then there was a smaller lake. There may be more, as the area was known as Iowa's Great Lakes. I think. Anyway, Bob's parents--nice people--also bought a small boat to keep on the lake. I believe Bob and I slept on the boat one time. But it was after all of that that we--Bob, Kevin and I--came up to the lake for a long summer weekend. I know I'd driven at least once in my Ford falcon Wagon (1966) that had been the family car for years and years and still ran (and whose stereo wiring--which I had installed--had actually caught fire once and whose brakes gave out on me while coming down a hill in Urbandale while coming back from a trip to Okoboji) but I know we also drove up once in Kevin's old black Volkswagon Beetle. But his parents--Bob's--had let us stay there and we, Kevin and I anyway, drank beer and motored about the lake in Bob's parents' little motor boat and there were a couple of girls staying in a trailer nearby--druggy-ish girls from Colorado or some such, one a little too young and the other a little too hip to have much to do with us--and we just generally did our inane things that we did at that age. But I do recall I was taking a dump in the bathroom of the trailer when all of a sudden Bob comes rushing in (I didn't lock the door) because his parents had pulled up outside. His mother and father had driven up and shown up without announcement, without ever telling us that they would. That was not nice--I mean, we were good guys, not into much trouble except some beer, which we were old enough to legally drink--and here they were showing up out of the blue as if to check on us, as if to catch us in some transgression. Really. And if we had been doing anything more than just taking a dump and having a few beer cans around? (And Bob did not even drink.) What if we'd had the girls over, what if we were smoking cigarettes and--god forbid at that time--marijuana? What if we had trashed the place and sunk the boat and who knows what? Would they have been happy to find that out? Didn't they think that at our age at that time that there were some things they best not know about? I mean, we were still pretty innocent and caused no true or even rowdy trouble, so why show up unannounced?

Oh well.

It wasn't long after that that Bob and I parted ways, fell out of friendship with each other. Kevin and I stayed good pals for a long time but I have not seen or barely heard from him in maybe two decades. And Okoboji? I don't know. I can't quite recall its charms. To me, it's now just an Iowa-centric place.

A Football Game: Iowa City 1974

2011-02-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

Only my father and I loved football. No one else in the family--my three brothers, sister, mother--had any interest in it, at least not until much later. I also shared a love of plants and trees with my father--a love of gardening and growing vegetables. But, as I said in the post about buying a vehicle with my older brother, there was still an emotional distance between us when I grew up, as there was among us all in the latter stages of the family as a unit (that is, before we all got older and moved into our own, separate lives).

So--and I'm hazy on all of the specifics--one fall I agreed to go to a football game with my father. Just he and I. And it was not just any game, it was an Iowa Hawkeyes game. Father had gone to Iowa and was a rabid follower of the Hawkeyes. I--and my brothers, sister as well--were supporters of the team, more or less, but not avid ones (that would come later as each of us, like my father, would attend the University of Iowa). So, he drove us over to Iowa City from Urbandale/Des Moines. Not a long drive--two hours at best--but long enough to go back and forth in one day. It was early in the fall. Sunny. Warm. Green. I had not really been to a college game before (maybe once in Tennessee, at the small college in Johnson City because a friend of mine's--Bobby, who had a glass eye--father was the band director at the school) and was pleasantly surprised to see the crowds, the general pleasantries, hear the marching band, see the baton twirlers and all that went with the game. We had parked in a grassy lot in someone yards for five dollars or such (we had entered the town the back way, which was why, years later when I drove to Iowa City for orientation, I came the wrong way--it was all I knew) and had brought ham sandwiches that he had purchased in a store. We sat and ate by our car, he drinking a beer and me a soda, I think.

The game was not a great game. Either Frank Lauterber was coach or maybe Cummings by then but they had both always fielded bad Hawkeye teams. I don't recall who they were playing (Nebraska? Not a Big Ten team, I don't think) but they were losing, as usual. But then the Hawkeyes made a big play--a long pass which the receiver barely caught. My father and I cheered. We looked at each other, cheering, straight in the eye. And then we didn't.

It was as if we both had caught ourselves in a faux pas--this act of shared emotion, this father and son moment, one that would be considered healthy and normal and sweet, both of us cheering and sharing a near touchdown for the home team. But that was not done in our family. Not much, anyway (at least by our teens). Again, expressions of affection or love, even at a sporting event, were suspect expressions. That's not to say that my father or mother never said they loved me or us or each other, but if they did it was on very rare occasions. I don't know. It just seems strange to me now, that I--and perhaps Father--would be embarrassed to share a cheer at a football game. And I'm not trying to place blame, or make it into more than it was. I loved my father, love my mother, my siblings, my wife and own children. My parents were good parents all through their life--my mother still. They had much tougher childhoods than we--their children--can understand. As a father, a parent, I know that as your kids grow older, hit their teens, things change in both how you view them and certainly in how they view you.

I know love.

But, I guess I wish it had been a bit different. I wish I could have easily yelled for the Hawkeyes with my father on that bright sunny day in Kinnick Stadium in 1974. I wish we could have cheered the team on to a touchdown and be able to hold our hands in the air and look each other in the eye as we did so. I wished we could have hugged.

Driving To Nevada To Buy A Van: Urbandale 1976

2011-02-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

It wasn't that I lacked practical sense, I actually could be a very practical person, but when it came to spending money on big items, I had little sense at all. Which was how I came to be riding in a car with Second Oldest Brother down little dirt roads in rural Iowa trying to find his friend who wanted to sell me his van.

Now, I had been practical enough to save my money from working in the stockroom at Younkers (at the Merle Hay Mall) for almost two years so that I could buy a car with cash. I mean, I spent very little. I had, I think, close to twelve thousand in my little savings account my parents had helped me start as soon as I got the job while in high school (I'd quit football and had gotten the job instead, walking to the mall after school and often working full days on weekends). So, eventually I got the car bug and wanted one of my own. My older brother--Second Oldest--had had cars by then, had had money and had spent money, so I went to him for advice. And he, in turn, went to his friends who were trying to unload certain cars.

In all fairness, Second Oldest Brother took me around to some car lots and I drove some cars from there. I knew nothing about anything: what to expect, what to ask, how much I should pay. Second Oldest Brother was there for that, I figured. Eventually he showed me his friend's vehicle, a Grand Prix (Pontiac?). I liked big cars, more or less, and I drove it around but decided it wasn't for me. I told him what I really wanted was a van, one I could camp in or live in. You see, I didn't tell him this, but I was fresh out of high school and I wanted to get a van, a dog, and hit the highway. I wanted to go out west and live a vagabond's life. So, Second Oldest Brother knew of a friend who had a van. He lived out in Nevada.

Now, this was not the western state of Nevada, that mecca of gambling and whorehouses and deflated housing markets, no this was Ne-VAY-da (as I believe the locals pronounced it), a small town in rural Iowa not terribly far from Des Moines. So that's how I ended up with Second Oldest Brother driving the back roads one summer weekend.

I have to say, it was very nice of my brother to take the time and effort to help me. He drove me out there at his own expense, even bought me some McDonalds as we got a bit lost. Just he and I, he closer to adulthood than me (two or three years older) who had always been the doer in the family, the one to get a paper route, the one to buy his own mini bike, then car and other items, the one who was most independent and anxious to get out of the house. Which was also why he was the most mysterious brother, the sibling I felt I understood the least.

We had been a very close family in many ways, yet also an odd one. Yes, we had both parents and were a family of five kids (four boys, one girl). We were all born in Sioux Falls, SD but from there we moved often: Vancouver, WA, Jonesborough and then Johnson City TN, Des Moines/Urbandale, IA. So, in many ways we were close to each other out of necessity, out of a sense that all other relationships were transitory . . . But as we got older, as Oldest and then Second Oldest finished high school and as we stayed in one spot--in Iowa--for once, we kind of drifted apart. Then again, I should say that we became indifferent to each other. Both of our parents had grown up in broken families, both without fathers (my father's father was in a mental hospital all of his life after WWI; my mother's father ran away, abandoning his family). And we, as their offspring, always had some kind of element in us, one that is hard to explain but that essentially was disdainful of positive emotions, of showing need or affection or cohesion as a family unit. I'm not sure. I mean, we knew we were loved and that my parents loved each other, but, yet, no one could say the word and we were often--as we got older--more mean to each other than nice and then we were, as I said, indifferent. My parents, fatherless children of the Great Depression and young adults of WWII (in which my father fought in Europe), perhaps had learned to deal with sadness and disappointment in their lives through indifference to it, so much so that we kids carried a certain stoic/pessimistic gene . . . Then again, who the heck knows. Maybe we were pretty much like everyone else. (We all get along quite well now, us "kids", but we also live far away from and don't have much contact with each other.)

Anyway.

What I'm trying to point out is that it was strange and somewhat embarrassing to me for my older brother to be helping me out, to care enough to help out. But we did find his friend and the van and I bought it. I paid the asking price because I had no concept that I could bicker--and, Oldest Brother never said a peep that I could ask for less from his friend. Yes, I paid too much. Yet, I was happy to have the van: a 72 Ford Econoline painted in two-tone blue with shag carpeting on the inside and a bed in back, a cooler between the two front seats (Captain's seats) also hidden by shag carpeting. It was quite the 70's semi-hippy mobile.

I never did take the van out west.

I did take it to Florida that next spring, to Daytona and Key West. I took it to Iowa City a few times and when I decided to go to college, it sat back at my parents house until it became an eyesore. I eventually sold it to friend of a neighbor for about $500--more than $2000 less than I paid for it.

So it goes.

I disliked owning a car for many years afterwards.

1st Drunk: Urbandale 1976

2011-01-29T05:54:00.000-08:00

I've always been late at doing everything. At least late in doing those things often considered as rites or thresholds and such. I was eighteen before I ever got truly drunk--bad drunk--and that was when, in 1976, the drinking age was eighteen. I must have been nineteen--almost twenty--before I got laid and though I had tried pot towards the end of high school, I'd never been stoned until the age of twenty, while in college. Even later for later thresholds, I was always behind somewhat, be it a live-in relationship with a girlfriend or love and marriage or getting published and teaching and so on down the line. As I've said before I was (am?) a late bloomer.

So, this incident is not one I like to recall often. It was after high school (which I pretty much hated) was over. It was summer. I was working full time at Younkers with no plans to go to college--my only plans were to get a van, get a dog and drive out West: Idaho and Oregon specifically. I was smart in some ways, very stupid in others: I was still a kid. After a self-imposed semi-exile from my longtime friends at school (I thought I was punishing them as well as myself, but I don't think they noticed that much that I was gone from the group--but this is another story/lesson), I was pretty much back into the fold by summer, after graduation. And I was out with them: Jim, Randy, Bill, Rick, Dave. There was a party somewhere in Urbandale, not at someone's house but at some rented room like one would for an anniversary or birthday or bar mitzvah (though we knew nothing of bar mitzvahs, any of us, as there were no Jews in Urbandale [that we knew of] just as there were no asians or blacks or much of any ethnic diversity [okay, there was one asian girl, Alice, and there was one black girl, but that was pretty much it for a suburb of Des Moines in the late 70s]) and in this room were only fellow former students of our class.

Now, I'd had beer. I'd had wine and whiskey and such. My parents were no teetotalers. In fact, they were heavy drinkers in their way--nah, strike that, they were heavy drinkers--so I'd had sips and gulps since childhood and there was always beer and such at the house and I'd had a few beers since turning eighteen, but only a few. But I'd never been drunk.

Well, at the strange party I drank beer after beer. I had been quiet and invisible for most of my high school years--at least invisible to the movers and shakers, that upper echelon of cliques in the tiered world of high school--and a lot of the popular people, guys mostly, were there. But, becoming drunk, I was doing just fine. (I'd also changed a bit--again my luck, my sense of being late--just out of high school: my acne (a great thorn in my side, the bane of my life) had dissipated, I had put a lot of pettiness behind me very quickly since school was done, I was more vocal and personable. So, I was holding my own and somehow became the focus of attention as music blared and they all encouraged me to chug a beer. Me! And so I obliged.

Now, do I think they purposely encouraged me so that I'd get drunk and make a fool of myself?

No.

They had no idea I'd never been drunk. They encouraged me because they too were drunk and that's what young males do, the only difference here was that I was new to this game, this bonding through drink and objectification of women and such. So, I drank it up! And, I was quite drunk by the time the party broke. A good chunk of the boys decided to head to the Urbandale Country Club to sneak into the pool for a swim. I recall Dave was driving (Dave was one of my earliest friends, since junior high, and his father was the Mayor of Urbandale (seriously)) and Dave had his dad's Cadillac. I was full bore drunk by then and I rode in teh back seat as we charged out to the country club (a place alien to me except that I'd gone a few times with Dave, as his family was a member) and they all clambered out of their cars and climbed the fence in order to swim. Me? I was too far gone, feeling quite sick, so I only made it to the top of Dave's Caddy, where I sprawled out like a wounded soldier and groaned. I wasn't very aware of things and in other ways I was very aware. So, I rolled and moaned on top of the car and then I eventually began to vomit.

I threw up great hanks of slime and chunky beer-swum vomit and--so very unfortunately for poor dave (or poor Dave's father--the car's windows were open below me. So, on top of the Cadillac I threw up down the side of the car and into the open window. Ah. I was out of it. I'd never been drunk, had never vomited because I was drunk, I thought little of it other than the vomiting made me feel a bit better.

I don't recall everything after that. I know dave was not happy. I know we went to Gary M's house but I was wasted. They--the classmates who I did not care too much for (though I always liked gary and he was always good to me)--my erstwhile classmates of 76 put me tenderly to bed, treated me quite nicely, were very amused that I had thrown up into the open windows of a Caddy and there I was.

In the morning I woke up feeling 100% horrible. I did not like standing up. My mouth was dry, tongue swollen, my skull was like a washing machine at full tilt. But it was my stomach that pained me the most (I've always felt things through my stomach, be it worry or heartache or what-have-you). I did rise and make it out of doors. I knew where I was and why. No one else was around. It was still somewhat early--maybe nine or so, maybe seven--and I felt strange as well as sick. My world--the simple world of Urbandale which I pretty much hated--was different, different in neither a good or worse way. Just altered somehow. And I began to walk. It was a slow painful walk, a long distance to walk, further than my walks from 65th Street to the high school, but I walked.

When I finally got home, my mother was there. She was relieved to see me. Of course I had not called and I had never before failed to come home, but my parents were not the over-worrying type, they assumed we kids knew to keep ourselves alive. Still she was relieved and pretty quickly made the correct assumption why i was struggling home at nine in the morning. I told her i was sick, that I had been drunk. She was not angry. She told me I was hungover.

"I'm not hungover," I protested. "I'm sick. My stomach hurts."

She laughed.

"That's what a hangover is," she informed me.

Ah. All that time I'd only seen hangovers through the lens of TV and the movies and in those it was always the recipient's head that was in pain. But, there, I learned that wasn't true.

Well. Though I'm often late to things, I'm rather glad for it. It's like when you have kids and in those early years people prattle on about when your child or their child first learns to walk or talk or even sit up and as a parent you'll fret over it until it happens and then it's forgotten for the most part. The thing is, they learned, it happened and now on to the next threshold. So, I'm glad I took my time. My brain and body had a good while to develop and strengthen before I learned to destroy it. My emotional state--always a bit iffy with me--had time to strengthen also before I involved myself in the trials of humanity. So, I'm okay. And now, on to the next rite of passage . . .

Washing My face In A Cold River: Seattle 1987

2011-01-22T08:48:00.000-08:00

Just a short memory as today is cold and the water from the tap--normally warm down here where I live--is coming out cold. What I recall is a time I went camping in the rain forest in the Olympic Mountains. This was with Matt and Brock and, just east of Forks or wherever, we went into the National Park and to the rain forest and there was no one else there save one lone camper who had tons of collected wood and had stored it beneath plastic tarps although while we were there it did not rain in the rain forest. It was damp, grey-skied, a place full of huge trees and tree limbs and the thick drapery of moss, slugs and fungi. It was quiet and the trails led through the trees and over white-rushing streams and up mountainous hills. But what I'm thinking of is the morning I awoke and--this was a primitive camp--there was no running water, so I took my wash cloth and my bar of soap and went down to the river--the Hoh River, I think--and dipped my hands in it and it was ice cold! But, I wanted to wash up (I was somewhat fastidious about washing my face, a leftover from my teen years of bad acne), so I went ahead and lathered up (yes, I know you are not supposed to put soap in a fresh river, but really, this was a bar of soap and this river was fast and wide and I hardly considered it to be a pollutant) and I washed my face with that achingly cold water. Fresh water. Snowmelt/rain water. And it wasn't just the water, but it was the fact that I was more or less alone in a great woods leaning into a big cold river with woods and mountains and the gray un-raining sky above me. That's what I recall and miss.

The Weirdest Place I Have Ever Been: Jonesborough 1968

2011-01-07T09:01:00.000-08:00

By weirdest I'm totally talking about within my own vision. The people who lived in small towns, the people who lived in Jonesborough in 1968, would not have seen it as strange. I know that. But I was a kid of, what?, 11 years old or some such when we moved from the Pacific West Coast, from Washington, and into that little tiny burg in semi-Appalachia Tennessee.

For us--at least Mother, Oldest Brother, Second Oldest Brother, me, Sister and Younger Brother--it was a shock to the system. We went from a bedroom community of Portland, Oregon, a burgeoning town with ties to Seattle, to a smaller than small town in the almost deep south. In the late Sixties! We did not understand the history, the customs, and almost the language . . . Ah, I'll explain later.

LATER: much later. Trying to pick this thread back up but suffice it to say that the United States of the 60s and early 70s was not the homogenized, restaurant and retail chain, cable TV/Internet/cell phone connected country that we live in today. We were all midwesterners and, though my parents were not sophisticates by any means, both from small towns in the midwest (Red Oak, Iowa; Arlington, South Dakota) and we kids had been born in Sioux Falls and had a bit of the west coast in us from Vancouver [not L.A. or San Fran or even Seattle], but it was still a shock to the system to have landed in a small burg like Jonesborough--even Johnson City would have been shocking enough. It was world still wrapped in racism and small thinking, one of rural sensibilities, it was like a foreign country in the sense that the language was different, the food was different (how many hot school lunches did I have that were simple beans or cheese toast, collard greens?), the people were different. That's not to say I disliked the people or even, eventually, the culture. I grew to like it in many ways, but more in Johnson City than Jonesborough; I adapted--perhaps more than my brothers and sister, perhaps not as much as my father who liked it, over all. But it was--the small town of Jonesborough, where I did return briefly in the eighties with Fru, a quick car trip for a look-see when I lived with her in Champaign, and where it had changed and was a charming little southern town, pretty and unassuming with a cafe and bed and breakfast and antique shops and such--the damned weirdest place I'd ever lived.

A Pet Hammerhead Shark: Fort Lauderdale 1997

2011-01-05T22:13:00.000-08:00

First Daughter always loved animals. Sure, she liked cats and dogs (she still does like cats, dogs not so much), but she really loved elephants and giraffes when she was young. She also liked things like anteaters, bats, lizards, armadillos, tapirs, and other creatures. But all of this was mainly when she was very young, when we lived in Illinois.

We moved to Florida and she started school and then there were other interests--friends and cartoons, music, Pokemon. She still liked animals and was interested in them, but the pull of them was less so. So, a year after our move, when we bought our house after renting one in Victoria Park for a year, I was a little surprised when she started going on about hammerhead sharks.

She really really liked hammerheads. We took her and Second Daughter to the Museum of Science and Discovery and there they had a bonnethead shark--very similar to a hammerhead but much smaller--and that fascinated her. At some point she asked if she could have a pet hammerhead. I said, "Sure. I'll build an aquarium in the back yard." Of course I was joking.

I guess the point of this memory is that I was very surprised to find that she had taken me seriously. She really expected me to build the aquarium and get her a hammerhead shark. I had thought the she knew I was being fatuous in my comment (she even knew the word facetious, she knew by then my sense of humor and irony), she was six or seven and so I had assumed she would not conceive of the idea that we could have a 100 to 1000lb shark as a pet. But it turns out that I was the one who was wrong.

She took the news well that she would not be getting a pet hammerhead. I explained the impossibility of it and she understood. No biggie. But then, for her birthday, I surprised her and got one!

Not really. Just being facetious.

New Guy at School, Once Again: Urbandale 1971

2011-01-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about how I started 7th grade in Iowa, how we moved mid-year from Tennessee to Des Moines (Urbandale) and, once again, I was a new guy at school. I'd been a new guy before and so it wasn't traumatic or unusual for me. I'd started kindergarten in Sioux Falls, the 1st grade in Vancouver. We'd moved mid-year from Washington to the little town of Jonesborough, TN during my 4th grade and I adapted to those very strange surroundings. Then, while in Tennessee, I'd changed schools from Jonesborough to the Cherokee county school and then the Johnson City school before Iowa. Still, there's an oddness and stigma to be new, especially in mid-year.

I started attending the 7th grade at Urbandale Junior High (now it's called middle school, I believe) right before the Xmas break, but we didn't move into our house till the new year so in many ways I started the first of the year. I recall within my first day I had some girl pass me a note from some other girl who wanted me to "like"her, she described herself and where she sat in this class, etc etc. I was new. I didn't know what to make of it, so, I ignored it. She and her friend--who had passed the note--then took a disliking to me for, really, about the rest of my years in that school system. Huh. I was assigned a locker and my locker mates--two false tough kids--didn't care for that, so they changed the locks on me, threw my stuff out, etc. I complained and got that settled--don't remember exactly how. I was not adverse to fighting, physically, but did find that I was a bit cowed by all the newness in this new world--not just the new school, but entering into that phase of life known as adolescence. I think middle school is probably the worst years of a person's life, in many ways. This was before they tried to educate kids (and parents) about the difficulties and changes, about the steep pitfalls that befall many young people in those years.

The school systems themselves were quite different. In Tennessee, I was used to regular rooms and then going to classes. Academic expectations were not high. I was basically in a country system, full of rural boys and girls. In Iowa, they had open classrooms, where we all gathered together then split up into sections within a giant room to be taught separate subjects. They were further along than I was and I had become shy, internal, subdued by it all. I tolerated school. I felt more displaced than I had--in many ways--than in Tennessee, even and still longed for the days on the west coast in Washington (which I still considered my true home).

But more than anything, I think it was just the physical and hormonal changes that affected me in those days and the years to come, until about the end of my senior year or even a year or tow after--for me, probably until about the ages of 19 or 20, believe it or not.

It still amazes me to come across teens who are self-confident and capable, who engage well with both adults and their peers. I get ticked off when I see movies--or, less often, read books--about teens or pre-teens who are crafty and quick-witted, who confound adults and the adult world and can accomplish many things (perhaps that's why these teen movies are popular, they provide the fantasy of being able to outwit and outshine the adult world). To this day I such find such confident teen behavior--whether fictionalized or empirically derived--abnormal and always expect teenagers to be shy and clumsy and to do very stupid things.

Maybe that was just me.

Driving to Saylorville Lake: 1976

2010-12-17T10:27:00.000-08:00

There weren't many swimming options in central Iowa. There was Camp Dodge Pool and smaller community pools, there was the Des Moines River and the Raccoon River--but people didn't really swim in them, there was Big Creek--a man-made lake--and then there was Saylorville Lake (also a reservoir).

My best friend Kevin had a little black late 60s Volkswagon Beetle. He and I often drove to the lake, often with my other friends who were from my high school class (Kevin was from the class ahead of us, but he and I had become good friends--I was always one of the oldest in my class) and I can still recall that feeling: summer, no school, the warm hot air coming in the open windows, the trees full and open land full of weeds or crops and even above the rush of the air you could hear the calls of redwing blackbirds . . . It was just, by 76 and right out of high school for me, a feeling of youth. And we'd have his cassettes or 8tracks playing--usually the Eagles--we'd sometimes sing along to them though I never got the lyrics right because I've had bad hearing all my life, but it didn't matter, it was the drive and the lazy day and the looking forward to the lake and the friends and the girls that would be there, the sun and the water and what passed for a beach in Iowa, it was a time when time was endless. We were all very young.

But by, say 78, my attentions were shifting. I'd been off to school at Iowa, in Iowa City, while all of my friends--including Kevin--had gone to Iowa State, in Ames and they did not think of staying there in the summer, as Des Moines was so close. And by 79 it was--to the best of my memory--my last summer of coming back to Des Moines and I pretty much lived in Iowa City from then on, until the end of 83, and after that I lived in a series of places for brief months or years (as well as back in Des Moines and Iowa City) until, say, about August of 1990 . . . Anyway, this is a long way from a post about driving to Saylorville.

Saylorville Lake. We swam there. I swam there. Used to go water skiing with Seth who had a fast boat and all the accoutrements that go with the sport. I recall one fall--late fall, maybe even November--there was a late Indian summer and Kevin and I--perhaps I was home on Thanksgiving break from Iowa, or perhaps it was the semester I took off from school with the idea of going to Europe (Brock and I--he went, I did not and went back to school instead; just one of a number of times I backed out on good ol' Brock)--and we decided to go to the lake. We donned swim suits and took towels and when we got to the beach no one was there. The water looked gray and cold, the trees had few leaves. But, it was warm, and we went ahead and got in the water--it was cold, but tolerable--and swam. Not so bad. I recall I went ashore while Kevin kept swimming and I picked up a rock, not a big one and not a small one, and tossed it out into the lake at him. I hit him in the head. You've got to understand, this is a big lake with a big swimming area and no one was out there, not even a boat and I threw the rock from a far distance, never thinking I'd hit him, but I got him right in the forehead. It must have hurt. But Kevin and I were pals and shared a wickedly sarcastic and pessimistic sense of humor, so he laughed it off. I apologized and neither of us could believe I'd hit him from that distance.

But after I'd lived in California and Florida's panhandle, when I went back to Iowa and I'd see my friends, I couldn't bring myself to swim in Saylorville anymore. It looked ugly, the water was thick and dirty--unclear and unclean. It was cold compared to the Gulf of Mexico.

Kevin had stayed in Iowa (as had almost all of my high school friends) and so he didn't know that it was ugly and dirty.

Pajamas With Feet: Sioux Falls 1961

2010-12-14T15:13:00.000-08:00

Ah, I can barely remember this. I must have been three or four, but this could have been when I was a bit older. All I'm thinking of is that Mother used to buy us kids these pajamas with feet. You know what I'm talking about? One piece kid's PJs that were like a costume of sorts, where they covered your feet and, I think, your torso and arms and all--kind of like long johns but with the attached feet . . . All of us little kids loved those pajamas (we loved pajamas anyway--though my mother and father were not, we kids were a family of loungers, given the opportunity). The best thing about them was that, on the bottom of the attached feet, there were little round non-skid beads. The soles were white and knobby. And, this is really where this tiny memory comes from: Oldest Brother used to pretend they were poison pills. This is what I recall, me being little and my PJs on and Oldest Brother creating some narrative or another, playacting, and I'd sit on the couch and he would pretend to pick one of the "pills" off my feet, swallow it, and with great theatrics, die. Man, I laughed and laughed . . . I don't know why, or how, young kids can find death so funny.

Sitting By My Window Reading: Urbandale 1973

2010-12-05T20:44:00.000-08:00

This was in the summer. This was when I shared an upstairs room with my brothers. Not all of my brothers, but at least some of them. This was when I had a bed next to the lower window in the first room down the hall, the upstairs being the first floor, not the basement, in our one story house. This was when we did not use air-conditioning. I grew up without A/C.

What I recall, is that in the summer I sat in bed reading a book. I'd gotten the book at the Urbandale Public Library--Mother was a big reader and I'd gone with her to the library and randomly looked around in the Young Adult section and picked out books. I had this novel that was set in Russia and was about Cossacks and Tartars and such and I was very involved in it. And I was reading it one lazy summer afternoon by the window in my bed, the window wide open against the hot Iowa day and outside in the street kids were playing. I knew the kids that were yelling and running and scuffling through some game out there, and as I heard them and watched them I thought that I should join them. I was an active person, I liked games and sports and running around. Yet, I really liked the book I was reading.

It was a warm summer Iowa afternoon yet I was inside reading by the open window. I should be out there with my neighborhood peers . . . But, no. I wanted to read my book. I loved reading that book. So, I stayed inside, consciously relishing the air from the window, the sounds of kids playing in my absence while I read my library book set in the old Russia of cossacks and czars. I realized that I liked the excitement in my head--from the book--as much as the excitement of reality, at least for that moment. The world of my imagination was more important.

It's not as though I became a bookworm from then on, but I think I still remember that otherwise mundane instance because I realized that I had something else, something small (or big, depending how you feel about books) and private and that there was a value in pursuing it. I'd always liked reading, writing, but until that day by the window in the summer I don't think I realized how much it meant to me.

Watching Dr. Who: Iowa City 1978

2010-12-05T09:14:00.000-08:00

By 1975 to 76, after a childhood rich in watching a lot of television, I quit the habit. Sure, I still saw a thing or two now and then, but no more gluing myself to the tube as an opiate, watching reruns and prime time shows, I gave it up cold turnkey. But then, by the second semester in college, while living in Burge dorm, I started watching a bit again. One thing was our small dorm fllor, the majority of us, began getting together in Marty and Tim's room to watch Mork and Mindy once a week. I know, I know--lame show, lame activity, but it was a communal event and Robin Williams was funny enough. But the Tv watching I enjoyed the most became a semi-weekday habit of tuning in old Dr. Who reruns on a PBS station.

I'd head of Dr. Who but had less than a passing understanding of the show. But the local PBS station ran the half hour show every weeknight around the or ten thirty at night and, by that time of the day, I was done with classes and studying and Morn and Mindy etc and ready to settle in a bit before bed. Now, I had no TV set, but my roommate, Chuck (my third roommate being Jeff) had brought one, a small black and white thing which he had set up on some kind of pole near one of the desks. So, despite all of my good anti-TV intentions, I began to turn it on at night and watch the show. And I got hooked. It became a bit of a ritual: come 10:15 or so, I'd make the walk (sometimes with friends, often by myself) down to Vendo-Land (what I called the bank of vending machines down in the basement of the dorm; our half-hall was essentially in the basement, just 1/2 a flight of stairs up from it) and get my soda and snack, then return to my room to tune in Dr. Who.

The thing is, despite having two other roommates in the small dorm, I always watched the show alone. Not even Brock--a candidate for serious Dr. Who watching if there ever was one--joined me. So maybe this was part of the enjoyment, being alone, munching on my Sour Cream and Onion Lays potato chips, drinking my Coke or Mt. Dew or whathaveyou, watching the silly British show with tacky and campy special effects, semi-humorous story lines and characters. That Dr. Who was the big red-haired guy who always had a long scarf. That's my Dr. Who. Black and white. He had some primitive cave-girl type companion then (if you know Dr. Who, there are many actors who played him and he always has a constant Earth companion or two along for the adventure) and she was not horrible to look at as they gallivanted around the universe saving alien races or planets or saving Earth itself. Fun enough.

It was always a moment of respite. Moments of respectable waste of my time. Dr. Who and Sour Cream and Onion Chips. Dr. Who is back now on the BBC and I admit I've watched it. New actors and better special effects, an hour time slot. But it'll never be the same as when I was in Burge Hall in Iowa City in 1978.

The Bird in the Garage: Urbandale 1975

2010-11-24T05:27:00.000-08:00

I can't recall exactly how old I was when I found the baby bird. I know I wasn't 13 or 14, must have been 16 or so. Not sure. The bird was a robin, small and newly hatched, found on the ground below the maple tree that grew in our front yard. I did not try to return the bird to its nest--I saw no nest. Instead, I put it in a shoebox with nestlike materials and put the shoebox in the garage.

For the next several weeks I fed the bird. I fed it bread and raw hamburger and insect-like stuff. It grew and feathered up and responded to my feeding of it. My father knew the bird was in the garage--which was a detached garage, half-old and wooden--and my sister came out to see the bird a few times. It was early summer by then. The bird was growing but it did not come out of the box. I did not handle it.

At some point I decided it was time for the bird to learn to fly, or some such. I took the box off the shelf and carried it out of the garage. When I finally took the bird out of the box itself, I saw that it had deformed legs. It could not stand on its own. It could not fly.

"Maybe that will teach you to let nature take its course," I recall my father telling me, intimating that I should have left the bird alone, that its mother no doubt had pushed it from the nest.

The next day, I ground up two aspirin and mixed them in with the raw hamburger. I carried the meal out to the garage and the shoebox. I fed the aspirin and hamburger to the baby robin, the bird eating it just as it had eaten all the meals I'd been feeding it. I can't recall if I stayed or walked away.

I buried it in the garden.

Sandlot Baseball: Urbandale 1971

2010-11-20T03:47:00.000-08:00

I was never much of a baseball person. My father was not a fan, I was not a fan, I didn't toss the ball around much or favor an old glove--none of that stuff. I recall in Johnson City, Tennessee I decided to try out for Little League: I signed up, my father took me to the try-outs (or whatever they were) and it was crowded with kids, we stood around and I looked around, there were so many kids, and I told him to forget about it and we went back home.

When we moved to Iowa, to Urbandale--a suburb of Des Moines--I was the new kid once again. I'd started school halfway through the year. Down the block there was one kid my age named Bob and we struck up a semi-friendship. he knew a group of kids from around the immediate neighborhood--most a bit older, some in the same class as us--and he invited me to play baseball with them at a field behind Jensen Elementary School, which was close to our street, just across Aurora Avenue. So, I went.

I played horribly. I was athletic but I could hardly hit. I let ground balls roll between my legs, I was timid and uncertain in the infield, misjudged balls in the outfield. They other boys laughed at me. I took it in stride, told them I was better at football, but still, it stung a bit--like I said, I was the new kid.

(I had plenty of experience being the new kid--I'd been in five different schools by then, in four different states ranging from South Dakota to Washington to Tennessee and now Iowa.)

I just didn't have any baseball skills. I was also into the beginning of my adolescence so some of the confidence that used to come naturally to me was now failing, diminishing, leeching out of me and being replaced by I didn't know what. But I soldiered on with bat and glove and (over the years, not the summer of 72) I got better. I also came to understand the game of baseball better. I really didn't take an interest as a fan until much later, in the 80's, when I made up my mind to follow the Chicago Cubs one year and asked my very good friend Kevin to teach me why people liked baseball so much. And it wasn't until the 90s and 2000s that I finally got it.

But anyway. After my baseball fiasco, where I was pegged as the clumsy kid on the block, not too long after that, Bob came and said they were going to play football behind Jensen. "Okay," I said, eager. And off we went to the school, Bob and I, Blair, the McIntire brothers, Scott Oaken and maybe one or two others (I'm surprised I can recall these names). We stood there in the grass and the two eldest picked teams.

I was the last one chosen.

But as the game began--we played two-hand touch--the team that didn't pick me soon regretted it. I can to this day still recall the catches I made, the runs, interceptions and touchdowns, the surprise on the faces of my more-or-less-peers. I was tall and fast, confident, had sure hands and quick reactions. I had football skills. And from then on I wasn't the clumsy kid anymore.

I still played sandlot baseball, but among the group of friends--good friends--I fell into and acquired over my years in Urbandale, football was the game we played. It was the most important. We came to mainly play at Lions Park, just across the road from Urbandale High. The games were great fun and full of exercise--I recall years later I happened to meet an ex-Urbandalite and he said he remembered seeing us play football in the park; he had been a pothead, essentially, and he told me he couldn't understand how we could just play football and have fun and not be stoned or drink or whatever, said it in a wistful way almost, as if he regretted not being so simple or smart . . . And I am glad I played all those games, that I did not learn to drink and smoke until much later in life. I believe I built up a very healthy base for myself physically by being so simple and semi-innocent, by playing sports and riding my bike, building myself up (innocently enough) in those years when your body is still growing, your brain still developing. I can say that, at least.

I played a lot of basketball, too. And baseball--which is what this post was supposed to be about. But, as you can see, even a post about baseball becomes one about football. Football was very important to me in those years--not organized football, not the high school team, but just sandlot, just among friends. All of that was very good.

Coming Into Iowa City: 1977

2010-11-17T05:48:00.000-08:00

I recall that I drove myself to Iowa City from Des Moines (Urbandale, actually) for freshman orientation. I'd been to Iowa City before, but only with family. My father had gone to the University of Iowa--so we had visited briefly when I was younger. Oldest Brother and then Second Oldest Brother went to Iowa, so I must have gone along to help move them or visit them at some point in time. Father took me to a Hawkeye football game once--just the two of us, as no one else in the family had much interest in football--so I'd been there for that. But I had no true sense of the town and school when I drove there. I recall I came up the back way--through Coralville--from Interstate 80 because I knew of no other way (the more direct way) to get there. So, I ended up on the other side of the Iowa River, feeling my way through the campus around the science and education buildings, past the hospital and stadium.

I parked in some garage across from the Union (I'm not sure it's even there anymore) that was on a hill and connected to either Gilbert or Trowbridge Hall (Trowbridge, I'm thinking) and attended the orientation, didn't stay the night, and then drove back home.

I didn't really understand what I was doing.

Even though I'd taken a year off--working and traveling to Florida (Key West!)--I was still not clear of mind, I still didn't quite grasp what the heck I was supposed to be doing in the world. But I'd decided to go to college, to go to Iowa, had taken my SAT or ACT entry tests a year later than I should have and applied and was accepted and so on. And then went to orientation, signed up for classes, applied and got a dorm assignment, and then I think my parents moved me over to Iowa City just before classes started.

I was wary at first. Uncertain I'd done the right thing. Was ready to return to Des Moines (Urbandale, actually). But then, slowly, I got it.

College was fun!

Being in Iowa City was fun!

And Iowa City became the place I'd rather be.

I can still recall drives from Des Moines, coming down I-80, and as I neared the city of Iowa City I'd get a slow burn of excitement, of anticipation. I remember the exit onto Clinton Street and there would be the sign for Iowa City and the university--a shiny black metal sign with gold lettering (Iowa's colors) with some symbols: the Old Capitol, an ear of corn--and it just plain made me feel good. (I was into signs back then. I loved to drive long distance and the sight of highway signs could elicit the same feel-good emotions in me, feelings of adventure and anticipation. I recall walking the pedestrian bridge on the other side of campus to cross the busy road and there was always a highway sign right there--some numbered highway leading out of town--and just the sight of the sign would evoke travel and escape and new frontiers; I loved it.) So, just coming into Iowa City became a pleasurable endeavor for me.

I don't know. I mean, I was young, a late bloomer, I'd lived such a small and insular life for many years that a place like Iowa City, that roadside signs, became symbolic for a new and open world, one of fresh uncertainty and challenge. To this day I still love Iowa City. I don't know if I could live there--well, not true, I know I could live there, just don't know if I'd really prefer to live there--but it's always close to me. I realize that almost everyone has great affection for their college, their college town, but I'd like to believe that my connection is a little more than that, a little more tied to my personal history. It is, after all, where I bloomed.

To Whom It May Concern #9

2010-11-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

I know of only one person who reads this blog. And I'm very intimate with that person, so I'm not sure that counts. Doesn't matter. This wayward blog is still in it's beginning form. Not there yet.

It makes me recall a time in Montana. I worked with this very nice guy, Bruce, at the Old Town Cafe in Missoula. He was from Glendive, MT which is way out in the eastern part of the state and is full of treeless expanses and wind and dust. But what I recall is he told me a story about a friend who wrote a play that was set in Glendive. In the play there was only one act and setting--it was set in a radio studio where a disc jokey is spinning his music. He's also talking. Suddenly something happens to him--I don't remember if it was a medical calamity or he was being threatened with murder, something--and he yells out to his audience that he's in trouble. But, there's no response. Or, maybe he's just doing a call-in show and no one ever responds. Anyway, what the point of the play, and the theme being an existential one, is that he was all alone with no listeners. He was talking into the void, playing music for no one. And--if he is indeed in need of help--I guess he dies because no one was listening.

The fact that no one is "listening" to this blog, however, is fine. Perhaps for the best. It is after all irregular and idiosyncratic at its base. In many ways the posts are only dry runs for potential ideas and possibilities much later in life.

Radio Days: Champaign 1993

2010-11-08T09:44:00.000-08:00

Was thinking about when my girls were very little and I wasn't working unless you consider working taking care of two babies and not being able to sleep or shower or do anything of you own volition except take care of babies . . . So I often had the radio on for company there in Champaign. In the spring I'd tune in WGN from Chicago and listen to the early baseball games--the Cubs, with Harry Caray. Harry Caray was the greatest and i could listen to him and the soft cheers and pinks and snaps of the game as I cared for my little kids. It made good background noise even if I could not follow the game. And other times I listened to the local NPR station with it's mix of shows and music and news. They had this local guy, a weatherman, named Ed and had a show called Talk to Ed where people would call in before the weekend and say they were traveling to such and such a place and Ed would let them know what the weather would be like there. This was before the internet and when the Weather Channel was in its infancy (not that it's that specific) and Ed had a natural and soothing voice/demeanor and it was always pleasant to listen and think of those places people were going to. And then there was WEFT, a community station from downtown Champaign. Now THAT was a radio station. They played jazz and blues and old time country music. They played rockabilly and rasta and sub-genres of sub-genres--eclectic stuff depending upon the taste and mood of the volunteer disc jockeys. I learned a lot about music and musicians by listening to that station.

Harry Caray is gone. I'm sure Talk to Ed is gone. WEFT is still there, I believe. But, I'm not. I'm gone and those days are gone and I don't listen to the radio anymore . . . Maybe when I have grandkids.

Minnesota 3 Green Bay 0: Urbandale 1972

2010-11-07T16:58:00.000-08:00

My father was a Minnesota Vikings fan and so when I started watching football, I became a Vikings fan. This was when Joe Capp was their quarterback. This was when the had Carl Eller and Alan Page and the Purple People Eaters defense. Anyway, what I recall is one game where I stayed in my room and listened to it on the radio.

It was a late season, winter game--freezing cold afternoon, the game in Minnesota when they had an outdoor stadium--and I had this little green radio that I used. It was not televised (like almost all the games are these days) and my radio was round like a ball, which I had won in some kind of contest through a local radio station by calling in or something. Weird. Anyway (again) I stayed in my room and listened, following the game on my scratchy radio. And it was a boring game. I mean, it was arctic with wind and snow and nobody could move the ball. 1st Quarter: 0 - 0. 2nd Quarter: 0 - 0. 3rd Quarter: 0 - 0. 4th Quarter: still 0 - 0, until about the very end.

Finally Minnesota moves the ball down into Green Bay territory. Their stubby-legged kicker comes out (and again, this is all through the radio), Cox I think his name was, before Gary Anderson was their kicker, and he hits a field goal and the Vikings win three nothing.

Wow.

But what amazes me is that I sat through that game, only listening on my tiny green ball of a radio, sat glued to the whole zero to zero ball game. And I pretty much enjoyed it.

Man. I must have had no life.

Destroying the TV Guide: Urbandale 1974

2010-11-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

The TV Guide used to be the #1 selling magazine at one time. It was a small publication, thick and hard and square, about the size of a current-day DVD box. It was published once a week, I think. Embarrassingly enough, we were big TV people when I was a kid. We--us kids (except perhaps Second Oldest Brother) and my mother--used to get excited when, each year in the fall, the TV Guide featuring all the new shows would come out. We would read about them and decide what we would watch and what we would not. And we watched a lot of shows together as a family: The Addams Family, Mary Tyler Moore, M.A.S.H.--oh crap--and many others (which fortunately I can't even recall now). But, that's not what this post is about. It's about how I came to enjoy destroying the TV Guide.

As I've mentioned before, I was a very unhappy adolescent. I had a lot of pent-up anger. I was introverted most of the time but also an aggressive little snot. (Okay, I wasn't little by then, probably at or over 6ft by then, nor was I ever a snot. I was sensitive and introspective and depressed and could be dumb about the most basic things. I was also a boy and as a boy I liked to knock things down and tear things up and run around till I fell down.) So--and I don't know how I discovered this--one way I found to get out my aggression was by destroying the TV Guide each week.

As soon as my mother bought a new one (or it arrived in the mail, I think she subscribed eventually) and the week was over, I grabbed the old magazine and began to punch it. I would throw it up in the air and kick it, slap it, crunch and chop and slice and dice the fat little thing with my bare hands. I killed it. Murdered it. Mutilated it. It brought me great joy to start it out fresh in the living room and smack its glossy pages--Blam Blam Blam--and see how the magazine began to fall apart as I worked it all around the house. I made it fly against walls and down the stairs and back up, it hit ceilings and floors, the stove and fridge, chairs and doors, my knuckles dug into it and its spine would crack and bend and pages would fly and I did not stop until it was a mealy mess.

I did not imagine the TV Guide to be anything other than what it was. It did not represent authority figures in my life or boys I disliked or evildoers or enemies of any kind, it was not a fantasy moment, this destruction. It was just a pure outletting of desire, desire to destroy something. I became very concentrated as I hit and swatted and dismembered that magazine. And I understood what I was doing, that it was a release, that it was a type of therapy. I know my mother was somewhat unsettled by such behavior, but she couldn't stop me. No one could. And I so enjoyed it. I looked forward to it each week.

Ahhhh. It was fun.

And it was only the TV Guide, no other publication would do. And, maybe but two years later, I learned to dislike TV itself. I remember I sold my own little TV for 50 bucks to Jim at Younkers, because I wanted to give it up. And I did. I think I was so full of TV watching by the time I was in my late teens that I had no desire to watch much of it ever again. I still don't . . . As for the TV Guide, as far as I know it still exists, but I'm not sure. And if it does, I think maybe I could still put it to good use if I bought one; I bet I still have a lot of aggression to release. Lord knows I could use the exercise.

Seattle and Walla Walla: Vancouver 1965

2010-11-03T04:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a little kid and we lived in Vancouver, Washington, my father worked for the VA and sometimes he had business trips. Conferences or whatever. Often he'd take all of us--our whole family: Mother and Oldest Brother and Second Oldest Brother and me and Sister and Younger Brother--along with him. These trips were usually either in Seattle or Walla Walla. We may have gone to Camas once, that smelly paper mill town along the Columbia River, but I'm not sure. But it didn't really matter where to us kids, it just meant we got to stay in a motel.

We were not hotel people--we'd stayed in few by then, in Chicago maybe (and later in Atlanta)--and we weren't even motel people all that much, though we had stayed in quite a few by then and in some cabins back in South Dakota (where all of us kids had been born, where my mother was from, my father being from Red Oak, Iowa [though he had been born in Nebraska]), but we had become mainly campers after moving out to Washington. So, a motel stay in a city was a treat. And my father would go off to his meetings and my mother would get us all together and take us out around the town.

In Seattle, going out around the town was fun. We had a place close to the Seattle Center and the Seattle Center (home to a World's Fair at some time, when the Space Needle was built and where the Space Needle was) had amusement rides and park-like settings and monuments and the monorail. Ah, the monorail! Here was a futuristic ride that you did not find just anywhere. So, we rode that. We went on a few rides, got some cotton candy, walked and looked and stuff like that. We went back to the hotel--all of us crammed into a single room (I have no idea how my parents did this, seven in one motel room)--and discovered Seattle cartoon shows like Patches the Clown and other things that were different than home. Seattle was the big city. We liked it.

But we also went to Walla Walla . . . Hmmm. I think Walla Walla--the town with the funny name--was smaller than Vancouver. Vancouver was really a bedroom community for Portland, Oregon (though we never felt this, that I recall) so it had a larger city attached to it. But, in our kid eyes, Walla Walla was just fine. Sure, there was no Space Needle or monorail, no Patches the Clown, but there was a toy store and other stores and all we needed was new coloring books and crayons and a TV in the motel and that kept us busy enough. That's what I recall of Walla Walla (which, like the name, we went to twice; Seattle twice, too, I think), that we got some new monster-themed coloring books (it must have been close to Halloween--a big holiday for kids) and worked on those the whole while.

So, these were little adventures. I came back to Seattle in the eighties, lived there for a bit just a few blocks from the Seattle Center, then visited often with Fru when we were in Montana, but by then I required more than just a motel room and coloring books to make me happy.

Waiting For Rick Kading: Urbandale 1975

2010-10-31T02:52:00.000-07:00

I didn't get my drivers license until my senior year of high school. By then quite a few of my friends already had theirs. I was from a family of five kids with two older brothers, from a family that usually only had one car. I had two older brothers so, even though by then we had two cars, it didn't mean that one was at my disposal. Though I did drive when I could.

The reason why this was important was because my social groups entertainment and world revolved around driving. And I mean, literally, just driving. We'd pile into someone's car, start up the main streets of Urbandale--down Aurora past the high school, down 73rd to Douglas and downtown, maybe down around past the mall and then around and around and around . . . We joked and listened to the radio (not our 8-tracks or cassettes and there were no CDs or ipods and such--I had an 8-track in my van that I bought after high school) and looked to see who was out and about just like us. This is what we did on Fridays and Saturdays and other days and summer days, at least for a couple of years. Sometimes we'd go somewhere specific--a movie or bowling or whatever. Sometimes we'd venture into Des Moines and go to The Loop, which was a circle downtown among the big buildings where all sorts of strange people went around and around and around to no purpose other than to go round'n'round and see others do the same. Ah. Sometimes we'd hit the Interstate--I-80 or I-35--which was an even bigger circle and we'd see what we saw.

Talk about your wasted youth.

But the person who drove the most was Rick Kading. He was a good guy, from my class and my lab partner in biology and botany and friend. I did most of the work (all of it, really) as lab partner, but I liked Rick very much and he was good to me. He'd come pick me up at my house in his car and we'd gather others for a night of driving. he had a Chevy Nova--his car--that looked cool and whenever the song Don't Rock the Boat came on he'd turn his wheel back and forth and make the Nova rock like a boat. Yes--very inventive . . . Anyway, we had fun and I used to sit out on my front porch each evening waiting for Rick to come driving down 65th Street and stop so that I could hop in. He didn't come every time and then, if he didn't show up, I'd feel shunned and sad. I don't know why I didn't just call him (he lived only a few blocks away from me in the older part of Urbandale), but that just wasn't done. (We did NOT have cell phones and that constant need to be in touch, anyway.) So, out I'd sit and hope Rick Kading would come driving down my street in his Chevy Nova.

There were adventures to be had--girls to meet, near fights with older classmen, car chases with strangers on the Interstate. But ultimately, besides just enjoying a newfound motorized freedom, we were just killing time. We didn't know what to do with ourselves in a place like the suburbs of Iowa's biggest city other then to circle around within it. I mean, we socialized and had our routines and it was not a long period, this driving around, but still: we were going nowhere while pretending that we were going somewhere.

But that's how it is in those years. Eventually we did grow up and go--to college, to other states and such. Rick never went to college. He married and had a kid and stayed in Des Moines--in Urbandale. I lost touch and we weren't close friends, I'd hear of him here and there through the high school friends I did stay in touch with. I did come back to Iowa one summer and Rick called and he gave me a day's work doing concrete, which I appreciated. But, just like not calling to see if he was coming by in his car, I never asked him for more work. Rick became a very successful person, as I understand it. But, like I said, he was a good guy overall. And I got my hand on cars and vans and such and I drove all over the place in the following years. The following decade or two.

Maybe Rick got it out of his system while in high school. But I made bigger and bigger circles, still thinking I was getting somewhere.

Do I wish I had stayed in Des Moines? No way.

But I'm still circling.

The Killing Of A Deer Fly: Missouri 1974

2010-10-28T04:55:00.000-07:00

This was the summer of 75 (I think) and I was getting older. I went on a camping vacation with my parents down to Missouri (from Iowa, of course). It was the last vacation I ever took with them, now that I think of it. My two older brothers had both declined to go on this little trip, so it was just my parents, Sister, Younger Brother and me. My parents had a camping trailer by then.

First we stopped at this state park called Johnston Shut-Ins. I'm not a big fan of Missouri (though I've come to very much appreciate St. Louis), but the Shut-Ins was a great place--it was woods and had a stream that ran through carved rocks with big boulder-like surroundings and many pools. You could swim and stream down the semi-rapid small waters from rocks to rapids, from pool to pool, all of it natural and fun. But, I was also an older boy and I felt a tad foolish acting like a kid. I was also checking out all the women and girls who swam and camped there.

Then we moved on, further south to the Ozarks area of Missouri. It was along some lake, in the woods, you know, a campground. It was not nearly as interesting as the Shut-Ins. We cooked out, swam in the lake, stuff like that. And there were flies. Sure, there were mosquitos, there were dragonflies and bottleflies--we called them horseflies, those long skinny blue flies, smaller but similar to a dragonfly--and there were deer flies. I hated the deer flies. They were big and fat, looking like mutant house flies, and swarmed around all day long and into the night. And they bit. Not a small bite or a prick like a mosquito, but a sharp stinging bite that made you sit up straight. Ouch. So, deer flies were low on my list of needed creatures in the world.

And what I remember--what this post is about, essentially--is that I was coming back from the lake at dusk, headed back to camp. I was barefoot, bare chested, making my way through the darkening trees and here was this one deer fly buzzing me, landing on me, biting me. I began to jog a bit but could not shake this single fly. I was swatting at it, so it was attacking me where it thought I could not reach. So, I slowed down a bit. I was very angry at this fly. I hated it. And I walked, waited. The fly--and I could tell this, it was a very evil-genius type of deer fly--the fly thought it had the best of me, that I was but its very large young meal for a while. And I watched waited until I felt that big fly land squarely in the middle of my back. Who could swat such a thing in the middle of one's back? I'm sure the evil genius fly thought this.

It turned out that I could swat it.

I was in my teens. A strengthening boy. Nimble and quick. And when I felt that pestilent pillaging fly land on the middle of my back, I quickly brought my arm and hand behind me, using the back of my hand, and smacked it! Good god that fly must have been surprised! I smacked it and felt it with both hand and back and knew I had gotten it and I stopped and looked down behind me and there it was. Yes, it was dusk, but I had my keen eyesight and I could see the damn thing in the leaves and it wasn't quite dead and I took my bare foot and stomped the bastard until it was dead. Dead as a door nail.

Ha ha.

One dead deer fly out of a million, but it was the one who bothered me the most and I am--to this day--very glad it is dead. Yes! I would never harm a person or animal, even some insects (well, I should not say never, because there are always circumstances when no doubt I would, or even have to some degree) but even now I find delight in recalling the death of that deer fly in southern Missouri. I've killed other flies or beetles or bugs that bugged me (I killed two flies on a low mountain top in Santa Fe because they would not leave me alone--snatched them cleanly out of the air and squished them and buried them in the sandy soil--I remember that), but this one was my most triumphant. So, other than the Shut-Ins, what I remember most about Missouri is the killing of a fly.

Maybe that's why I'm not so big on Missouri.

8hr Layover: New Orleans 1995

2010-10-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

I'd been accepted three places for graduate school: the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Colorado State in Ft. Collins and Florida International in Miami. I'd been out to Ft. Collins and loved the place, but was unsure of the program. I'd been to Fairbanks way back in 1983 and, thinking how I had a wife and two little little kids (ages 2 and 4) I ruled out Alaska. We--my family--drove down to Florida and I found the writing program at FIU to be much better then expected. Still, I was not sure. Was torn between Colorado and Florida, with the idea of living and possibly settling down in one of those states, cities. I was looking to get my MFA (in creative writing, fiction), though I had already been to the Iowa Writer's Workshop (and had subsequently withdrawn from there for reason to ignorant to account here). So? So, I decided to take a train ride down to South Florida, on my own, for one last inspection of FIU.

And, that loooong Amtrak ride had an 8hr layover in New Orleans.

I don't know if you've ever ridden the train, ridden it long distance. It's clanky, somewhat spartan (somewhat not, as well), makes plenty of stops and it's hard to sleep on (I had no sleeper car, was doing it about as cheap as possible). But you do, inevitably, end up talking to people.

I met and talked to a lot of folks, but towards the end of the first stretch, before I got to NOLA, I met this guy who I'll call Ferris. (I can't quite recall his name.) He was older than me by a little. He was from Detroit and on his way to visit his brother in Pensacola. He was big and black. I'm white. No, this is not a big thing, of course, this racial difference, but it's also a bit interesting. You'd be surprised, perhaps, how places and people will divide themselves along racial lines--in neighborhoods and bars, in public places and while traveling. But, Ferris and I sat together and started talking and we slowly got to know each other pretty well. We opened up a bit and I found out that he had played football at USC--was the running back behind James White, a guy who was very talented but lost it all to drugs and abuse--and that he had been given a writer's card by some screwed up Hollywood producer (or some such) and that other members had asked to see the card and then promptly burned it, right in front of him. Ferris was not from places I had been, not from a comfortable neighborhood in Detroit.

But, we got along well. And by the time we stopped in New Orleans, we were pals.

He had not been to the Crescent City before, so I suggested--since we had 8hrs--we go to the French Quarter. And he was good with that. So, we stepped out of the big old train station in New Orleans and tried to get a cab. We found one--and older black guy as driver--and got in the backseat and then Ferris said something about money or some such and the cab driver promptly tossed us out of the cab. Huh? I didn't get it. So, undaunted, I said we'd just walk.

I did not know the city that well, but I recognized a few landmarks, I knew sort of where to go and knew if got to Canal Street I could probably figure it out. And . . . I did. It wasn't such a long walk, really and then there we were in the Quarter, wandering and looking and drinking. Yes, we drank. We drank hurricanes and beer and ate meat-on-a-stick while wandering Bourbon Street and Charters Street and Royal and Decatur and Governor Nichols and all others . . . we went to the French Market and there they had tons of vegetables and fruits on display, candies and souvenirs and other items. "All this color, the smells, the sensations," Ferris said. He was happy. I was happy. We were pals.

We went to Pat O'briens--one of the few places I knew--and sat at the inside bar, near the entrance. The place was pretty crowded and we had our drinks and we were animated, talkative, drunk. There was a group of people--all white, of course--sitting with us and they liked talking to Ferris. Like I said, he was a big and little bit rough-looking guy (I'm kind of big, also) and this was where the racial differences became sort of acknowledged, not in a bad way but in the sense that Ferris knew these genteel white people wouldn't be talking to him except that we were together, that he was okay because he was with me. He even said, out loud, "I'm here with my white buddy" and he clasped me in his arms and laughed, inferring that he was safe and accepted. Ah. And I admit I enjoyed hanging out with him because he was a big black male, because we worked against type among the revelers in the Quarter. A woman with the group even began flirting with Ferris--much to the chagrin of her male companion. It was a bit awkward, but again it was because he was deemed a nice guy. We both enjoyed that conception. But then, we were both nice guys.

We kept drinking. A cabbie told us of a good, out-of-the-way strip joint to visit. We went there. It was a little hole in the wall, cheap, dirty, very French Quarterish (except for the cheap part). We didn't spend too long there, just enough to pass out a few dollar bills, just enough to say we'd done it while in New Orleans. then we were off to other bars, other drinks, making jokes, enjoying ourselves. Then, we had to be getting back to the train. We found a cab. The driver did not kick us out.

On the train, we were still giddy. It was late at night. The train had few riders. Now it was time to settle down, to come down from our French Quarter shenanigans and dissolve into the coming hangovers. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses. Ferris asked if he could borrow twenty dollars. He was broke and wanted to get a beer, a sandwich or something. Ah. I knew I'd never see that twenty again, but, sure. I gave it to him.

The train started. It was night--well past midnight I think--and off we went, lurching sideways through the South.

I didn't see Ferris again.

The train stopped in Pensacola very early in the morning. I woke but did not see him from my window. The train went on again and, after many hours, I made it to my stop in Ft. Lauderdale. (I'd chosen to stay in Ft. Lauderdale over Miami--I still did not trust Miami, but that's a different story.)

I took the train back after a few days. Another looong ride. No long stop in New Orleans. I played cards on the train, hung out, I made it a point to integrate myself--I think, because of Ferris--and everyone was friendly.

I think it was close to a year later--maybe only six months, I don't recall exactly--when I got a phone call.

It was Ferris. He was at home in Detroit. I could tell he was a little drunk, that he was with friends. But it was good to talk to him. He was laughing and recalling all the things we did in the Quarter. Then he said, "You know, that was the best time I had the whole trip. My brother was so serious, he was telling me I had to get a good job, had to do this and that. But New Orleans, that was fun, that was something." And I said it was the most fun I had had, too. And it was.

I never heard from him again. I never got my twenty dollars.

But that's okay--it was worth way more than a simple twenty.

I Found A Wallet: Alabama 1988

2010-10-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

I was driving through Alabama in the winter to go see Fru for the first time since she had visited my place in Seagrove Beach. In the Florida Panhandle. I was on some lonesome highway or another and it was cold and I pulled over to take a piss in the woods.

All there really was was woods.

I'm a pretty private guy sometimes (as in I'm English, from my mother's side; but I also like to trek in the woods), so I walked and hopped a low fence and walked up a slope a bit into the thick trees. And I took my piss. Then, as I was walking back, looking around at the leafless trees and the leave-full ground, I notice a brown wallet. (I've always been good at spotting things. My father would always come to me when something was lost, no matter how small.) I bent down and picked it up. I looked through it seeing a drivers license--it was an Alabama license, white male, in his thirties--maybe a credit card and other things. There was no money. It looked like the wallet had sat in the leaves for a while, it was damp and worn, but it also was not covered by the leaves, or I would not have seen it.

I still think of this wallet. And in my mind, I took the wallet and stopped in the next town and dropped it in a mailbox. Sometimes I think that I really did that. But, I don't think I did.

I think I looked for the cash, and where there was none, I tossed the billfold back into the leaves in the woods on a hill along a nameless roadside in Alabama . . . In those days I had never had a credit card (had never had credit) so it wouldn't have occurred to me that I could have taken the credit card (if there was one). All I, unfortunately, was interested in was some cold cash. Some wet cash. And I went back to the car,got in, drove off, thinking of my appointment with Fru, who--already--I loved.

And it was when I was down the road apiece that I began thinking about it. This poor guy. I thought that he'd probably been hunting and lost it. He'd probably been hoping it would

somehow return. And I could have done that. That's why I often think that I kept it and dropped it in a mailbox--who knows for sure, maybe I did. But later in life I even imagined that he had been a man who had died, or been murdered, and the wallet was the needed clue to solve his disappearance. Yes, I have thought that. But really, as I got older and had credit cards and changed licenses and such, It's about that bother of not having your identification, your insurance cards, fishing license, voter registration, your library card--your credit cards!--that will devil you. And this poor guy went around knowing his wallet full of ID was missing.

Ah. Anyway.

I know I've found other wallets, some since then. A few. Maybe it was one of those I dropped in the mailbox. Prior to the Alabama billfold, I recall in Iowa City, in maybe 86 (when I was in the Iowa Writers Workshop), I was walking back very drunk from the Deadwood with Craig (not Craig P., who was also from Iowa City and became a screen writer/cartoon editor in L.A. and who I collaborated on a screenplay based off an unpublished novel of mine . . . Nor was it Craig S. who was from Des Moines and who I worked with at Younkers [nor Craid D. M. who I went to high school with]; this was the artist Oregon/Iowa Craig) and I found a wallet at the Quick Trip, on Market and Linn. I was drunk and obnoxious. An unhappy person. At odds a bit with Craig. So, I opened it up, found some money--cash-- and took it. I brought the wallet into the Quick Trip and handed it to the cashier, and said: Someone lost their wallet by the pumps. If they ask, I already took the money."

He smiled uneasily, I smiled easily, Craig was both stupefied and also thinking I was stupid. But, again, I looked for the cash. I did at least leave the wallet--otherwise untouched--where it could likely been found.

But, as I said, I still think of that tiny incident. The lost wallet.

Who was that guy?

Camp Dodge Pool: Des Moines 1976

2010-10-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

Camp Dodge was north of Des Moines, just outside of Johnston. It was big place where the Iowa national Guard was located, though I think it used to be an actual Army base. It had a huge pool--and I mean big big--that had been built for and used for aquatic military training during WWII (it was that big, larger than a football field). But it had been a recreational pool for some years by the time I moved to Iowa.

I'd gone to the Camp Dodge pool a handful of times with my Mother and brothers, my sister, but it wasn't until high school and I had set friends, when we could drive, that I went often during the summer.

It became THE place to go. Iowa does not have a beach or many lakes; there was the river (two rivers in Des Moines, actually) and there were two reseviors, Saylorville and Big Creek. But the natural--or naturalish--bodies of water were brown and sandless, though we went to Saylorville pretty often, the best place for swimming and sunning and seeing girls was Camp Dodge.

It was mainly me and Kevin, Larry and Bill. Others came too: Randy, Jim, Dave, Bob and such. But, as I recall, it became Kevin and I, Larry a lot, who habitually went to the pool in the summer--almost every day. Though I was working at Younkers in the summer, I'd sometimes go home for lunch then skip the rest of the day and go to the pool (and then return to work at the end of the day and pretend I'd been there all afternoon--yes yes, my bad). There was this older guy who ran the pool--was the head supervisor. he had a big nose and white hair and a loud voice. Kevin and I called him Foghorn. As time passed, Foghorn recognized us each day. the lifeguards recognized us and Foghorn began calling us The Golden Boys . . .

I guess we were golden. We mainly sat poolside along the deep end, sunned ourselves like reptiles, jumped in the water only to swim to the raft (it was big enough and deep enough to have a raft at the deep end) and sun ourselves some more. We were brown (except Larry, who remained white no matter what, Larry who would not swim out to the raft and would say, "I don't have to prove anything!" [I guess he was a bad swimmer]). Ah. Summer. Golden summer. We had no worries, really. No jobs of import, no need for great sums of money--but we were still wet behind the ears, so life was full of the usual turmoil, teenage turmoil. Still, at the big Camp Dodge pool, even that turmoil was mostly gone, life was but our place in the sun.

That was golden, too.

And when we left the pool, which was situated down in a hollow-like area with a big hill leading back up to the main road, we'd drive up the hill and I'd get out and stand on the car, surfing the car, doing "My Spiderman Routine". Yes, I crawled all over the car as it moved up to the main road--I have no idea if people watched me, but we all got a laugh from it.

I don't know. day in and out, swim and sun in a big pool in Iowa summers . . . a waste and yet not so much. It brightened my life, I think, I who was sad and foolhardy, a self-pitying teen. Camp Dodge was a bright spot. It was the only place in the world--since I had moved to Iowa--where I was a Golden Boy.

Blizzard Triptych: Des Moines 1973

2010-10-06T05:17:00.000-07:00

ONE: The blizzard was a big one and, what made it unusual and what makes me recall it, it happened in the spring. In April.

When you live in the northern climes where winters are long and often brutal, spring becomes very important. Now, someone who lived north of Iowa, say in Duluth or the U.P. of Michigan, or a Canadian, they may look at Iowa and say what nice short winters we had. But they are not nice short winters. Tennessee has nice short winters. So, I can recall livng in Iowa and hating the month of March because in March winter was dissolving but never quite went away--the weather would tease you with snow melt and hints of warmth only to turn around and freeze and sleet and snow a little and piss you off. But April? Ah, April is crocuses and tulips and daffodils. I mean, it's not May, but April is usually more sun than snow, there's no more hinting that spring is here. But not that winter.

I think there may have been flowers out and leaf buds and the first insects of the year, but a huge winter storm came roiling in out of Colorado and across Nebraska and it dumped pound upon pound of wet heavy snow on Des Moines and Urbandale. Upon central Iowa. Whiteouts and roads closed, people and animals trapped, cities shut down. Schools closed (Yes!).

But despite all the trouble, a blizzard is fun, it demarcates the season, your life. Even though a feeling of spring had been trashed, I went out into the blizzard to goof around. The next day my neighborhood friends, my brothers and sister, went out to play. It was fun. Huge drifts, our boring landscape changed. Snow wet and thick, perfect for snowballs and snowforts and snowmen . . . Okay, if you're going to have one last shot of winter in April in Iowa, why not a blizzard?

TWO: I built a huge snowman. This may have been after a blizzard, but don't think it was the one mentioned above. I built the snowman out of a drift that had blown in against our front door covering the porch. I'd shoveled the porch, piling it upon the drift, and I then shaped that--because it was wet snow--into a ballish shape, then made another huge snowball, rolling it up in the front yard, then added a smaller one for a head, then packed snow all around that. Did the usual stuff with charcoal, carrot, hat, sticks and had me a snowman. But like I said, it was huge. It was maybe seven feet tall (I could reach its top by standing on the porch), big and fat and solid, as solid as a snowman can be, I'd say.

It stood by our front door like a sentinel, a winter god, a big oaf to scare off solicitors. It stood there for days and days.

Now, I was the kind of kid who liked to stay up late. Living in a smallish house with a family of seven, sharing rooms all my life, arguing over tv shows and such, I loved the night when everyone else was asleep and the house was dark, living room empty, streets outside empty. So, I was up one night after my snowman was into his second week of existence. I was up, alone, looking out the window, houselights off, streetlights on outside shining cold and yellow upon the snowed suburban landscape. And what do I see? I see the neighborhood kid from down the block come sneaking into our yard. This was one of the two boys (or were there three?) who lived across the street and about four houses down, maybe less. I don't recall their names. I don't recall which one it was. They were not friends. They were rough kids, mean-spirited (the Howles?)--to me at least--who would throw eggs on Halloween and mistreat animals. So, I see him sneaking up. He does not know I'm awake and watching. And he comes up to my snowman, looks it over, then goes behind it and braces his body up against it and heaves, trying to topple it.

I watched his push and push.

I don't know why I didn't tap the window or open the door or go out the back door and confront him. I wasn't afraid of them, just disliked them for the most part, but I was in my lonely groove and only watched as he pushed.

And he could not do it. My snowman did not budge. And I enjoyed that, seeing him unable to knock my giant snowman over. he tried and gave up and that was good enough for me . . . He may have been the one I had the snowball fight with where I had to pay for the broken window.

THREE: I was walking home from school on a winter day and when I got to 65Th Street--where I lived--there was one of the boys from down the street and he began to throw snowballs at me. And that's fine. There may have been a malicious intent on his part, but to me it was just a snowball fight. So, I dropped my books and bunched up some snow and tossed snaowballs back at him. The snow was heavy, icy (oh, ice balls--the worst of snowball fights; I got hit in the face by an iceball one of my first winters in Iowa, by a guy who was pretty much a friend, when I was walking to Joe Strayhall's house; it hit me in the nose and I bled all the way to Joe's). So we battled back and forth and I had him on the run. He backtracked to his own house, to his driveway where I had him cornered, though his garage door was open. So, I tossed a good fastball right at him as he backed into his garage and, as the snowball flew hard and straight, he reached up and pulled the door down. he got it closed just as the snowball came and--BLAMCRASH--my snowball went right through one the garage door's windows. Glass was strewn.

I didn't think too much of it, but within a day his mother called my mother and demanded that I pay for the broken window.

What?

My mother was always of the mind to just pay it and be done with it--no arguments--and ignore people like that. So, she gave me the money in an envelope and I went and put it in their mailbox. But, what injustice! I can see that he never told his mother that he was the one who had lowered the door, who had stared the fight . . . but there's more to this, in a way.

The Howells (I'm pretty sure that was the family name) had two, maybe three boys, as said. But one of them was killed a few years later, maybe in the early eighties. I think maybe it was the oldest boy, not the one I had a snowball fight with, not the one who tried to topple the snowman, but then again, it could have been him. He wasn't murdered, I believe. I think he died in a hunting accident or some such thing. But he wasn't much older or younger than me.

Winter. Winter. Winter.

A Confounding Idiocy: Urbandale 1974

2010-10-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

So, I was in high school and I'd been in the Urbandale school system for about three, really two and a half, years by then. I wasn't the new kid anymore, but I also wasn't an established one. I was tall, broad-shouldered, lean and lanky. My face full of acne by then, I think. And I was on the football team.

What I'm thinking of--what I'm remembering--is one particular football practice when one of my teammates began to hit me. Not hitting like you're supposed to, but hitting me with his arm after a play was done. This was Noel. I was not friends with him, not even really acquaintances. He was, socially, in the upper echelons of the high school world and I was one of the invisible minions for the most part. Now, I had met Noel before, early on when I'd first come to Iowa from Tennessee. This was the 7th grade and I was brand new to the school and bewildered (well, I was bewildered most of my teens) and was thrown into some kind of counseling session with some other students--something I guess all the students were put into. The counselor was, I guess, the counselor for our class all the way through our Urbandale school career (I hardly knew who the guy was). In this forced get-together we had to partake in a role-playing game where we pretended to all be in a life boat--with the likelihood we'd stranded on a deserted island--and, as best I can recall, we had to pick who should survive or not, that there was only so much room on the boat and only so many supplies or something. (Yes, a nice game.) We essentially were supposed to argue among us who should die and who should live. This was the counselor's set-up, mind you.

I guess the idea of the exercise was to either learn how to work together or get you to stand up for yourself, to list your qualities and qualifications to live. I immediately said I would get out of the boat--I would die. I mean, I did not take this seriously. I could see what was going on and I thought that it was idiotic. It was all pretend, so, heck, I'll jump off the boat and into the sharks . . . The counselor (Mr. Woodley?) did not like this. Noel scoffed. Okay, I thought, then I'll play. I said I'd stay. I said I knew how to live in the woods, to find food and build shelter. Noel came back and said that he could beat me up. This was his qualifications for him living and me dying. Hmmm. He was a small guy but a tough guy, I don't know if he could beat me up or not, but this was his logic for being a superior specimen.

Which brings me back to that day in practice. I was playing on the defensive line. Noel was somewhere, maybe even on defense too, my teammate. It was a practice play and someone ran the ball, was tackled, the coaches blew the whistle. And just before the whistle and then quite a while afterwards I could feel this guy on my back, not just on my back but he was taking his forearm--which was padded--and repeatedly smashing it into my helmeted head. He was reaching around and trying to get his arm between my face guard and helmet to hit me in my face, rendering blow after blow long after the whistle. And it was Noel.

I really didn't react. One: I was kind of shocked--why would he do this? And Two: I had hardly noticed it at first. I was sort of a big guy--especially compared to Noel--and he was sort of a nuisance on my back. In football, bodies are always crashing into each other and it took me a few moments to even realize he was hitting me with his forearm. I just couldn't quite fathom the point, didn't realize the purposeful maliciousness of it. I wasn't mad. I was simply perplexed. I thought that he was an idiot and--somewhat like the counselor meeting--I was confounded by this idiocy.

But, perhaps I was the idiot. No doubt the coaches liked this display of aggression. That anger was needed for a good football player. They don't need a player who is perplexed. That mean-streak (even if it borders on the sociopathic) is part of the competitive spirit, and to take it further, part of the competitive world. It's very much part of the American psyche: violence and competition, action over thought, attacking over consideration. Isn't that why football is the national sport--a game of controlled warfare? It's just like in the counselor's meeting when Noel said that he could beat me up so therefore he should survive and I should not, what he was saying is that he would kill me in order for him to survive.

Interesting.

But what may have surprised him is that, if it really had been real and not a game? If it was not just a psychological exercise in a room in a junior high in Urbandale, Iowa? I would have killed him first.

Into The Dorms: Iowa City 1977

2010-10-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

When I graduated from high school I had no real interest in going to college. So, I didn't.

Instead I worked at a department store--full time--bought a van, got a dog, and planned to head out into the world thusly. I didn't.

Instead I worked and saved and took a long trip down into Florida, to Daytona Beach and then Key West. When I came back I got a job at the local UPS distribution center unloading trucks in the middle of the night. By then, I knew I wanted to go to college. I knew that I wanted to go to the University of Iowa.

I was a pretty insular person by then. Iowa was my realm from which all other places were judged. It wasn't that I loved Iowa or Des Moines/Urbandale (actually I had a great disdain for it all, especially Urbandale) but it was what I knew. It had--despite my growing up in South Dakota and Washington state and Tennessee--become home. My frame of reference. Most of my friends from high school had gone on to school and they'd gone on to Iowa State, in Ames. I'd been to Iowa City, where the U of Iowa was, and preferred that town, that campus, that school (I mean, if you knew anything about the two, who wouldn't?). My father had gone to Iowa. My two older brothers had gone there as well (as did my sister and younger brother and even my niece later), I also had a few friends of a friend (people who later became my friends) who were at Iowa--they were from the high school class who graduated the year before I did. So, Iowa it was.

I applied, got accepted, got a dorm room assigned to me.

But like I said, I'd become a rather insular young man.

So when I got to the university--my parents moving me in and leaving--I wasn't so sure of my decision. I was used to sharing a room, but my two roommates were, of course, complete strangers. Everyone on the floor was a stranger. Everything was strange . . . Yes yes, it's the usual normal experience, the strangeness is also part of the excitement, but I was ill prepared for it in many ways. I guess I hadn't considered it much and my parents had offered little guidance for the situation. So, my first thoughts after about a week were: This is too strange. I'm getting out of here!

Of course, I didn't. No, it took only one more week where I began to see the fun of it, accept it, to make friends and go to classes and be independent (sort of, at least feel independent) among others my same age. Again, yes yes, usual and normal. It all turned out to be very very good.

The dorm was Burge Hall. I had wanted to live in Daum, which was next door, because I'd known someone who'd lived there (Keith). Burge was much bigger, but I had been assigned to a floor that was a half-floor. It was essentially a semi-basement floor, a step below the main floor of the dorm, a small floor whose windows on one side looked out on the loading ramp. I had such a room and every morning the trash truck or the food truck or other delivery trucks would show up and come beeping backwards. Ah and oh well. I got used to it.

I stayed in the dorms for two and a half years. I liked it. I stayed in Burge and on the half-floor--the 2000 floor. Met most of my Iowa City friends through there. And then I stayed a summer and worked and never really went back to Des Moines. I lived in apartments around the town, always close enough to walk to classes or work or the bars.

The bars. That's a different part of the Iowa City equation.

But I still hold a great fondness for dorm life, for Burge Hall, for the University of Iowa and Iowa City. Now that I've been gone so long, I have a new respect and appreciation for Des Moines.

I'm still a little leery of Urbandale, though.

The Fantastic Miraculous Bicycle Wreck: Johnson City 1968

2010-09-28T04:19:00.000-07:00

When we moved out of the rental house in Jonesborough, we moved to a brand new split-level house in a brand new developing development just outside of Johnson City. Really, the newer developing development was across Antioch Road and where Mother and Father had bought the house there were already quite a few homes. But the homes were new and they still had plenty of trees and it was, essentially, only a string of homes along a single street with thick woods, pastures and farmed land surrounding it.

And it was on a steep hill.

So, on our side of Antioch you'd turn and go up the steep hill (the other side led to flat fields, the creek, woods and then two steep hills) and then there was a turn and a cul-de-sac and then you'd have to turn around and come back down the steep hill. Our house was about half way up the slope, on the left, the lot with lots of black walnut and hickory trees that abutted a farmer's field where tobacco was grown and dried in an old wooden shed. But it was coming down that steep hill one day that I had my fantastic bicycle wreck.

First of all, I must have been eleven, maybe twelve years old. I had an oldish, beat-up-abused blue-black Stingray bike. It was beautiful. I used it about every day, over dirt and grass and asphalt, over rocks and broken glass and sticks and mud. There were a number of kids in that little one street neighborhood, a few who lived across Antioch and at the top of one of their hills, and we all had bikes (though by the next year, mini bikes would be added to the mix). But on the occasion, I was alone.

That's right, my fantastic bike wreck was only a wreck with myself.

Being kids and having Stingrays with fat tires, we boys would often take off, peddling as fast as possible and then slamming on our brakes to make big thick skid marks in the street. These were foot brakes not hand brakes, so you could really jam down on the pedals and make your mark. So, that's what I was doing on that day. All alone out in the street, I decided to go all out super fast down the hill and then slam on my brakes.

I went to the top of the hill, pedaled pedaled pedaled, coming down the sheer cliff face of the hill, picking up mach speed, still ramming forward, me all alone, no one else even seemingly remotely around, and then just around my house I slammed those brakes on, pounding my feet backwards on the pedals. And the bike's tires caught that pavement well. There was the big shhhqurinschhhh that the tires made as all that forward downhill motion came to a sudden attempted stop and, as you might imagine, the bike started to flip.

The bicycle fishtailed and popped up and jerked face-forward downhill with me still upon it. This all happened in a matter of seconds. I had no time to think but I also did have time to think. I did have no time to be scared. Okay, I knew I was crashing, I knew it was going to hurt, I understood that the bike was pitching forward on the hard concrete asphalt pebble-studded hard-sloped street, so I figured the best thing to do would be to let go of the bike, follow through with where I was headed anyway and just tuck my body up and roll with it, like a tumble. A somersault.

And that's what I did. I rolled forward with my bike, landing hard but not so hard on the pavement, my head tucked, my arms and elbows bent ball-like and over and over I went downhill, my bike clattering along next to me, until I and the bike came to a stop and miraculously I was not hurt. Even my bike was okay. I mean, I crashed and rolled and popped right up in the street as healthy and unscratched as a armadillo. And I was so pleased with myself. In those seconds of just before the crash, during the crash and jumping up from the crash, I realized what a great childhood event this was and I came up from the roll like a magician, my hands out, my face scanning the neighborhood for an audience.

But, there was no audience.

Ah, my greatest bicycle moment in my life and no one was there to witness it but myself . . . that must be why I'm compelled to write about such things as this.

Football and Clouds: Johnson City 1970

2010-09-27T05:17:00.000-07:00

Now that I realize I spent most of the year of 1970 in Tennessee (and not Iowa) I realize that I first started football then as well.

Football.

That was not my first dream. Being a comedian was what I wanted to be when I was about five years old. But when I hit my early teens, my desires changed to sports, and of those sports football was the thing for me. I wanted to be a wide receiver. Well, I still wanted to be a comedian, so maybe a comic wide receiver? No, I was actually an athletic person and was very good at catching a football. My father spent a lot of time with me there in Tennessee, in our neighborhood just outside of Johnson City, throwing the football to me, long and short, straight and over-the-shoulder. This was one of my few lone connections to him--just he and I out of a family of four boys and one girl--as no one else in the family liked to watch football, let alone toss the ball around. (Another connection, later, became plants and gardening.) He had grown up without a father (my grandfather had been a WWI navy pilot and 'scout' (he'd go up an a balloon/blimp tethered to the ship and look out for coming enemy aircraft, a dangerous job) and had come back from the war shellshocked (post traumatic stress syndrome, nowadays) and my father never really saw him. We kids never met him. But, that's not football.

So, there finally came the day when I was going to enter the 7th grade. I'd gone to the county school but my parents had paid for me to enter the city school--East High--in Johnson City and I was going to join the football team. We lived out in the semi-sticks (well, all of Tennessee was pretty much the "sticks" to us back then), an area that was a development not yet developed that had only a scattering of houses, a lot of empty red dirt lots and a lot of woods, pastures, small tobacco farms and such. So on the day of my first practice (maybe a week before school was to begin) I recall riding my Stingray bike down the hill and over to where the creek was, my mind full of football and anticipation. I was telling myself that, "This was it!", the beginning of my fame and fortune (more or less that was my fantasy), the start of my football career.

But as I sat on my bike among the wild fields and the creek, I looked into the sky where it was blue and there were tall white clouds building up and up. Beautiful clouds. And my mind wandered there, into the dreamscape of the white and blue, the billowed terraces of cloudwork.

Ah.

Football turned out to be quite different than my dreams of it. It was rough and dirty and they wouldn't let you drink water until the end. That's not to say I didn't like it, but let's say that I wasn't as well prepared for the aggressive aspects of it as I was for the more sublime. But I stuck through the practices, made the junior varsity team (but not as a starter), had a pretty cheerleader interested in me. And then came the news that we were leaving for Iowa that fall. Moving . . . But, this was not a bad thing. Our family, all of us except perhaps my father, had been wanting to get out of Tennessee, that little strange northeast corner of it. So, this was welcome news. I was ready to go. And, I quit the team.

The guys razzed me about it, called me a quitter (I guess I was) but, I wasn't really playing any and we were moving and, to tell the truth, I was more interested in other things.

I did play football in Iowa, but I found that I was not really the overtly aggressive type. I didn't have enough of a mean streak. My mind was always off somewhere.

In the clouds, I guess.

Mountain Man: Urbandale 1977

2010-09-24T01:47:00.000-07:00

When I was eighteen and it was the nineteen-seventies I wanted to be a mountain man. Now, I knew I couldn't be a true mountain man (those days were long long past and I wasn't quite that naive and stupid) but I still dreamt of going out west (of which I had personal knowledge from childhood), of living close to the woods or at least living a nomadic existence, town to town, out west.

It's still a bit fuzzy to me, these memories of the seventies, of adolescence and very young adulthood. It's such a strange period in life--at least for me--as in some ways I was very mature and intelligent and understood basic principles for life and in other ways I was confused and exceptionally ignorant and did the dumbest things quite frequently. But by age eighteen in the 70s you could legally drink alcohol as well as vote as well as run off by yourself to see the world. In my case, my world was a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa--which I hated very much yet also felt very secure within--and I wanted out. I never thought much about true world travel: Europe or Asia and such. Sure, I had my tropical isle dreams, but my main idea of getting away was always within the confines of the United States and was almost always limited to the western states with usually Montana, Idaho, Washington/Oregon (where I'd been happy as a child) and Alaska. This idea of going to these states was not a fresh one in the 1970s--this was a time of a big ecology movement among young people after all and there was John Denver on the radio and Jeremiah Johnson on the movie screen, there were serious people--mainly out west--doing serious things to help and preserve the environment, to curb pollution and change corporate and factory ways.

The 70s were not all disco and polyester and leisure suits.

I was a big reader--though a haphazard one (or, eclectic, I should say)--and one of my favorite books was Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher. I read and re-read that book as a teen. I also had books by a man named Angier (I think) that told me how to survive in the woods, how to build a long cabin and such. I had pamphlets on how to obtain free land in Alaska (which i think was real, that there still was free Fed land in AK in those waning 70s years--though it was not a simple process to obtain it). But then again, I wasn't completely stupid. I knew I didn't have the discipline or self-knowledge to actually go out and try to live off the land by myself. So, when I was nineteen and done with high school and uninterested in college, was working full time at Younkers department store in the stock room and living at home and stuffing my money into a savings account, I decided that it was the highway nomad's life for me.

This was before I'd read such things as Kerouac and the Beats, so I'm not sure exactly where I got the concept, other than as a family we'd moved around the country and had always taken long car trips and I'd loved that.

But in 1977 I bought a used van from a friend of Second Oldest Brother. I saw an advertisement for a dog--puppies that were part wolf--and went out and got a puppy and kept it in my parent's basement (where I had a room). I'm not sure why my parents allowed me to do this, that is get a dog at their house, not buying the van and planning to travel. (And as a current dog owner, god, I feel bad about that puppy, who I of course named Wolf. I did not have time or understanding for the poor dog. I mainly kept him leashed beneath the basement stairs and didn't give him the attention and care he both required and deserved.) So, my plan was to quit my job, take my money and my dog and drive out west by myself, town-to-town (as I said), state-to-state, concentrating on Idaho and Oregon and Washington. No doubt I planned to go to Alaska. I was going to camp mainly. Live in the woods. Sleep in my van. Be lonely and mysterious. I'd write. I'd work some job or another if I had to (I didn't bother to think who in the heck would hire me, a man with no address, a van and a dog that was part wolf). I would be my own version of a mountain man.

Of course none of this came to be.

I was at least smart enough to give my dog away to someone who would care for it. (The people who sold me the dog contacted me and were not happy that they had sold it to me, but I can't recall if they were the ones who took the dog.) I kept the van and-instead of the mountains of the west I got three friends together (Bob, Kevin and Mark Lobsinger) and drove down to Florida instead.

I know.

But that was how I discovered the Florida Keys, Key West, which I still love to this day.

And then, after working a few jobs back in Des Moines/Urbandale, I decided that maybe college was not a bad idea and I enrolled at the University of Iowa in Iowa City (another place I came to love).

I kept the van even though I was in school, but it sat and sat back in Urbandale until the neighbors complained and then I sold it for a pittance. I was glad to be rid of it.

But, in the longer run, I did live my highway nomad life in a way. I did live in the west (New Mexico, California, Washington, Montana). I even made it to Alaska in 1983, though did not stay all that long, and though I lived in a tent in the woods (more or less the woods: a free state park north of Anchorage in Eagle River), I came back to Iowa and finished college. Which was for the best.

I don't get out to the woods much these days--and miss it. I get to the mountains even less and haven't been out west for many years now. Don't dream much about being a mountain man, though still sometimes dream of living a lonely and mysterious life.

I drive a Volvo.

Math, Detention and Mr. Shutters: Urbandale 1974

2010-09-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

I always disliked Math. I always found it difficult, almost to the point where it was a phobia. I think I had a mental block against it--a stubborn sense that I'd never be able to do it, so why even try. (Some of this may have come from Oldest Brother, who I recall always telling me ho hard math was, scaring me about fractions and such . . . but, really, I can't blame it on him; I just plain hated math.). In high school, when it came time to do Algebra (ah, I remember in Junior High, when I first got to the school and they asked me to do math problems on the board in front of the class, I'd just go up there and stand [I'd become a shy and introverted boy] and wait and not even make a mark on the board) I had a teacher named Mr. Shutters. "Dr." Shutters, he was known as, because he had a PhD (and was teaching high school in Urbandale, Iowa?). Well, Dr. Shutters did not like me. He was teaching one day and while we were supposed to be working on some problems he caught me drawing my wild cartoon doodle pictures instead. I remember he grabbed me by the back of my neck and squeezed down hard (how today I'd like to think I would have acted differently, such as: Get your goddamn hands off me" or "Don't do that Mr. Shutters, it's indecent" or some such) and I just let him squeeze my neck as he asked what I was doing and, you know, it was obvious what I was doing and the next week I had detention.

This was not an after-school detention. This was a daily detention that I otherwise would have had as library time or extra lunch or something. It was really for troublesome kids, the bullies and pot smokers, the F students and trouble-causers. I was none of theses things. I really had no idea why I had even been sent to this long-term detention (though later was told it was because of my poor math scores). But I wasn't an arguer, and my parents--with five kids--never really got involved with my school life, so if the vice principle said I was in detention instead of the library (where I talked with my friends and read books--I loved books), then that's how it was.

And in detention is where I fell in with all the pot smokers and bullies and bad apples of the school. And you know what: they were not bad people. They could tell that I wasn't one of them, but I've always had the habit of winning over people, not in a gratuitous way, but because I rarely pass any big judgement on people and, if they treat me okay, I treat them okay. So, I got along fine with the school's malcontents.

I suppose there was some danger that I would become a troublesome student due to my association with the other troublesome students. I did get to know a number of the tough guys and relate to them but I never got to the point where I hung out with them outside of school I pretty much kept the friends I had made--which were good kids, middle-of-the-road kids who did what they were supposed to do, didn't fight, were not part of the high or low social strata, not nerds of jocks or anything--pretty much just the invisibles. That was me. A nobody in high school (and it wasn't bad, though I pretty much hated high school and assumed about everyone did [though I was wrong about that]).

I recall once, when the teacher who headed up detention was taking roll, she skipped me. I was behind a student in the row of desks and I usually hunkered down--writing or reading or drawing--and she missed me and that afternoon in the hall the vice principle stopped me--came to find me I guess--and asked if I'd skipped the detention class. I looked at him honestly, a bit bewildered, a bit scared, and said, "No." And, to the vice principle's credit, he believed me. He said something to the effect, "I didn't think you would." And if he hadn't believed me and my detention had been extended, who knows? Maybe I would have ended up with the tough guys, maybe I would have been a delinquent.

But what I came away with from that detention was:

1. The bad guys aren't always that bad.

2. It's not always best to do what you are told without question.

And:

3. Dr. Shutters was an ass.

Jim Tiernan's Cake: Urbandale 1975

2010-09-03T05:22:00.000-07:00

Thsi was the second-to-last year of high school for me. This was a post football season, or maybe it was homecoming during football season. I was on that team, but the next year (my senior year) I quit football (among many other things I quit). Jim was on the team--offensive guard, I believe--and he was a friend of mine.

Anyway, the cheerleaders or pom pom girls had baked each football team member a cake, or some such thing, and after the ceremonies at the gym we all got our cakes. I did not get my cake because I didn't give a damn about a cake. (I'm thinking maybe this was in 76 and the cakes were baked for the senior homecoming ball players, which I would not have been one of.) But, Jim liked his cake. Afterwards we were goofing around--our group of me, Jim, Randy, Bill, Dave and some others, maybe Rick--and it was busy outside the high school with cars coming and going and students and parents. It was evening. Maybe a light rain. Somehow, I had Jim's home-baked cake and, as a practical joke, I decided to put it out in the parking lot, in the driveway in and out of the lot to be exact, and watch the cake get run over. My friends were in on it, but i was the one to put the cake out there.

Jim discovered this act of treason. He wanted his cake! I was surprised that he wanted it, that it meant something to him. I suddenly felt bad about putting his cake out in the driveway. And . . . too late . . . just as Jim was going to go out and get it, a car came along and SQUISH ran right over his homecoming cake.

Ah. I did feel bad. Still do to some degree (no guilt like a midwesterner's guilt). But the thing was, I really didn't think he'd care. Who wanted a cake? Part of it was I didn't much care for sweets. I mean, I loved to eat, but a cake? The other was that--at that time--I considered it a silly gesture, someone baking a cake for you, for the team. Just more small town high school nonsense to me. But Jim wanted it, he was looking forward to eating it, I think and maybe even had a certain high school-sentimental attachment to the whole thing. Ah. But to his credit, Jim never held it against me, his squashed cake in the road, in the light rain. I have not talked to him in decades, but we remained friends.

And if this was in 76 and not 75, if it happened when I'd quit the team and was full of bile and uber-sarcasm towards Urbandale High, then the implications of my actions are different. Then there could easily be read some deeper meanings of resentment or revenge or self-loathing into my destruction of that football cake.

Or, then again, sometimes a cake is just a cake.

Spiders and Wasps: Champaign 1994

2010-08-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about when we lived in the little house on Miller Street and I was at the window (probably washing dishes--we had no dishwasher) in the little kitchen and this was when the kids were little and we had a little insular world. Anyway, what I was recalling was there were two small spiders (shall I call them little?) living in opposite corners of the outdoor kitchen window sill. They weren't much bigger than a sunflower seed but they had built their respective webs in the corners and went about their respective business of catching little bugs while respecting each other's territory.

But the reason I recall it is because as I stood there washing the dishes--probably the kids bottles and sippy cups and such--a big wasp came flying to the window. I watched as the wasp went to one of the spider's webs and plucked it with its legs. That spider came up a bit and looked and then retreated. The wasp went to the other spider's web--the right-hand side spider--and plucked its web and this spider came charging out to see what he had caught. Well. he had not caught anything and the wasp proceeded to grab the spider and sting it and eat it.

Hmm.

And who says Nature is not a nasty place?

I also recall seeing a big blackbird, who was feeding in the back lawn, attack a small sparrow who was also feeding there. I had never seen a fellow bird attack another but this blackbird (not a crow or raven, mind you) jumped on the sparrow, held it down and deliberately pecked at its head until the sparrow was dead. The blackbird them flew away, leaving the sparrow's body in the grass.

Yes, sweet sweet Nature.

Related Memory #4: Daughter Disappears

2010-08-24T05:46:00.000-07:00

Ah, for whatever reason I remember saying that Second Daughter never hid from me again after that incident in Victoria Park (in Ft. Lauderdale). But, for whatever reason, I now remember that that's not true. She did hide again, this time maybe four years later when she was over at a friend's house.

This time Second Daughter was maybe eight or nine years old and she'd gone to Carly's house to play after school. When I showed up to get her, neither I or Carly's mom could find the two of them. They had been playing outside (a nice neighborhood, Carly's family-her parents--nice people who we were friends with) and it was strange that they were not around. Of course, being parents, after so many minutes of looking and calling we began to think the worst. You can't help it. Neither Carly's mother or I said anything, but it was there, the thought of kidnapping and killing or just plain lost.

It took a while, but finally their two heads popped up from inside the new car in the driveway. They had been playing inside the Toyota Sequoia and had hidden in there.

Ah.

I did not strike or get loud, but I was angry. I let my daughter know--once again--that such games were forbidden, that they were wrong and I believe that this time it stuck.

She's seventeen now, drives herself around town, a straight A student and high achiever. So, I guess she learned something.

The World of Work: Des Moines 1975

2010-08-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

I'm not even sure how I got the job, other than I recall my mother took me up to the employment/customer service department of Younkers at the Merle hay Mall and had me apply. I really--to the best of my memory--know what I was doing exactly, but I got a job in the stockroom there at Younkers department store. (Younkers was a local Des Moines/Iowa store, a trusted and somewhat "high-end" retailer--they are still there, but I think now owned by Macy's.) I was deep into high school by then. I had quit playing football--I'd broken my arm that summer playing street football, but that wasn't the reason I quit the Urbandale High team--and I guess Mother had decided that I needed a job. Though I was old enough, I didn't drive yet and, anyway, there were only two cars in our seven person family. So, I usually walked to work or got a ride. The mall was near our house.

It wasn't really quite my first job. I'd worked a few weeks for Dave's (Dave a school buddy) father in downtown Des Moines, in the upstairs of an old building on High Street. That temporary job was all about filling envelopes, about collating advertising material and putting them in big envelopes to be sent out. But my first real employment was in the stockroom at Younkers.

I worked off and on at that Younkers for many years--up into college, full time between college years and then for a while in the first years post college. But I'm thinking of the first few years there, when I was a self-blind, extraordinarily moody and ignorant teen. I was also shy and a good worker for the most part. But work at Younkers opened up a new world in many ways--a world outside of the kinds of people I'd always met, away from high school and people my age. That's not to say I didn't work alongside other high school students, I did at times, but I also worked with very blue-collar adults, I worked with some college students (one, Jim, from the Chicago suburbs, who became my friend and sort-of mentor). But I now had a couple of bosses, I had bosses above those bosses, there were heads of departments, there were truck drivers and delivery men, there was the occasional customer (as we also did shipping and took out packages for pick up); there was a large strata of people I interacted with in different ways as a stock boy. The job mainly consisted of unloading the trucks that came in from the warehouses downtown, then sorting all the merchandise (the boxes or tags would have numbers on them that coincided with each department--we had to learn the numbers and which department they were--I came to know these very well). We--I--also did clean up duties as needed, even bathroom duties. There would also be calls to come pick up hangers as well as trash, there'd also be calls for help lifting or unpacking or about anything. And on weekends we worked with the cleanup crew--old men, mostly--doing the mopping and buffing and vacuuming. There was a restaurant upstairs--The Meadow Lark--which someone was always assigned to vacuum. Usually Jim Cisco did this. This was not the Jim from Chicago, but a local guy about my age who, unlike most others and unlike me, was very competent and talented. he wasn't exactly wise, but more of a boy scout type. But we got along well and I saw him outside of work as a friend. (More on Jim Cisco and Jim from Chicago down the pike, and others, I'm sure.)

I began to see a lot of my co-workers outside of work. I built a second tier of friends from that job. And--my senior year in high school--I spent more time with these people than my longer friends from school (this shift was on purpose as I'd come to hate high school). But what I'm thinking about are the older guys, the full timers or the retired guys who came in on weekends to supplement their incomes. They were an interesting lot.

Most of them were uneducated people, people who had been laborers all their lives. Another job in the stockroom was running the bailer. The bailer was a machine that squished down all the cardboard and other paper-type trash into giant heavy squares. It was a noisy machine and when the bailer was full you'd select wires and tie it off, then open the machine, push the big bail out and then use a handcart to set the bail out of the back dock. Usually one of the old retired men ran the bailer and I recall one guy whose name escapes me, but I'll call him Charley. (I have not thought of these days in so long, but names and memories--small thoughts--will come back to me.)

Charley was bald and had a huge fat nose. He used to go to the deli upstairs to get their trash because he'd take the meat and cheese they were tossing out and take it home. We younger people made some fun of him for this, or saw it as pathetic, though I don't think I did much. I did feel sorry for him. But Charley (I'm thinking his name was really Al or Alfred) was also a gambling man and he loved to tell me about shooting craps.

Now, this was before all the Indian casinos and other casinos that have spread across each state. The only gambling was in Nevada, then maybe by that time Atlantic City, but I'm not sure it was even there yet. But Charley would always try to show me how craps games worked. He always had dice and he'd even bring in a book that explained the game. What he had done was work up this elaborate system to play craps, to make multiple bets and cover the table so that you'd almost always win. I can't recall it all (I've never played craps, though I went to quite a few casinos over the years, to Vegas numerous times, until about my 30s) but he was very insistent that it was a fool-proof system. He taught it to me and always said I should leave Des Moines and go to Vegas and play the tables. I asked him once that, if was so foolproof, why he didn't do it and he said, "I'm an old man. I've got a wife who needs me. You're young, you should go."

I don't know. He had more faith in me--in my youth--than I had in myself. I wasn't mature enough to go alone to Vegas back then, but it would have been interesting: a young man from Iowa out in Vegas shooting craps for a living. Hah.

Anyway--there were a whole bunch of Charleys and Jims and others, there were my immediate bosses of Farrel and George. There were Marks and Craigs and truck drivers and the limping head cook who ran the kitchen of the restaurant. There were African Americans and Jewish Americans and Hispanic-Americans; there were Poles and Germans and Norwegians, even an Englishman, people from other suburbs and from the inner parts of the city, people from other cities and some from small towns, people with long histories, sad histories (including a number of Holocaust survivors) and others just starting out. Though I'd been around--South Dakota and Washington and Tennessee--this was all new to me in most ways, this mix of people (Urbandale High was stuffed with people just like me, there was one single black student there at the time). And the thing was, my parents knew nothing of this world I was in. Oh, they knew where I worked and met some of the friends I'd made there, but over all it was my own world and my own experiences which I never shared with them or with my brothers and sister. I guess by 1975 I was inventing myself and the world I lived in, independently, and it never occurred to me that my parents or sibling should be involved in it.

I don't know to this day if that was good or bad, that lack of parental connection to my life at that age. I see it--at times--that my parents had raised us, five rowdy kids, and they were pretty much burnt out from the experience, or I see it at times, that they were calculated in the idea that this was now my life and not theirs and that I'd have to sort things out for myself like most people do, like they no doubt had (under much tougher circumstances). But I was a boy/man who lived a dual life, who fretted and was also stridently independent. I was capable of making friends and being very social as well as being full of self-pity and self-isolation.

Ah, those days. I don't think I'd want to live them again.

Winter Walk to School: Des Moines 1971

2010-08-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

I'd walked to school way back in Sioux Falls--to kindergarten, by myself, with snow on the ground. I'd walked to elementary school in Vancouver--just a few blocks away, no snow. But in Tennessee, I'd taken the bus or gotten rides--little snow. So, by the time we moved to Iowa, mid-winter and into the middle of the state, I was not used to either walking or snow. I had not lived in a cold climate since I was five years old.

Now, to my recollection, we started school--for me it was Junior High at Urbandale Junior High (Middle School these days), the middle of 7th Grade--while we were still living at the Redwood Motel. But Father and Mother had finally chosen a house, a little red brick one story on 65th Street just off of Aurora Avenue. Dow Aurora but maybe two blocks was an elementary school--where Sister and Youngest Brother went--and down the other way on Aurora (west) was Urbandale High, and connected to Urbandale High was the junior high school (where I would go). The high school was maybe ten blocks or more down the avenue. Oldest Brother and Second Oldest Brother were in High School. But, the first day of walking to school, I did not walk with them. In fact, I don't recall ever walking with them. (We were a pretty insular family, but we were also each individuals, over all the years I rarely saw my brothers in school or walked with them or associated with them or their friends in school [we mainly associated together with neighborhood friends, that was, up until the time we moved to Iowa, from there we all had our own sets of friends or no friends, I guess] the only exception was when we first arrived in Jonesborough, TN and I rode the bus with my sister and tried to look out for her, ate lunch with her, for the first few weeks or month before sliding back into my, our, solo habits outside of the household.)

So, here I was in a new state, city, suburb, a new house. I knew no one. It was cold. I don't think there was snow on the ground, but I didn't know how cold it was. I was unfamiliar with the school. But I was put out the door one Monday morning with my books, my warm clothes and coat, but without a hat or gloves or scarf. And, I began to walk.

It seemed like such a long walk. The threes were all bare, the yards ugly, the homes seemed old to--we'd lived in brand new houses, in new tract communities in Washington and just outside of Johnson City (in Jonesborough we'd lived in a rented house along a highway with lots of woods and big lots, outside of the main town), the streets were straight, the cars puffed by and there maybe were a few others walking but I did not know them. And--as I said--it was cold.

I'd never felt so cold. My hands were aching, frostbit-feeling. By the time I got to the school, I entered the first door that was available, near the gym. The Junior High was on the other end. But I had to get in and the first thing I did was drop my books and hold my hands over the heat register that was in the hall. I thought this was crazy--this cold, this new strange school and town. In many ways, though I became very comfortable with Iowa and Urbandale, I never got over that first dislike. I had never liked school anyway, and this just furthered my dislike.

But I did adapt. I became inured to the cold and midwest ways. I made it through school, as we all do. And I walked. I learned to love walking.

Coming Into Des Moines: 1970

2010-08-05T06:50:00.000-07:00

It must have been November when we moved from Johnson City, Tennessee to Iowa. Possibly December. It was a move most welcome by all of us in the family--except perhaps by Father. We--Oldest and Second Oldest Brother, Sister, Younger Brother and myself--had all gone through the shock of living in a place like Eastern Tennessee in the late 60's (after having lived in a rather progressive-minded place like Vancouver, Washington) and we had all wanted out, as did Mother, I'm sure. So, we were eager to get to Des Moines.

I really don't recall the drive up. I'm guessing we took two days. But what I remember is that--my father worked for the V.A. as a psychologist, as a Chief of Staff--the government gave my father a moving/living allowance and the first place we lived while my parents looked for housing was the Holiday Inn on the east side of the city. This was like at the intersection of Douglas and maybe SE 14th Street (I think). And, this is not a pretty part of town. Was not, still is not to the best of my knowledge. Yet, there was very much a sense that we were somewhere different, that the stores and streets, the people were different.

We were somewhat used to living in motels, as we had moved before, but this was a rather bleak place, it was cold and gray, the surrounding area was old and unfriendly (there was some store across the busy street that we'd wander over to, it had a few arcade games and those gumball machine-type things), it's intersection full of traffic (at least to us) and industrial-feeling.

My father had to start work right away and the rest of us were pretty much free--we were out of school though we should have been in it; I missed at least a month of 7th Grade with this move. (I remember going around to all my teachers back at East (Junior) High, getting grades from them on some piece of paper because we were moving, recall my squat little woman geography teacher saying, "Oh, you're going to Iowa where they have all those pigs." Ah--the start of the many misconceptions people have about the state of Iowa.) So--I don't know--we did what we did around the Holiday Inn where we had adjoining rooms for all seven of us, my Mother handling it all, everything strange and new and not very beautiful. Eventually we moved to another, smaller place--The Redwood Motel or some such--which was on Douglas/Euclid right next to the V.A. Hospital where Father worked. We did spend weekends looking at houses around town, which I vaguely recall, and by that time I think they decided on the suburb of Urbandale to buy a house. So, our family of seven was squeezed into two rooms--some kind of suite-like place--at this small motel in the winter of 1970.

Such as it was.

There were the expected problems and despair, the sibling battles and all that. But then--a house purchased but not yet ready to occupy--it was time to start school.

Mother got us all registered, got the situation set up. But, we were still living in the motel. But, we needed to be in school. No one wanted to go to school, but we did.

What I mainly recall is my mother having to get all we five reluctant kids ready and hauling us to the local cafe for breakfast and the hauling us out to Urbandale (north of the city) and to the school. What a thankless chore that must have been. I don't really remember the first day or those first weeks too much, other than being the new kid who shows up just a week or two before Xmas, I guess (it could have been the start of school after the new year for all I can recall). I do recall feeling out-of-place, of feeling the strangeness of my new reality--as one would expect. But, there was more to it than that, I was changing too, going from a semi-rough outward looking kid to an introspective shy adolescent. I guess sometimes I blame that or associate that with the move to Iowa, but I know it was starting to happen prior to the move.

Anyway, what I remember about the first days in Des Moines are the cold gray skies, the Holiday Inn, the breakfasts of fried ham, the strange stores and restaurants, the fact that I felt insular, that the world was confusing and I was confusing myself.

Myopic And Self Indulgent History #7

2010-08-03T02:33:00.000-07:00

The 1970s.

I don't think too often about the 1970s, at least not on purpose.

If I recall correctly, I spent the seventies in three places, but mainly only in one:Des Moines.

If I remember correctly, I lived within the boundaries of family life in 1970 and we were still in Tennessee, but by the end of 1970--by November--we were in Iowa. Des Moines, as I said. And then by the tail end of the seventies I was in Iowa City (but, still in Iowa, still connected to family for the most part).

The seventies, for me, are about adolescence. They are about self-sadness and self-consciousness. They are about awkward times and self-isolated times and the throes of high school. But, there must have been good times as well. Yes, there were. And I did have friends--plenty of them, some who I am still connected with to this day. But I had a difficult time in the seventies--at least as I recall it--I had a long, drawn-out adolescence, one of your usual angst and pain, but also one of intense depression which led to self-pity and withdrawal and inner-discovery. I doubt that I will explore the deep sadness I felt in those mid-seventies years. At least, it won't show up on the page--too embarrassing, I fear. But that doesn't mean I won't think of it, remember it as best I can. So for now I think I'll look towards the positive things, the little things, the mundane and the absurd.

To slip into "To Whom It May Concern" territory, this blog is still but a vanity project (at least on the surface). It's still just a dip of the toe in the water of my own life--my own ego, psyche, history, connections, my own true thoughts. All posts are still but quick hits, little shrines to the self, little pools of shallow water that reflect only the thinest of reflections, which--for now--suits me just fine. These current years I don't really have the time and patience, the courage, to wade into deeper things.

I am my only reader.

So, the seventies . . . Let's see what I come up with.

Special Edition #7: Dreams

2010-07-30T02:30:00.000-07:00

I just had a dream about Key West and, of course, in the dream Key West was not the real Key West. But when I woke up, I was certain that I had dreamt about real places, a hotel and an outdoor bar that really existed even though I dreamt of them in my dreamworld Key West. It honestly took me quite a while to realize that these were not real places . . . But that's because I have dreamt off and on about the Florida Keys since maybe 1979 and in that dreamworld, that alternate Keys-world, there are different highways and islands and buildings, there are hotels and bars and even people and I've dreamt about it enough to have created this second place in my mind and my mind remembers, even if I do not recall the dreams directly, my inner mind still does so that now it has become difficult on sleepy mornings, now it takes a few moments of direct thinking to separate the Key West of my dream from the Key West of reality.

And this is true of other places I have dreamt of. Missoula has its own dream construction in my mind. Grayton Beach for sure. New York and Alaska for some reasons also show up in multiple dreams, as do other places and people. I do not dream the same dreams but it's not unusual for me to dream about the same places, for some of the same mind-constructed sets and characters to come back into other dreams. That's how--I think--they become so deeply ingrained in me, in my unconscious or subconscious mind. Indeed, they are like the stage sets, they are the stock players or character actors who show up in all my midnight movies. Who reprise their roles and the settings compounded upon in my dream sequels: Missoula IV--Dream About Searching for a Job.

I have always had vivid dreams, memorable dreams.

I recall as a child--the first dream I can really remember--I had a recurring one about my mother being chained in a dungeon and some very evil man who would not let me see her and I would cry and cry. It was more of a nightmare--I was maybe three years old or five at best--and I would dream this dream and cry and be disturbed by it, which is why I can still recall snippets of it to this day. But I've mainly had enjoyable dreams. Dreams of adventure and of humor, dreams that were like the plots of novels or the filming of a movie, where I was aware of plot construction and character development and visuals while at the same time I was in the story or production. I've had dreams of great agony and of great sex. Dreams that were a joy to have, of subtle travel, of interaction with old friends or family members, dreams of seeing my old pets that I loved, of seeing my father who has been gone for almost ten years now. I like my dreams. I like those repeating worlds where they often take place.

So. You'll have to excuse me as I get older and continue to dream my dreams, excuse me if I get a little confused about the real places and the unreal.

Excuse me if, sometimes, I'm in no hurry to clear my head.

Brock Comes To Town: Champaign 1992

2010-07-23T01:09:00.000-07:00

The last time I had seen Brock was after Fru's and my wedding in '89, in Seattle. Before that, I'd seen him in '87 when Matt and I lived with him in Seattle. I'd met Brock in the late 70s in Iowa City, where he'd come out from the Seattle area to attend school at the University of Iowa. I'd always found it strange that he--a Pacific Northwest Westerner--would come all the way to the midwest to attend school, and choose Iowa on top of that, but that's what he did. Usually it's the other way around (midwesterners are notorious for escaping their region). But, Brock has always done things differently.

Anyway. I was established in Champaign by then. Fru was working at a bank, I was working part time at a place south of town called Agriseed. Fru and I had our baby and a house and--a while later--another baby on the way. We had a friend--Margaret--who was my friend from Iowa City (she had been the roommate of Cin, my girlfriend for a few years and had become my friend as well as friend of my friends like, say, Brock). Anyway, Margaret had moved to Champaign after graduating from Iowa--moved there because her older brother was living there and why he was living there is beyond me--and Margaret got a job at the bank where Fru worked and they became friends. In fact, it was Margaret who introduced Fru to me and me to her and that is another story. But Margaret had always had a thing for Brock and eventually Brock had a thing for Margaret. So, one winter I find out that Brock is moving to Champaign.

He's coming from Seattle to Champaign.

Washington to Illinois.

In the winter.

I was happy to hear the news. I mean, I was very busy with a baby, with my little world of Fru and I and First Daughter, and I did have some friends in Champaign--not close friends but nice people (I'll say this about Champaign, the town had some of the nicest people I've ever met)--but I didn't really have a close friend outside of my spouse. So, Brock drove into town.

And it was good to see him. He and Margaret set up house together and ended up renting a nice place just a block or two from us. He and I could walk up to Hubers and have a beer or six. But before that, they lived in a house closer to downtown. I remember that now--I went over and we put up a croquet set and played croquet one day. Brock hung out at a bar called the Ice House. I went there a few times but not much--like I said, I had a wife and kid.

But things were also different. In Seattle, in 87, I think we got sick of each other a bit, Brock and Matt and I. Yet, I saw Brock in Montana and back in Seattle and enjoyed his company. Just as I enjoyed his company when he came out to Champaign in the early 90s. But somewhere in the 90s we became distant. It was before Fru and I moved down to Florida . . . Ah, it happens. The best of friends move on.

So, Brock had come to town to see and live with Margaret. He had come in winter, in February as a matter of fact. He arrived in town on Valentine's Day, I learned. A very romantic thing to do. Except, one night at Hubers over a few beers, I asked him about that.

"You really showed up on Valentine's Day?"

"I did."

"Wow."

"But I didn't even know it was Valentine's Day."

Ah. That sounded more like Brock. An accidental romantic.

He and Margaret have been married for a long while. They have two kids--boys. They live outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I hope they are doing well.

Garden of The Gods: Champaign 1992

2010-07-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, this wasn't in Champaign but in southern Illinois, in the Shawnee National Forest. But it started in Champaign when Mike (Mike from L.A., Iowa City days, Mike from Chicago) and his friend Chuck drove down from Chicago so that we could go camping. From Champaign we drove--in Mike's truck--down to the Shawnee where there is this one area/campground called garden of the Gods (not to be confused with garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs CO).

I had not seen Mike in quite a while. He had been living in Los Angeles all the years but had come back to Chicago and had gotten married. Chuck--who I had met before and who I liked--was also married, but none of them had kids yet. First Daughter was but a year old or so. Anyway, I arranged the camping trip with them and had never been to the Shawnee before (though after this trip I'd return a number of times to camp solo and once with Fru and the girls to stay in a cabin) and I didn't have a big tent so I rented one and the guys showed up and after a night--I think--we got in the truck, all of us wearing different colored flannel shirts ("We look like a Kodak commercial," Chuck said) and did the long drive down to the Shawnee. This is way down in the southern smidgen of the state (Illinois is a surprisingly long state), where we turned east at the Carbondale exit (that small college town being west) and we stopped in Harrisburg for some foodstuffs and beer and such, then to a little hamlet called Herod--taking small roads in the hilly country--and then to the Garden of the Gods and a campsite there.

We hiked around, climbed the big rocks that jut out into a deep valley. I had a camera and took some photos and then the camera slipped out of my pocket when I jumped from a rock, it bounced, broke, fell down the steep wall into trees way below--but when it broke, the only thing to pop out was the film, so I saved that and had a few photos after all. Then we went to camp and had a fire and they played their guitars and we roasted dogs, drank beer. Evening came. It was peaceful. Nice. Woodsy. But, we ran out of beer.

Gotta have beer on a camping trip.

So, we got back into the car, drove back to Herod, stopped at a little store where the proprietor wore old clothes and had an old beard: he looked like some Amish guy.

"Do you have beer?" we asked.

"NO sir!" he said, almost offended. "You'll have to go to Harrisburg for that."

Okay then. A dry town, maybe a dry county then.

So, we drove all the way to Harrisburg for beer, then--night now--drove the dark roads back to camp.

And we had a good time. Food, beer, fire, jokes.

Mike told me that Chuck's father was dying. Chuck kept saying how this camping trip was what he needed and now I had an inkling why.

Then, that night, all three of us sleeping in this musty half-broken rented tent, I woke in my alcoholic-stupor-hangover-coming state and heard crying. I didn't say a thing, but there was no mistake it was crying. I pretended not to notice. I pretended to still be asleep. I mean, what are you going to do? We were guys. Camping. Guys camping don't cry.

In the morning we got up. Rekindled the fire. It was nice. Hungover but not too bad. made our jokes. Got ready for the long drive back (even longer for Mike and Chuck, who had to go to Chicago). No one mentioned the crying. I never even said a word to Mike. Knew it had been Chuck.

We took our time getting to the interstate, tried to take a side trip to see something called The Old Man in the Rock or something, but never saw it. Then we hit I-57 and that was a long ride (I remember the whole trip I was making noises, I could not stand still when I stood still but was always swaying, rocking, making weird noises--this was because I had a baby, and I told them so, said having a baby makes you go bonkers a bit, and because you're always holding said baby you're always moving your body, rocking and swaying and they took this without much comment [but they found out when they had their own babies, yes indeed]).

Anyway--that was it, the trip. I got home and they drove the last two hours back to Chi-town. Nothing was said of the crying. It hadn't happened.

I lost touch with Mike for a good long time, until about a year ago. he's divorced now. He's still in Chicago but travels. His two daughters are only a year or two behind mine. And not all that long ago--months ago--I asked him about Chuck.

"Chuck died," he wrote.

"He died?"

"Yeah, it's weird. I saw him one week and then next he'd died."

I forget what Mike said Chuck died from--heart attack, aneurysm, don't remember. But he was our age, probably a bit younger than me.

And so it goes. I'll have to ask Mike if he remembers that camping trip. If he recalls that night in the Garden of the Gods. Chuck was a good guy. Had a wife and two kids. His father died. He died. We all die.

Second Daughter Disappears: Fort Lauderdale 1996

2010-07-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

When we first moved to Fort Lauderdale--after our stint at the Riverside Hotel--we rented a house on SE 10th Ave in Victoria Park. It was a decent small house in a very nice neighborhood with a wonderful Montessori elementary school (VSY) a few blocks away. We had a horrendous landlord--but that's a different story.

The house--like a lot in South Florida--did not have a laundry room. Many homes had hook-ups in little covered spaces in carports. Our house had hook-ups for a washer and dryer in a too-small garage attached to the house, though there was no door from the garage that led into the house. So, to do laundry one had to go out the front door, down the little steps to the walk, go to the driveway and to the garage door, open the garage door, and there was the washer and dryer. It was a bit of a process, especially when you take into account the carrying of dirty or clean clothes.

By September or October of that year, we had life pretty well settled after the move from Illinois. Fru was working at Sun Trust on Las Olas, I had classes at night at FIU in North Miami, First Daughter was attending kindergarten at VSY (Virginia Shuman Young) and Second Daughter stayed home with me during the day while I took care of all the mundane chores of regular life in America.

Okay.

But one weekday, while I was doing the chore of laundry and only Second Daughter was home, I went about my usual routine, toting baskets of clothes back and forth out the front door, leaving it and the garage door open whilst doing so. But then, then I go back into the house and Second Daughter is nowhere around. I look and look and call her name--but no sight of her, no answer to my calls.

This is strange. We had never had issues of our daughter's whereabouts, of them wandering or running or hiding, of not answering when we called . . . I looked all over the two-bedroom house, went back out the front door and checked the garage, checked the yard, the whole while calling her name. Now I began to panic. Where was she? She was three years old at the time, but why would she run off? Had someone taken her? I held my thoughts together, but I was beginning to think some very dark things. It made no sense. I had been out in the garage for only minutes, if she had come out she knew what I was doing, where I was, she would have come to me . . . Where was she?

I was upset now.

Then, on one of my trips back inside and around the house, I heard her. I went into the girls' room. I looked in their sliding-door closet. There Second Daughter was. She had been hiding. She was giggling, smiling. I yanked her out of there.

I was so angry. I had been so worried. She--of course--did not fully understand this. I gave her a quick spanking, told her never to do such a thing again, to not hide and always answer when I called. She felt bad. I felt bad for swatting her. I was also relieved, to say the least. I calmed and talked to her, explained why I was so upset. She never did such a thing again.

But that's how it is having a child, having children. You create a thing that is so important to you, that you love beyond anything, beyond your spouse or yourself--you'd easily give your own life for your child. And this thing--this child--is a fragile thing, is something that needs constant monitoring, attention, affection, education, love. And if this thing were taken from you it would quite literally ruin your life.

That's the scary part about having a child.

If you lost them, life would be irrevocably altered--for the worse.

But for me, it had just been a game. She had only been hiding, playing a trick on me that she must of learned at some friend's house (there were other little kids right on our street that she was already good friends with--kids First Daughter's age, too--which was another good thing about renting that house in Victoria Park) or via a TV show or kids movie. It was not a crisis. It was not irrevocable. It was but a temporary panic.

And I never want to go through that again.

Walking Orange Street: Missoula 1990

2010-07-07T02:37:00.000-07:00

When Fru and I lived in Missoula, we lived on Rollins Street. The closest main street from there was Orange. The city of Missoula is laid out in opposing angles, that is--I was told--because two of the founding fathers had differing ideas as to which way the streets should be gridded. So, one group laid them out one way, the other another way and when the opposing streets met it made for some interesting connections (Malfunction Junction comes down mind on Reserve Street). Anyway, Orange Street had its own direction as it headed towards downtown with its bridge over the Clark Fork River. But what I'm thinking of--remembering--is the street before it reached that bridge, the part of Orange Street that encompassed our neighborhood.

I had lived in walkable towns before: Iowa City, Champaign, Santa Fe, Seattle was a pretty walkable city. But I'd also been in places where walking wasn't done much: Los Angeles, South Walton County. So, it was nice to be in Missoula and be able to walk places--both Fru and I enjoyed it.

We often strolled up to the Orange Street Food Farm. This was a local grocery store. Nothing special, except the oddish name. But it was the walk that made it special for us, going to get a few groceries that we could comfortably carry. It was pleasant--even fun and romantic--to walk together to gather the ingredients for our meal, for snacks, a bottle of wine. I also used to walk up to the little laundromat that was there and do our clothes (we had a washer and dryer, which we'd used in the cabin in Stevensville, but there were no hookups for them in our little cottage on Rollins and they sat forlornly on the miniature porch off the miniature kitchen), and I'd walk with the dirty-to-clean clothes. We also often made trips up to the little Greek place. This place sold gyros and had an ivy plant inside that had been trained to go all around the wall. The people there knew us and we loved our gyros. (There was a more formal Greek Restaurant across the street where we went maybe only once or twice--probably owned by the same people.) Fru and I used these walks to keep life slow, to stay in tune with each other, to enjoy our own company. We used Orange Street to get to downtown a lot of times--to go to the Crystal Theater or the ice cream shop. We also walked back and forth to the University of Montana, but did not use Orange to get there.

I think of Chicago and New York, where I did plenty of walking, yet those huge cities also required the El and the subway. In Santa Fe and Iowa City I had no car, so walking was not just a choice but sometimes a chore. I had no car for a while while in Grayton Beach and had to rely on friends to get places, to get weekly groceries. In Seattle I, we--Brock and Matt and I--walked mainly by choice. We would walk long distances to downtown and Pioneer Square, sometimes we took the monorail. We all had cars but rarely used them. I didn't walk much in Des Moines--rode my bike a lot until I learned to drive. And L.A.? Are you kidding? Who walks in L.A.? But I've always loved walking places. I love the slow pace, the time spent observing and thinking, never thought much of it as exercise (walking wasn't exercise, running was [but as a kid running wasn't exercise either, it was just running]). So I enjoyed it when I lived somewhere where I could walk a lot.

But Montana--Missoula--was maybe the best walking town despite it's groveling winters. It wasn't just the mountains or its many trees, it's olden funky downtown, it's because--for me--Fru was there. We were in love. We were married. And we could go out our door, amble down the sidewalks to Orange Street, holding hands, chatting, looking at the world together, and go to the Orange Street Food Farm for some chicken and potatoes, cheese and bread, milk and wine, or we could go get a gyro. And we could walk back to our miniature house--the cottage--knowing that we'd walk somewhere again tomorrow.

Simple stuff.

Everyone knows the simple stuff is the best.

Birth Day #2: Champaign 1993

2010-07-03T04:15:00.000-07:00

So, come the day Second Daughter was to be born, we--Fru and I--had already been through it. We had an almost-two year old and Fru had been through pregnancy before (we were Mommy and Daddy already) and we knew what to expect. So, when Fru woke up early on an early spring day and said she was having contractions, I was ready.

I think I went back to sleep.

I think she told me to sleep because she knew the contractions were far between and that it would be a while and that it would be a long day. Okay. So--I think I went back to sleep.

But, by a-little-less-early in the morning, I was up and about and getting things in order for the trip to the hospital: packed the bag, contacted the pediatrician, contacted Fru's sister and father so that one of them could watch First Daughter while I took Fru to have Second Daughter. Stuff like that. I was also writing a screenplay at the time--had just finished it--and was supposed to fax it out to Los Angeles that day for the co-writer to look over and shop around. (This sounds a lot more exciting than it was--it was a screenplay adapted from an unpublished novel of mine, co-written with Craig from U. of Iowa days, who was now a film/cartoon editor out in L.A. and a struggling screenwriter [nothing ever came of it, though manuscript is still out there to this day].) So, there was a little back and forth between Fru and I as she sat there with her contractions and I stood there with my screenplay and finally I went out and faxed it away--because her sister (I think) had come over--and then I was back and then we went to the hospital.

With the second baby we knew where the hospital was this time (unlike the 1st where we had to stop and ask someone in the street). So, it all went well getting there and meeting up with the doctor and all that. But . . . But, as we had known, the second baby in the womb had refused to turn. That is, she had finally turned but--according to ultrasounds--she had left one leg up and one leg down. So, the doctor decided that the safest thing was a Cesarian. C-Section.

So, I think they gave Fru some medication to stop the dilation and for the operation and I was given a gown and cap and booties and went in with her to the operating room and stood off to the side--held her hand--as the doctor opened her up (I recall seeing the tubes that must have been connected to the "suction" and the tubes were suddenly filled with red red blood--and I mean a lot of blood) and pulled out a baby. A baby girl. SECOND DAUGHTER!

And after cleaning her up a bit, she was handed to me and I held her and held her until they took her from me.

They tell you that a C-Section is easier but don't let them tell you that. Fru was in pain. She had a big cut and stitches and could not maneuver very well for weeks. It affected her ability to breast feed, her ability to hold First Daughter after Second Daughter was born.

As for First Daughter, who was about a month shy of being two years old, she was happy. There were no questions or resentments about having a sister. We--First Daughter and I--went to the hospital to visit Fru and the new baby and First Daughter was delighted with Second Daughter. In the confines of that little private hospital room, we were a family: Fru in the hospital bed, Second daughter either with her or in the roll-in crib from the delivery room (or wherever), First Daughter either curled up in the bed next to Fru or on the little couch and me, me there with all three of them. It was nice. It was March--March in the midwest being one of my least favorite months, what with the long winter trying to be over and the promise of spring and yet the undecidedness of the month as it shifted from warm to cold to messy--and it was just nice to be a father again, to have a new life for us to tend to and love.

Babies.

And people came to visit and then Fru got to go home, where the house had been decorated for the arrival. And the day we got to bring Second Daughter home was a beautiful day. Spring had finally blossomed for real and it was sunny and light-lighted and the first flowers were up, the trees held leaves, and our new baby came home to the house on Miller Street in Champaign, Illinois.

Pacing in La Paz: Mexico 1990

2010-06-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

I'd taken the bus down from Tijuana, from Baja Norte into Baja Sur and stopped in La Paz--the capitol of Baja. The ride had been interesting, going along the sea and then crossing through a strange bouldered desert, then the Gulf of California, then back into a flat desert full of cacti and vultures and odd towns, then into La Paz.

after a bit of walking, I found a nice moderate place on a side street. It wasn't far from the main town, not far from the beach. I was hungry and tired. I was uncertain of myself. I was alone in Mexico.

What should I do?

I knew I should go out and explore. Get some food, see what was what, meet some other humans. But I didn't want to. I don't know if I was strung out or scared or just--as I said--uncertain, but all I really wanted to do was stay in my room and pace.

Just walk around in circles and get ahold of myself.

Oh, I chided myself. Here I was in my first solo destination in Mexico and all I wanted to do was hole up and be strange. I felt bad, I argued with my desire. Yet, ultimately, I gave in. I decided that, if it's what I wanted to do, then I'd do it, Mexico or not.

So, I did that. I paced my little room, thought my thoughts, decompressed and aclimated the way my brain and emotion was telling me to aclimate.

And . . . it worked.

It wasn't too long before my confidence and sense of adventure returned. I did go out. I went to a meal along the beach where two or three waiters kept bringing me all these little bowls of condiments or side dishes and I didn't know what I was supposed to do with them (EAT THEM!) and then, after, I wandered the town looking at the houses and the seaside and stopping in a bar where the TV was on and some locals were discussing the politics of the TV. "Tu eres un politico?" I asked, not sure what the hell I was really saying and the guy looked ta me, smiled, and said no. I don't know what he thought, if he thought I knew what they'd been saying (which I didn't) or if I was just some idiot interrupting their day. But at least I'd stuck my neck out and said something.

So, maybe the pacing about wasn't so bad. Maybe I had to walk out the confines of my cell before tasting the freedom outside.

Davidson Park and the Dog That Wasn't Mine: Champaign 1994

2010-06-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

Since I stayed home with the two girls when they were babies, toddlers, little kids, in spring summer and fall I'd take them around to the parks in their stroller. At that time they watched a movie called Totoro, which they loved. In Totoro two young girls would find acorns (among many other things in the movie) and so, as I walked them in their stroller, both little blond-headed girls riding in the cart, they'd look for acorns. And there were plenty. Because if nothing else, Champaign had some wonderful trees. I'm talking great big oaks, maples, catalpas, tulip trees and many other big hardwoods--but especially oaks.

One park that had tons of these big trees--maybe the prettiest park in the city--was Davidson Park. It was off Church Street, up a ways from Miler Street (towards downtown) and was a very pleasant walk to get to. The park had some grand homes around it--all under leafy shade with big yards--and the place itself was a nice smallish horseshoe of a park, a round drive around it, with swing set and slide and jungle gym. It also had those huge spreading mature oaks and maples and sycamores all among it: lots of shade and birds and acorns to find. The girls loved it--but then, they loved about anything at that age. I probably appreciated it more then them, but it made a fine destination for a stroll. And, on the way back, you could stop at Hubers and buy them candy from the window.

Anyway. One time while we were there, a dog showed up. It wasn't a big dog, also not a small dog. It was rambunctious but not as puppy. It was a bit troublesome but also a rather comical dog. It ran around and tried to engage my little girls in play, but I found the dog (not a stray, you could tell) to be too rough for them, so, we left. But as we left the park--the girls in the stroller--the dog followed us.

The girls were fine, so I made no effort to shoo it away. But as we walked down Church--before Hubers and the candy--a youngish guy came walking towards us and he had a dog and his dog was on a leash. Well, the troublesome dog trotting next to us ran right up to this guy's dog and began yapping and nipping and just plain teasing the leashed pet. When we got up to them the man looked at me, giving me the evil eye.

Ah! He thought it was MY dog!

"That's not my dog," I said and strolled right on by. And the guy, realizing he'd been giving me the evil eye for naught, went about trying to shoo the dog-that-was-not-mine away--without too much success.

Dogs.

I was glad I had babies.

Kitty Cat Stone: Champaign 1995

2010-06-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

When we first moved into the little rented house on Miller Street there was an old man who lived in the house directly behind us. As I did yard work and as a couple of years passed, I talked to him a bit but never really got to know him. He lived alone and kept to himself, as best I could tell. I did notice that he had a cat. This was a big Tom cat, orange and long-haired. The cat--like the old man--kept to himself. It wasn't a mean cat or a nice cat, it was your classic independent cat.

Well, while in that house, we had our first child and then added another and we went about our business as a young family. We had two cats--M.R. and Jack--and then Jack got run over by a car on Church Street and then we had one cat who was low on the totem pole of attention because Fru and I had our baby daughters. But later on I did notice that I didn't see much of the old man anymore. I still saw his cat, but not him. Then, from our next door neighbors (who'd been there forever) I found out that the man had fallen ill and had been taken to live with his daughter in Ohio (or maybe Indiana). I believe that he then died--but am not sure. Yet, his cat was still around. No one had come to take him.

Hmm.

So, being who I was and still am, I started leaving food out for him. He appreciated that and got over his fear of me and would let me pet him and would come to see me when I was out in the back yard. And then winter came. The big Tom was still living outside and seemed to have someplace to sleep and keep from being frozen and I continued to feed him. But then the hard part of winter came--a big snow, below zero temps--and I thought, okay, I better get that cat inside somewhere, maybe my garage.

By then he trusted me enough to let me pick him up. So, after feeding him in the evening, I did just that. No problem. But when I went to take him inside our house, he didn't want to. He didn't scratch or bite, he just struggled a bit and showed his fear and displeasure, but I took him in anyway. I put him in the garage. He did not like this at all. I can't recall if I kept him there all night or what, but the cat felt that he had been captured and so I let him go, go out into the snow and frozen world and he appreciated that. And so for that winter and all the rest of our winters in Champaign, that was the arrangement: he was an outdoor cat no matter what.

Because we had little kids and because we had glass French Doors that opened up to our back yard and the big Tom would come up to those doors and sit there and look in and wait to be fed, we had to name him. So, I named him Kitty Cat Stone. The girls called him Kitty Cat Stone and we even had a song about him which I'm going to sing for you right now . . . (Joking--we had songs for everything back then, dumb little ditties that the girls loved). Anyway, I did end up building this gawd-ugly cat house for him so he at least had some shelter to sit in in the winter as he waited for me to feed him, but he was living somewhere--under a house or in a shed--that kept him alive in the winter. It was not unusual to wake up on a cold-bitter-cold snowy morning and turn on the light and see Kitty Cat Stone standing there at the window with ice sickles all around him. (Sort of like that.)

The thing was, we also had a squirrel that came to the back door to be fed. Her name was Lula and she would eat from your hand. The squirrel was not afraid of the cat and sometimes both of them would sit right next to each other and look into the house. Both were hungry. I don't know why Kitty Cat Stone left Lula alone--he was much bigger than her--but such is the nature of free food. I also recall that, being a cat, sometimes he would vomit up his food and it would freeze there on the porch and then, then, the starlings would find it and have a feeding frenzy over his frozen vomit. Yum!

When we left Champaign I informed both next door neighbors about Kitty Cat Stone. I gave the woman next to us what cat food I had and the gawd-ugly cat house. She said she'd feed him, as did our other next door neighbors, the Christians (or something like that). And then we moved away, down to South Florida where there was no snow.

It was a few years later when Fru's sister--who lived in the same neighborhood in Champaign by then--sent us a clipping from the local paper, the News-Gazette. It was a photo and the photo was of a big orange cat on a porch in the snow, taken just down the block from our old house.

Of course it was Kitty Cat Stone. He was still alive. He was still living his independent life in the snow.

Leaving Vancouver: 1967

2010-06-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

I could be wrong about the year. It could have been in 1966, but I think it was the winter of 67 that we packed up and left Washington and moved to Tennessee. My father had bought a brand new 1966 Ford Falcon Wagon--a dark metallic green--and after the moving vans had come, we all piled into that car (seven of us) with a multitude of belongings and we took off. Must have been 67.

It was still winter, so we took the southern route through California with stops at Yosemite and San Fran, Los Angeles and across through Arizona (must have stopped at the Grand Canyon, but maybe not that trip) and into New Mexico. It was one of the classic long car trips of my childhood. I do recall wanting to see Albuquerque because my best friend back in Vancouver (Joey Hanes) was from there.

The whole trip was full of long rides and adventure. I usually rode in the very back, among blankets and boxes, sacks of snacks and suitcases. I had a little spot burrowed out there along the back window and side window, a comfortable nest where I could watch new worlds go by as Father drove. Of course it would be illegal now, but back then you just rode whatever way you wanted and no one used seat belts. We stayed in motels mostly--small places, sometimes a Holiday Inn which we considered to be extravagant, a luxury resort. My father liked to drive all day and into the nigh, he liked to get going before the sun rose sometimes. I do get that trip mixed up a bit with all the other long trips we took, but I do recall specifically a time in Texas.

In Texas--the panhandle, I think, around Amarillo--we were up before dawn. I was in my cubbyhole in back and I remember, distinctly, the sunrise. It was a big fat orange sunrise with the empty lonesome highway and that endless nothing nothing land all around and the sun came up and lit it all, showering it with pinks and grays and requisite purples. Orange and yellow and the beginnings of blue. And it struck me. I was nine or ten or whatever and it hit me that this was a beautiful moment. Not just the sunrise, the the sunrise in Texas and the way I felt, the texture of the moment, the context of the trip and the unconnectedness to any home or place or community. We had no idea what Tennessee was or expectations. We as a family--at least how I see it--had only ourselves and our slim belongings and the car, had motels and new horizons. We had only the moment.

Man, that was a long time ago. I don't think I can even conjure up any of that feeling--that feeling of childhood and being in my family, that world of brothers and sisters, of toys and newness. That long passages of time. Maybe I can get that feeling--I mean, I can remember it, I just can't feel it.

Anyway. We moved from Vancouver and most of us regretted that. We didn't know at the time, but we did regret it soon enough. For a very long time I considered Washington State--the Pacific Northwest--considered Vancouver to be my home. Though I'd been born in South Dakota and was there till the age of five (or almost the age of 5), Vancouver was home. I don't recall being sad about us leaving. I remember walking home from school and thinking: "I'm moving to Tennessee!" I was excited. But I--we kids--didn't say Johnson City, we just said Tennessee. We had no idea. But we left. We'd done it before--a big move--and we just went along with this one as well. We were kids. But that long drive was something. That move. I grew into a new consciousness on that trip--I became more aware of the world, the innate beauty of the physical world but also the inner beauty of my own nomadic existence--on that morning in the Texas panhandle.

To Whom It May Concern #8

2010-05-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

I was in Neptune Beach a weekend ago. Stayed with Bill. Francis was visiting so we went up there and each had a room in his upstairs old place on 1st Street. (I need to write about the people I know named Bill. This was Bill from Montana--over a decade older than me--who is originally from Springfield MA and then from Columbus, OH (did a stint in Oregon) and from Medelia/Mankato, MN, then Missoula (then Lafayette IN, then Jax/Neptune Beach FL.) We had a great time . . . But what I wonder is, will I remember to write about it?

This is to all the 1/2 (one half) people who read this blog: It will be quite a while until I write about the tens (2010 and on). So I think, what will I remember from these current days? Will the trip up to Bill's be something I can recall/will recall?

Does it matter?

Crying And Trying in Quebec: Quebec City 1992

2010-05-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

After visiting Francis in Montreal, we drove over to Quebec City on our own. Sure, we were impressed. We hadn't been to Europe (well, Fru had been to Sweden in the seventies), so for us this was like being in a European City. The French was nice to hear, but we were glad we could speak all the English we wanted.

We had not picked a place to stay, so that was one of the first things we started looking into. Sure, we were impressed with the big castle-like Hotel Fontenac, but in those days we'd never think of staying there (Fru would, actually, but we were young parents of one baby, maybe fourteen months old, maybe less.) So eventually we found a little French hotel in the old city. Can't recall the name, other than it was a woman's. She showed us a room on the first floor--a nice big room with a big bed and lace curtains and a big old bathtub. It was fine.

At this time, Fru and I were trying for another baby. She was trying to get pregnant. So, we thought it would pretty cool to conceive the second child in Quebec City.

And there was that big old bathtub.

But that night--after walking the city and a bottle of wine in the room--First Daughter cried. I don't mean just cried a normal cry, no, this was a wail. Unstoppable.

We did not know what was wrong, until we changed her diaper and saw a horrendous case of rash. Oww. We did our best to calm her, to treat her, to get her to sleep. Nothing doing. Now we were worried about the other guests, about the woman owner. People had to hear it, this baby wailing. We felt bad.

Finally, we did get her to sleep. We did get that bath. But Second Daughter was not conceived in Quebec City.

Must have been all the noise.

. . . Like It's 1999: Fort Lauderdale 1999

2010-05-20T02:33:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to recall that year, nineteen ninety-nine. I think it must have been a good year, what with the end of the century and all that. I recall people were worked up about Y2K, where supposedly all the world's computers would crash--which of course did not happen (though considering 2000 to about 2009, maybe it would have been better if they had).

Let's see. In 1999 we were living in Fort Lauderdale. We had our house and M.R. the cat was still alive. The girls would have been 8 and 6, respectively and Fru and I were just starting our forties. We felt settled by then in South Florida, but it was still new to us just the same. I would have been finishing up my MFA and teaching, Fru still at SunTrust Bank. The girls would be at Virginia Shuman Young Elementary.

Exciting stuff.

Really, things were good, pleasant, calm. Come the next decade, a lot of bad would happen. Bad for the large sense of the world and for the USA, but also quite a bit of personal bad as well, for First Daughter and Fru and my family. Not horrible bad, but bad just the same. But all through 1999, none of that was even a hint in our minds.

I do recall the end of that year. Fru's family came down to visit for Xmas and her brother, his wife and their son stayed into New Years. We had a good time. Fru was very happy because her family had come--her father and his wife and I think maybe even her sister and niece, maybe even her aunt and uncle from Highland, IL had come down that year--and we'd had a big Xmas, the girls were happy to have family about, the weather had been good and so on. AND IT WAS 1999!

We celebrated the end of the year at our house. Fru had bought all this Year 2000 stuff: cups and plates, paper glasses, all this little plastic confetti shaped into flamingoes and 2000 and New Years and palm trees. All tacky and kitschy (which is not Fru). She wanted us to have fun. And we did. When the end of 1999 came we yelled and donned the funny cheap glasses and hats and used the noisemakers, we tossed the thin/hard plastic confetti into the air--all in our house in front of the television set--and then that was that. The 90's were over with.

I really remember that confetti. It went all over, stuck to anything remotely like fabric, fell down into any crevice or crack.

I think it was maybe 2006 when I found the last remaining flamingo/palm tree/2000 piece of confetti in our living room. That last vestige of 1999.

Scooting Across the Floor: Montreal 1992

2010-05-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

This was when First Daughter was not even a year old. It was when Fru and I (and First Daughter) drove from Champaign to Montreal to go visit Francis. I'd met Francis in Mexico and had stayed in touch and when we moved from Montana to Champaign, right after our first child was born, he came and visited us there (we met him in Chicago). So, now it was our turn to visit him.

We'd spent the night in Huron, Michigan and I think I called Francis to let him know we were coming. But my message wasn't exact enough, because when we got to Montreal he wasn't expecting us. He lived in a three story apartment--which he owned, where his brother lived in the bottom apartment, Francis on in the second floor and they rented out the third--and it was his brother, Jude, who met us and let us in. Francis had just gotten back from a fishing trip and was not there. So, his place had not been cleaned or readied for our visit (we were staying with him). Not that it was dirty--it's a very nice place in a desirable place in the city--it's mainly that his nice wood floor had not been dusted.

I found some beer in a cooler. The cooler smelled like fish. Jude had called Francis to let him know we'd showed up. Francis--a good host and conscientious human being--was a tad distressed that we had got our trip dates wrong. (I remember now, I'd thought about calling him the night before, but just assumed we'd set the date and time of our arrival, so didn't worry about giving him a heads up on the eve of our arrival.) Anyway--not to worry. All was good and Montreal was--is--of course a fantastic city. For Fru and I it was like going to Europe, the city had that cosmopolitan and foreign feel to it, that vibe, and then there was all the French, the language and voices, the signs, etc.

But--back to the dusty floors--First daughter was not even one year old. She could not walk yet. What she did was scoot. She wore diapers and she would sit cross-legged and to get around, her brand of locomotion, was to scoot on her diapered rear using her legs to pull herself around. . . . So, there we were in Montreal, at Francis' nice place, drinking fishy beer--Fru, Francis and I--and we stood in the kitchen as we watched First Daughter scoot along in her diaper, like a dust mop, cleaning the floors and leaving a trail in the wood as she went.

Of course we laughed.

June Bugs: Sioux Falls 1960

2010-04-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

In my mind, this was at home in Sioux Falls in the summer, but really it could have been at my cousin's house outside of Arlington, or in the Black Hills or at a cabin along Lake Ponsett. Not sure, really. But, it was in South Dakota.

Anyway, it was long into the summer, a prairie/plains summer--which means hot and humid, up in the 100's late July/early August summer. Hot. Sunny. Burnt. And it was night time. And we had no air-conditioning. No A/C. I never, never used it until Iowa City in the late 70's, really. Twenty years with no A/C. (Okay, enough about A/C.) Another anyway: It was early evening/night and we had all the windows open, the kitchen door open so that there were only screens. Maybe we were cooking something--Mother cooking something--and we hung out in the kitchen with all the bright sharp lights blaring, the back porch light beaming, we kids--five of us, ten if my cousins were there--were running in and out, playing, no shirts or shoes, kids, and at the screen door, at the kitchen screen window tons of June Bugs flew in.

I'm talking the screens almost covered with big fat hard-shelled insects, buzzing buzzing flitting and sticking to the screen. Man, there were a lot of June Bugs. It was repulsive and fascinating at the same time. It was memorable but normal at the same time. This was how South Dakota was. All these June Bugs covering the screens at night in a hot dog-day South Dakota summer and we were all just little kids, yelling and laughing and doing good dumb kid things, our parents still young but no one knowing that, many years to come but no one knew that, and those insects zizzing and zagging and blanketing the screens of our house.

I still remember that.

A Change In The Weather: Fort Lauderdale 1996

2010-04-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

So, we had moved from Illinois to South Florida. We'd lived at the Riverside Hotel from May into July, then we found a house to rent in Victoria Park. Fru went to work at SunTrust Bank, on Las Olas downtown, while I stayed home with the girls--ages five and three--until my classes started at FIU. First Daughter started kindergarten at VSY in the neighborhood, Second Daughter stayed home and my Grad School classes were in the evenings.

And what I recall is that that first late fall and into winter I really enjoyed the weather. I'd drive down to Miami with my windows down--sometimes taking A1A along the beach--and just purely enjoy the warmth, the salty breeze, the fact that I could have my windows down (despite the humidity).

I mean, that's one of the reasons we moved to Florida, wasn't it? The weather? the winter weather? I'd lived in Florida before, had spent much time in the Keys, but, still, I could dig the warmth and the sunshine. We were still connected to the midwest, to it's sense of geography, its flora and fauna, its climate and temperatures. That was our template for viewing things, so our surroundings were still new and fresh and tropically exotic. We--I, as I drove back and forth to FIU--were tangibly conscious of what we had and what we were missing. We knew what the weather was like back "home". And when the cool days of our first winter in Fort Lauderdale came, Fru and I would get out the lawn chairs and just sit out in the yard at night, enjoying the low temps of 60 or even the "cold" 50 degree weather. Ahh.

And it was like that for maybe the first two or three years--this knowledge of what we weren't experiencing during the fall and winter, in October or February or even March (I always disliked March weather up north). But eventually that faded away. Fort Lauderdale, South Florida, became home. Warm sunny winters became our new norm. Fifty degrees really did become cold.

And now, some fourteen years later, rarely can i conjure up that thrill for a warm winter day. I mean, I enjoy it, but no longer do I have that innate comparison to what's going on in Illinois or Iowa or Montana, to what people in New York or even Tennessee, or even the panhandle of Florida are experiencing. It's not even unusual for me to lose track of the rest of the nation's weather. It can be January, but in my mind it's warm everywhere--I think that, sure, someone in Chicago is outside in their shirt and shorts grilling some fresh fish just like me. Why wouldn't they be?

I miss the change in weather. I really do. It's exotic to me to go back to Iowa during the winter and--not just see snow--but to have to wear a coat, to be able to wear long sleeves and socks, to see trees without leaves, to walk on hard soil--that kind of thing.

Yet, the weather patterns are engraved in me down here. I know summer's great heavy rains and humidity, the sorrow of September when you're tired of the wet heat and Hurricane Season, the slight change of things come October, that wondrous first cold snap of winter (fifty degrees!) and then the shift into spring come February. These are subtle seasons, but real seasons and I know them well.

Feat of Strength & The Barroom Booth: Champaign 1988

2010-04-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

This was when I spent the summer in Champaign working concrete. I really liked Champaign back then. I had not really lived in the midwest for quite a spell and I enjoyed my time in Illinois. Some of the nicest people I have ever met lived in Champaign back in 1988. I'm sure some of the nicest people in the country still live there now. Despite my own personal misgivings, it's a nice town. A good town. One that I wish more towns were like, sometimes.

Anyway, it was some evening after a day of work and we--the gang, Doug, Kurt Strube (Kurt--pronounced "Strew-bee"--has one of those names that I just have to give the last name), Elroy, maybe Steve or "Foot" (the train-riding hobo guy who liked to be called that)--were at a bar. Pia's. On Springfield, I believe. The west side of town . . . So, we were there drinking copious beers after a hot hot tired day of slinging concrete and pulling concrete and puddling concrete and finishing concrete and talking concrete and thinking concrete. We sat in a booth in the side room where the dart boards and such were and--for whatever reason--some roughhousing ensued.

What was it about? I have no idea. But we began to push each other over something or another. Leroy was across the table and I was pushing him. Kurt was next to me, on the inside of the booth, and he began to press me. He used his arms and his thigh to try and push me out of the booth. But I resisted. He pushed and pushed, but I didn't even nudge in the opposite direction. I held him at bay, then pushed him, forcing him towards the wall. And then, it was over. It was just joking around, but it was also a show. A show of strength I guess (and thus a show--ultimately among males--of dominance).

"You're strong," Kurt said.

Kurt, though not a big guy, was a concrete worker from way back. A good worker. Strong.

"I was bracing against the wall and I still couldn't move you," he said.

To be honest, I knew that. To be honest, yes, it made me feel good.

I did feel good.

What made me think of this is that I weighed myself today. Came in at 220 pounds. Now, to me, my ideal weight is 195. But, I can carry 200 with no problem--I'd settle for 200. But 220! Ouch. I realize this sounds very self-referential or just self-boring, but you know I used to work construction, I worked concrete and landscaping and house painting jobs. I was physical. I haven't done that in so many years. And while I don't think of myself as old, I'm not young. So, this is not good. So, am I ready to settle in with a heavy weight, little exercise and be comfortable each day? I mean, I see this type, all around me, with men my age. I mean: be moderately healthy and moderately lazy and eat a good dang meal. But, am I ready for that?

Or do I want to be the guy who can still push Kurt Strube into the wall from a barroom booth at Pia's in Champaign, Illinois?

Birth Day #1: Champaign 1991

2010-04-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

It wasn't all that long after moving from Montana that Fru became pregnant. She had just started a controller's job at her old bank and I was doing landscape work. I remember how shocked I was, how I asked her to take the little store-bought test twice. I mean, we'd planned to start a family. She had gone off the pill. But we were under the impression that it would take a while.

Nope.

It took me a while to adjust to her pregnancy. Og course, it took Fru the whole nine months to keep readjusting to it. But she loved being pregnant and I loved that she was happy--and I was happy--and we waited and watched for our first baby.

(In many ways it all seemed unreal. I was never the marriage/baby kind of a guy, not until I met Fru, so the idea that we would have a child was strange to me. Babies were for TV and movies, for relatives and strangers. But, I was also fascinated. I was anticipating fatherhood, though I had no complete concept what it meant. [Though this is not entirely true in the sense that, obviously, Fru and I had discussed having children, had agreed on it and tried--it just came a tad sooner than I thought it would, besides the fact that having a child is something you have to experience to understand the enormity and deep pleasure of it.])

Then came the day. Our first daughter was early, actually. I know Fru woke up very early, then woke me later to tell me she was having contractions. Okay. She wasn'T nervous and I wasn't nervous. We called her sister and father to tell them. (I'm trying to remember if this was when I was writing a screenplay and had to fax it to L.A. that same exact day and had to go do that before we went to the hospital, or if that was when Second Daughter was born.) We had been to see the doctor at his clinic, we had been to Lamaze classes and watched videos, read books, talked to people, so we thought we were ready. We were ready.

Eventually we got in the car and drove. Fru's contractions were picking up, so she felt more comfortable riding in the seat backwards. Champaign is a small town--the hospital, Covenant, was in Urbana--so I didn't worry about driving slow with her not in a seat belt and sitting on her knees backwards in the passenger seat. Okay. But there was another problem: it turned out we didn't know where the hospital was.

In my mind, I knew where the place was. But it turned out that that was Carl Hospital, which was near Covenant. Now, this was Fru's town (her hometown is Chicago, but she grew up in Champaign by age 13 or so), so I assumed she knew where the dang hospital was. But she couldn't tell me. (Oh yeah, she was wearing this big, billowy t-shirt that had a big elephant imprinted on it--I don't know where she got it, but that's what she wore.) So, I was driving down these small roads looking for the hospital while Fru sat backwards having contractions wearing her big elephant t-shirt.

Eventually we pulled over and asked some very surprised people walking on the sidewalk where the heck Covenant Hospital was. Luckily, they knew.

So, off we went.

Wheeling Fru into the elevator the person coming out was her pediatrician. He was surprised to see us, as she was not due for a few more days or a week. "Not you?" he said--he'd just delivered an early baby. "Yes," Fru said, smiling. "Okay, I'll see you soon then." And up we went and they gave us a nice room and nurses came and eventually the doctor came and then we went to another room and then it was push push push, good good good, here comes the head, it's a girl, cry cry cry. ohmygods etcetc and I was holding my daughter.

Amazing.

And Fru got to hold her too.

Then there was a move to another room, our new first baby being taken to the room with other babies. The staying, the people visiting, our baby being brought into the room for feeding and care. I mean, it's so strange and wonderful: You have a baby! What do I do with this baby? You love the baby.

So, Fru and I loved the baby.

After a slight delay--she wouldn't eat much and wouldn't pee in her diaper--we took her home.

We had a crib set up--I said we were ready--and other things we were told we needed and then we got our brand new baby to sleep and we went to sleep and then "WHAAAAA" the baby wakes up and we feed her. Sleep and "WHAAAAAA" wake and so on.

But, the baby is ours. She is sweet and smells sweet and is a joy to hold and she is ours, Fru's and mine.

And we love the baby.

The Garden: Champaign 1995

2010-04-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Since I was a kid, I liked growing things. I liked trees and bushes and flowers, I liked fruits and vegetables. I liked gardens. My father was a plant person, a back yard gardener. Nothing huge or overtly anal, just your regular vegetable garden, maybe some vine fruit, and lots of trees and flowering bushes. I'm about the same (or was): nothing fancy or overdone, just a nice patch of vegetables and plants for the yard.

It was in Champaign--the second time around, when my kids were little--that I had my greatest garden. My only garden, really.

Champaign has world-class soil. I mean dark, rich earthwormypoop soil. It's fine and black, no rocks, and you can grow about anything in it without much effort. We were on Miller Street then. First Daughter was a three or four years old, Second Daughter was only one or two and I had worked at Agriseed in Savoy, a genetic crop lab, where they had given me all sorts of seeds because, each year, the employees there planted a big garden out in the land they owned. So, that's what got me going with my garden.

That first year I had broccoli and onions and garlic, kale and spinach and corn, bell peppers, jalapenos, red chili peppers, eggplant, leeks, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes. I mean, I did care for those plants and they grew huge and abundant. We ate a lot of fresh veggies and I still recall having the girls pick them with me. And over the subsequent time--by 1995--I had it down pat, growing two seasons of spinach and kale along with lots of peppers, broccoli, carrots, leeks and such. I also grew giant sunflowers: huge Russian sunflowers that would get to be seven feet tall or more, with wide Frisbee-sized disks for flowers that i would let turn to seed and which the birds and squirrels came to eat up in the fall. I also let groups of wildflowers grow in the back yard, so that there was a mowed path between patches of black-eyed Susans or daisies or whatnot. The girls would go out and play among them. And there was a big blackberry vine that I let grow in the corner, so we had fresh blackberries at times . . . That was good. I miss that garden. I don't miss too much about Champaign, but the garden definitely is one thing.

I don't have a garden anymore. Oh, I've got tons of plants, trees, vines, year round flowers, I've had citrus trees and an avocado, coconuts and pineapple plants. Banana plants. But I haven't had a good old fashioned vegetable garden. I tried for a bit, but south Florida is not the same as Iowa or Illinois. It's kind of an old fashioned seasonal thing as well.

But, we'll see. maybe I'll try again. Or, maybe, I'll again live in a place where a summer garden will grow.

Picking Raspberries: Vancouver 1966

2010-04-07T06:50:00.000-07:00

I think it was Mike Gust who found the raspberry patch. I'm not sure how, because the raspberries grew on a hillside quite a ways from our neighborhood. We rode our bikes to go get them.

It was Oldest Brother, Second Oldest Brother, mike Gust and I that went, with me being the little kid. And it did seem--to my mind then and even to my recollection now--like a very long trip to go gather the berries. We had taken pails and jumped on our bikes and rode and rode, along roadsides with cars and past intersections with cars and to the hillside where we dropped our bikes into the dirt along the roadside and made our way into the tangle of sticker-vine raspberry bushes. And there were tons of them, big and ripe, and we quickly filled our buckets. We also got scratches. Then we rode all the way back to our house on Enid Avenue.

We compared our gatherings, rinsed them all with water from our hose, sat out on the picnic table and removed any extra stems or leaves or thorns, then someone went inside and got bowls and the carton of milk and we ate raspberries with milk in the sun in our back yard.

Delightful.

But the thing is, I doubt that we ever even asked permission to go do this. In those days, we just went out of the house on weekends or summer days and did whatever crossed our minds, whatever we were capable of with our limited resources and unlimited imagination. So, we had that freedom. And, I wonder, how many towns are there any more that would just let raspberries grow wild along a hillside? How many kids have a childhood where they could just take off and find such a treasure without being driven there, without supervision, without having to pay some entry fee and sign some disclosure form to pick raspberries?

Ah. I sound like an old man. But with each generation, with each crowding of our world and development of our world, much is lost. I'm sure my parents saw it--simpler times, more free times--when comparing their childhoods to ours, just as I see it comparing mine to my children's. But things are gained as well: health and safety, other adventures not available. Still, there must be or have been a point where something becomes irretrievably lost, where the new urban/urbane childhood cannot match the one where nature was still prominent, where the need for safety has undermined the innocence and freedom of yore . . .

(Oh, just using a word like "yore" makes me feel old, makes me feel like a complaining codger.)

But, this has always been such. My complaints/thoughts are much much older than I am, older than this country I live in. Better to just remember that day in Vancouver, Washington, when we picked wild raspberries and ate them with milk.

First Xmas Return: Champaign 1996

2010-04-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

We had moved to Fort Lauderdale in the spring of 1996. In May, I think. By the mid-summer we had found a house to rent in Victoria Park and were moved in. By the end of August we'd made friends, First Daughter had started kindergarten at VSY and I was in classes at FIU's graduate writing program. We felt good, Fru and I, our little family settled into our slice of South Florida.

But, Fru wanted to go "home" for Xmas.

Well. Okay. I mean, I wasn't too keen on it. I would have been happy with just a small nuclear Xmas in our rented house, but, she had come all the way down to Florida for me and she was working full time and how could I say "No"? I couldn't. Besides, I liked Fru's family. I liked Xmas in Champaign on the whole. So, we drove up there when the time came.

And it was nice enough. We stayed at Fru's father's place. I saw people I'd known and went out and around with them a bit. But something was nagging at me the whole while. And I knew what it was one evening as I ran around with Fru's sister's husband (her brother-in-law and therefore, I guess my brother-in-law--Dan--who I always got along with the best and who gave me work now and then). Dan and I were out one night, I think we went to the Tumble Inn, and were coming back with Dan always taking the side streets to get around and it was dark and cold-frozen, the streets were empty of people and there was snow blowing. Little wisps of snow looking like fog being blown by a frigid wind across the steppes of Champaign. And I felt a great dread. I felt like I had not gone away and was still living in that town and that--even if it was true that we had moved and had settled in Fort Lauderdale--I would be coming back to live there again soon.

Ahhhhh.

Okay. Champaign is a nice town. It's no different than many of the Iowa towns I like. But, as I've said, I had mixed feelings about that place and spent six years there, most of those six years spent trying to get out. And I had gotten out. But then I was back. Back in town during the desperate winter months and I felt like I was desperate, too.

But, it wasn't so. Because Xmas came and went and we packed up our Volvo and I pulled out of her father's driveway and we--Fru, First Daughter, Second Daughter and I--hit Interstate 57 with snow on the ground and drove south: Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia.

Florida.

We drove home.

Sleep: Champaign 1991

2010-03-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1991 I got invited to go canoeing and camping with Matt back in Iowa. At that time, First Daughter was only about, oh, maybe 3 months old. So, Fru and I were still in the shock of having a baby, the worries, the 24-7-365 attention, the lack of sleep. But, I was off to spend some time in northern Iowa, canoeing the Upper Iowa River and with Matt.

I was going to sleep!

In some ways, I was looking forward to sleeping as much as seeing Matt, as being in a tent again and canoeing, looking forward to being away and free for a few days. So, off I went. And it was a nice time--(overall, I'll have to write about it some other time, Matt, the river, seeing Roger also who was married and living in Decorah, Iowa at the time)--and we canoed and had a camp spot at a campground right on the river.

Night fell and I was ready to sleep.

Ah. Sweet sleep. Anyone who is or has been a young parent knows what I'm talking about (and I'm talking about five or more years of pure zombiedom!).

But as I lied there in the tent, I couldn't sleep. This was an open campground and there were still people up, particularly a group of young gents who were drinking and playing cards. Still, things like this never bothered me before. I could always sleep. And here I was, tired, desperately craving a long sleep, so why should some semi-noisy neighbors keep me from it?

I was upset. I blamed the campers playing cards. I told Matt I couldn't sleep and I grabbed my pillow and went out of the tent. I indignantly shot a glance over to the noisy campers as I marched with my pillow to my truck. It was my red Custom Deluxe from Montana (still had Montana plates, I think) and I crawled inside and thought I could sleep there, in the cab. I'd slept in many vehicles, many smaller than my truck.

Still, no sleep.

Sure, I dozed, eventually slept, but it was fitful, lousy, a sleep that made me even sleepier.

I blamed it on the kids playing cards, on the cramped truck, on my unfluffy pillow.

The next night we stayed at Roger's house where I slept on the couch. Still a bad sleep.

The day after that, I said I was leaving early to return home. I told them I missed my baby--my daughter--and that was true. I did miss her. I wanted to get away from her, from Fru, from that world for just a bit, yet that was about all I truly thought about also. I wanted to get back to it.

And--as the years passed and a new baby was added--I realized that that was why I couldn't sleep. Not that I missed her so--my baby--but that I was now used to listening each night for her. It was ingrained in me to listen, to sleep lightly, to be aware. It was not the other camper's fault, or the truck's or the pillow's, it was my new life. The life of having babies.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this. I'm sure there are men who--knowing their wives, the mother of their children are right there--sleep as soundly as ever after having kids. But, for most, that kind of deep sleep is lost forever. You're always listening, listening, even when years pass and experience tells you that all is okay now, they are no longer babies and will sleep and will wake up the next day. Still, you don't sleep that well.

Ah.

Even a few years later, when I'd go off to camp by myself, when I'd spend one night at a motel with the sole purpose of just sleeping, I couldn't do it. I couldn't conk out and disappear like I wanted to. Eventually, I gave up that hope.

No. I'm not sleep deprived anymore. But I don't sleep that well, either. I can't say I've ever had one of those deep, unconcerned sleeps again ever in my life. Not just because I had kids--that's what brought it on--but also because I'm getting older and am told you don't sleep that well the more you age.

Oh well. It was only sleep. It is only sleep.

Being awake is more fun anyway.

James: Missoula 1990

2010-03-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

I didn't know a lot of people who were Indians in Montana, at least not intimately. I did know James. He was half-white and a painter. He was also pretty much an alcoholic. But he was interesting and we got along with each other, we were friends. I think perhaps he was Blackfoot. Maybe he was Salish. Anyway, that's not how I saw him, not as Indian or half Indian or an alcoholic. He was just James. He was a painter.

I met him in the bars. At Charlie B's to be precise. He knew Dennis and by 1990 I was good friends with Dennis, who collected and published books for a living. I know I met James before 1990, but that doesn't matter. What I'm thinking of is a short conversation we had at Charlie B's one night in 1990.

You have to understand that James had bad teeth and big glasses. He had long black hair and was very skinny. He had a crooked grin. He was drunk a lot. His paintings didn't sell much, but he was a real painter. He was poor. So, one night we were with each other at the bar--both drunk--and he started arguing with me, calling me White Man. I was actually interested that he called me White Man--don't know why, exactly, maybe just because I am--and he said his people don't always like my people. Of course, I didn't see it like that but also did see it like that (the fault being in my camp) and I said it wasn't true about me. He asked, "What do you think of me, then? What do you say when you see me?"

And I said I see a painter. I said, "You're an intelligent guy." And right away he smiled. He ducked his head and looked away and gave that crooked grin. He was flattered. And he wasn't flattered because I was a "White Man" or because he was a poor painter or because we were in Montana where people don't often compliment each other--only because I had surprised him by saying he was intelligent.

But James was intelligent. He was a good painter. He was a half-breed and I was a white man. I was glad to have surprised him. I was glad to have said something nice. It pleased me to make him smile his crooked smile . . . I should do that more often.

To Whom It May Concern #7

2010-03-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm still at it. Still writing this blog.

If you wanted to say that this is only an exercise in narcissism, that it's a self-indulgent diary, a re-write of personal mundane history, an attempt at self myth-making, well, you'd be right. It is. It's also a blog, a journal, a memoir, an autobiography of sorts, a record of my very existence, one that moves slowly slowly, a glacier of small memories, that will, eventually, only add up to what it is.

Whatever that may be.

My hope is that as it grows--and it's years away, I can see now, from being even half done (and in some ways will never be done till I die)--it will take on a larger narrative, will be imbued with more meaning. It is, I think, that larger narrative that keeps me writing. Then again, I could be wrong about that. . . I do plan to write more about other people, about some subjects I've avoided or glossed over, maybe get into the minutia of my own thinking and self-analysis (won't that be fun to read?), and then I may not.

What I've been doing is, every nine months, I switch to a new decade. This is just a structure that befell me, one I came to after the first year. I've mentioned this before, but I'm working my way the best I can through the decades--the 80's, 60's, 90's so far--and will hit upon the others I've been alive in, every nine months, until I'm up to speed with this new and current one. Once I write about a decade, I can continue to write about it, so that, now, I write about three decades whenever I want. So, when I get to the Tens, I'll see what I can do to improve the quality and depth of these little things.

Why?

I don't know, exactly. To make my myth, I guess.

Tijuana Bus Station: Mexico 1990

2010-03-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

I'd been in Tijuana for maybe twenty four hours. I'd come down from Los Angeles (after a bus ride there from Missoula), where I'd stayed with Mike. Mike and I and some employee of his--who spoke Spanish--had come down to the border town with me. We got drunk (I can document this). We had a little junk motel room. The next day I needed to get to the bus station, because I was traveling in Mexico for a few weeks.

We got a taxi. Hungover we rode, trusting the cabbie to really take us to the station. It was nice of them to do this, as I could have taken a taxi myself and they could have gone back over the border and, thus, back to L.A.. But, they went with me and when we pulled up to the Tijuana Bus Station, it was like pulling up to a busy airport.

People and cars were everywhere. The cabbie, not wanting to get far into the melee, stopped and told me to get out. Mike and his employee looked at me. I had my duffle bag full of stuff. So, I slung it over my shoulder and got out.

Mike and his employee needed the cab to get to the border crossing.

Oh, I remember--it was raining.

Not a big rain, but a misty one. So, I hopped out and hardly said goodbye when the cabbie pulled away. I turned and looked and saw: this was a big station.

I walked and, as I stepped through the doors, I was a taken aback. The place was cavernous, except for the fact that it was filled with people. I mean A LOT of people. And it smelled strange to me. I'm not trying to say it smelled bad or make some ulterior comment. It just smelled very different and added to my sense that I was somewhere new.

To me, it looked so chaotic. I had just been dumped out of a cab after a long night of partying in Tijuana, and now I had to figure out what I was supposed to do to find my bus.

My bus was Tres Estrellas.

I looked for the sign, found it, went to the counter and--in malo Spanish-- ordered my ticket.

And when the bus came, off I went for La Paz.

It was many years later, when Mike told me that they had made the driver come back around, to look for me. But I was already gone.

Desolation Cornfields: Champaign 1994

2010-03-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

I have mixed feelings about Champaign. At least about when Fru and I moved back there after living in Montana. There were many times I felt trapped in that town. Much of that was due to the fact that I became a stay-at-home father. Don't get me wrong: I loved and love my wife, I loved and love my children. But, I also had bouts of 'What the hell am I doing in Champaign, Illinois taking care of little kids all day?'.

These were fantastic days mixed with dark personal days. Then again, I'm quite capable of being a dark person all on my own, with no help of any other person. But, in the summer, I had one habit--or act--that I came to rely on to give myself a release from my own personally groomed and tailored troubles.

I drove out into the cornfields.

First, you have to understand that Champaign, Illinois is surrounded by extremely fertile earth. The whole county is a big bowl of mucky, schmucky dark rich ground. Things grow. So, it's sort of a farmer's paradise (if your idea of paradise is long stretches of flat flat land and a grid of harrowed fields) and there were miles and miles of corn and soybean fields just a baby step out of town. But, if you looked at them right, those fields had a quiet beauty of their own. I mean, I both despised them and loved them.

Like I said, mixed feelings.

Anyway, come a number of Sundays, I escaped into those fields. I'd buy a six pack of beer, a pack of cigarettes (maybe, if I was lucky, I had a joint) and I'd say goodbye to Fru and my pretty wonderful little girls and I'd head out into the cornfield wilderness.

I almost always headed west of town, maybe a bit southwest. I'd take the small roads, then take smaller roads, then hit the unpaved gravel paths that divided fields. I mean, it was summer. There were fields of tall green corn. Endless sun. No one around. And so I'd pull over in this anonymous little section of Champaign County, Illinois, in the midwest section of the U.S.A. and I'd smoke and drink and listen to the radio. I think sometimes I brought my journal, but not that often, as I didn't even want to write. I just wanted a break from the little house on Miller Street, from diapers and baby food, from Sesame Street and Barney and Disney movies, a break from married life, from fatherhood, from my own poisonous thinking . . . I just wanted a break.

So, I'd stand out there in the middle of cornfield-nowhere, drink and smoke--once in a while get high--and think and listen to the radio. And I'd listen to Prairie Home Companion--the Sunday rerun of it. Or, I'd listen to WEFT, the local community station, and it's eclectic brand of music. Yes, I'd get buzzed and listen and talk to myself out there in the true and honest middle of nowhere. And I liked it.

I guess I have that strange ability to enjoy my worst moments (as I had in Seattle). Even now I laugh at myself, even feel slightly nostalgic about those situations when I was down and self-pitying. It was pretty out there. I liked it out there under the big blue sky and powdered clouds, among the endless grids of tall corn and soybeans, so alone yet also so visible in the long flat landscape, being stupid and smart.

Possum Lake: Champaign 1994

2010-03-03T12:17:00.000-08:00

There wasn't much water around Champaign, Illinois. In the city, there was The Boneyard, a small creek that ran through campustown and around, its tiny banks littered with trash and broken bottles. The Boney, as some called it, would flood in big rains and flood the streets (until they built a huge retention pond after Fru and I left). There were miscellaneous "lakes" in the new neighborhoods--manmade retention ponds, essentially. There was the Sangamon River--supposedly, I could barely see it--around Mahomet and a few other rivers around the county and some lakes south of the county, but there was no real bodies or flows of "water" to speak of.

And then there was Possum Lake, which has nothing to do with real water either.

When my two girls were about three or four and one or two, they would listen to music and dance to it. The dancing mainly consisted of running around in circles and falling down. One Xmas, they listened to the Nutcracker Suite, and though it was too long for them to really absorb, they did love a few sets centered around the Russian Dance section. So, I would play the Russian Dance and a few others over and over for them, way past Xmas and New Years.

Their dancing to this music became kind of an act and I became the "Director" of their musical show. Me being me (which is who I am), I gave their performance the name of Possum Lake (as in Swan Lake, as in ballet). They had no idea that I was making a joke. For them, Possum lake was a real and beautiful name for their ballet.

So, when they wanted to hear the Nutcracker's Russian Dance and others, they'd ask to perform Possum Lake.

I made up specific parts for them to perform with moves such as "barbeque tongs" and "banana splits" and the "vulture dive". This was how I entertained myself while they entertained themselves which entertained all of us. So, I'd put on the music and they'd get ready--they sometimes wore tutus--and off they would go with their rendition of Possum Lake, perfectly executing the "barbeque tong" moves and other difficult steps up to the crescendo of an end where they ran faster and faster in circles until they crashed like vultures into the serene waters of Possum Lake (our dining room carpet, usually).

Yes.

But, this is what I did to them. I could never quite let things be normal or what they were supposed to be, I always had to make them slightly off kilter. I suppose I imbued them with a sense of creativity, of making something into your own, also a sense of cynicism and sarcasm--for better or worse--and maybe, perhaps, irony . . . I don't know. Both my girls turned out quite different, but they both have a great sense of humor.

And maybe that was all it was, after all, humor. Making something funny just to have some fun. And it was fun.

What would childhood be? What would parenthood be? What would anything be if you couldn't have some fun? . . . Today, I'd pay great gobs of money to see them perform Possum Lake once again.

Invitation to L.A.: Des Moines 1984

2010-02-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

At the start of 1984 I had just graduated from the University of Iowa and was back living in Des Moines. I got a job a Younkers, working at the 9th Street Warehouse. I worked there for a few months, till early spring, and then took the train to Santa Fe, NM where I stayed, worked until the fall of that year. Then I went back to Des Moines, went back to Iowa City for a spell, then back to Des Moines.

So, the winter of '84 i was back where I started. I think I may have been working at Younkers again, full time, but at the Merle Hay Mall store . . . So, I was writing, living at my parents' house and--to the best of my memory--had no plans. I mean, no doubt I was concocting some fantasy or real plan to go somewhere, but I didn't have anything realistic in mind . . . Oh, I think I spent a month or two in Chicago with Cin, but I did not plan to move there . . . It was winter. I was lazy. Then Mike called (Chicago Mike, a friend from college days) and Mike asked if I wanted to go to Los Angeles.

L.A.

I was never much interested in cities back then. I was not much interested in California--except perhaps the northern part. If I wanted to go to CA, no doubt I would have chosen the Mt. Shasta area or the northern coast; maybe the desert--Death Valley--or if I had to pick a city, San Francisco would have been it. So, did I want to go to L.A.?

Mike was going out there to work. His father was in the construction biz and he was going to get some work out there and put Mike in charge of it. Mike was going to drive his car out. He needed some workers--or at least one worker for the time being--and he called me to offer me this trip and job. Hmm. I had not really worked construction, just a small stint doing concrete work one summer in Des Moines. Hmm.

Of course I said yes.

So, out of the blue, I was going to L.A. Did go to L.A. Stayed in L.A. for almost a year.

(Which was enough.)

But what interests me here, is that there was a time in my life when someone could call me up and ask if I wanted to move across country and work a job I knew little about. I had the time and the gumption, the nothing-better-going-on life to say yes. Seems strange to me now.

And so, after Christmas, I took the bus to Chicago, saw Cin again, met up with Mike and we took off on New Years Day in 1985 for Los Angeles, California.

When will I ever do something like that again?

Hmm?

Bologna and Mustard: Johnson City 1969

2010-02-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

I joined the Boy Scouts once. Back in vancouver, WA I had been a Cub Scout for a few months (maybe only weeks) and enjoyed it, until the den mother down the street quit or they moved away and then it all fell apart. But this was in Tennessee and my friend from our neighborhood, Kent, was a Boy Scout and he told me that his troop was going to a weekend jamboree. he asked if I wanted to join up and come along. For some reason, I said: "Yes."

So, one way or another, I quickly joined, must have paid some kind of dues, and then Kent and I were off to some park somewhere in Tennessee for the jamboree! Ha! I knew no one else in this troop--no one else in all of Boy Scoutdom--but here I was staying in a big tent with a bunch of other boys. But let me back up a bit . . . Before going, I had gone grocery shopping with Mother because we had to bring our own food supplies--so I got drinks and chips and what not and I saw this pack of link sausages and said I wanted those. "Are you sure?" "Yes," I said. "You'll have to make sure to cook them all the way through," Mother told me. "Okay," I said . . . So, back to the jamboree: It was a pretty big gathering. There were lots and lots of scouts, lots and lots of troops, there was a gazebo where people sand and played guitar (I had never really seen this before and still remember this one older scout who played guitar and sang--actually sang!--into a microphone and he sounded good), there were games and food and such; I don't remember it all.

I do recall finding it strange to camp like that, in an open park with all those other people. I was no stranger to camping, but this was likely the first time I'd camped without my parents and in a non-forest/National Park/State Park type setting. I was a bit wary of it all but also excited. I remember our Scout Master was an older guy with a very bald head and he'd wipe his whole head down with a bandana, swiping great waves of sweat from himself, I recall there was a boy named Carroll in our troop--never heard of a boy named Carroll before--and he was very concerned with his bodily movements, worrying about taking a dump and then telling us about it and finally coming to the happy conclusion that all he had were "Wet farts". It was Carroll who I ended up trading food with.

You see, by the next morning, I was starving. All I had left to eat were those uncooked sausages. And, I did not want to cook them. I was a kid, still shy, didn't know anyone besides Kent and for whatever reason, I didn't want to ask the troop leader to help me cook my sausages. I felt stupid for having bought and brought them. But! Carroll, of funny name and wet farts, he wanted them. The only thing he had to trade me was a single bologna and mustard sandwich. . . I had never had a bologna and mustard sandwich. It did not sound good to me--too simple, too salty--but I was hungry and was not, NOT, going to cook those sausages. So, I made the trade.

You know what?

Bologna and mustard sandwiches are good.

That sandwich tasted divine. It was one slice of bad bologna with lots of yellow French's mustard and white bread. Yum. And from that day, I ate those sandwiches. I still eat them (now and then). Second Daughter eats them (now and then). Try one. They're good.

After the jamboree (I remember now, it was over Memorial Day weekend and this was a big city park and there was a big cemetery and we scouts went out and placed flags on many of the graves--veterans' graves--little American flags on little sticks) so after when Kent and I got back to our neighborhood outside of Johnson City, I was done. I never went back for a single scout meeting or program or whathaveyou. But I was glad I went, because I still remember those things, it took me out of my usual world, as a kid, and introduced me to things that were foreign to me at the time.

And--of course--I got to eat a bologna and mustard sandwich.

And An Elephant Says?: Champaign 1992

2010-02-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

My kids had lots and lots of animals when they were babies. I don't mean real live breathing animals (we had two cats: M.R. and Jack and Jack got run over and killed before Second Daughter was born in '93), but they had a great assortment of plastic animals and stuffed animals and animal videos and magnet animals, wooden animals, animal cards and on and on. So, I used these animal toys as lessons--like about all parents do--from what kind of animals they were to habits to sounds and eventually to what regions of the world they came from.

First daughter was especially crazy about animals--she loved giraffes and elephants the most for quite a while, then gave way to cats and dinosaurs. (I remember once we were visiting my parents in Des Moines, just me and First Daughter--I'd driven us over from Champaign--and a friend of mine, Scott, came over to visit. He was impressed with First Daughters ability to name numbers and colors and the alphabet, not just recite them, but when he went to leave I said, "Good bye, Scott" and First Daughter said, "Good bye, Skunk." . . . Oh, I never told Scott this, but I laughed and laughed, she had animals on her mind so she thought his name was Skunk.) But I remember one time when Francis came to visit us.

I'd met Francis in Mexico (where I'd mistook him for an English-speaking Americano) and he was from Quebec. His English, on the whole, was good (my French tres mal) and he had no problem coming to a place like Champaign and hanging with me during the day while I did laundry and took care of a baby and all of that (yes, we did go out some nights, Francis and I, and he did go to Chicago, so there was that). Anyway, he was there as First Daughter and I went through our animal sounds.

You know: What does a dog say? "Bark, bark!" Yes! What does a cow say? "Moo, moo." Good! What does a monkey say? "Eee-ee-ee-ee." Ha ha. "A dolphin?" "Bee-ee-eee-eee. " (Something like that.)

It's when I got to the elephant that Francis cracked up.

"What does an elephant say?" I asked First Daughter.

"Breeee Cheese!"

Francis--a French cheese kind of guy--thought that this was hilarious.

And it was.

So many things with little kids are hilarious, impossible to record--especially if they are your own little kids and their whole years are often profound second after profound second--and this was but one of many delightful happenings.

Ah. I was just thinking of it, that's all. Maybe you had to be there.

Small Memory In Idaho #5

2010-02-03T04:53:00.000-08:00

This was either '89 or '90. I'd gone camping--alone--down in Idaho from Missoula. I spent the night at the Craters of the Moon National Monument, where I'd walked around among the fossilized lava floes and went in the caves and such--it was nice. But the next morning I woke early. Had not slept that well, but wanted to get going as I wanted to take the long drive back, through Sun Valley and Stanley and the Sawtooth (instead of back through Arco), then back up into Montana. So I was sleepyheaded. I was discombobulated. I was hungry and wanted coffee.

I took off driving the thin road out of the park, headed west to southwest. The sun was just up, everything was fuzzy and surreal, the light dusty upon a dry landscape. And I had the highway all to myself. And then I just admired it all, became amazed at the small mountains hills and the color of the sage and the smell of the very Idaho air and I pulled the car off the road and got out and, more or less, just exalted in the moment.

And, again, like many of my Idaho moments, that was it. A moment of realization, of living in the very now, of appreciating the small and the grand in the same second.

"A Baby Is Better Than Smart": Champaign 1993

2010-01-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

When I lived in the dorms--Burge Hall--in Iowa City at the start of my college career, I used to play this song called Be Careful There's A Baby In The House by Louden Wainwright III on my stereo. It was just a song with other songs that I liked better on an album (I can't recall which one) and I never paid much attention to it other than to be mildly amused. But the three guys who lived next door to me (me and Chuck and Bassoonhead [I can't seem to recall his name, but people called him Bassoonhead because he was a bassoon major--among other reasons]), that being Steve, Jeff and Dale next door to us, they thought the song was hilarious. They especially liked the line, "Because a baby is better than smart".

It wasn't until a decade or so later that I understood what Louden meant by that.

By 1993, Fru and I had our second baby. Two daughters. And we lived in a little house on Miller Street across from a park. After Second Daughter was born, I stayed home full time and took care of them. I fed them, changed diapers, played games, watched annoying shows with them, bathed them, took them places once in a while, cleaned up their drool and vomit and other emissions. I loved it but did not love it. I loved them but also went a tad insane (possibly more than a tad). If you've been there, you know what I mean. You wake sleep live breath think worry babies. You watch them all day, you watch them sleep, listen for them when you sleep, you go without a shower, without food, without adult conversation for them. But of course, you do it all willingly, you do it because they are most important, more important then even your own life.

You love them.

And that is how they are better than smart. Their instinct outweighs their lack of cognizant abilities; your own instinct and sense of responsibility in response to them far outweighs your own intellectual capabilities as well. They're better than smart in that way, too"Take care of me! I'm helpless! Feed me! Change my diaper! Wrap me up and cuddle me! Walk me! I need sleep! All of this is communicated without any words spoken.

And they love you, too.

There are endless little things that I have forgotten about those early days--years--with babies. Most I have forgotten on purpose or, perhaps, as a blessing. (I do recall, specifically, one day as I was walking with one of them in my arms, looking out the front window and seeing a pickup truck drive by--some construction workers on their way to a job site--and I had this great yearning to be out there with them, to be out of the damn house and be on a job and I felt as helpless as the little baby in my own arms). That's not to say I didn't have fun. I did. That's not to say that the experience was not a profound one, because it was. It certainly woke me up to the needs of others, to the concept of deep, unconditional love. Having to take care of babies, children, teens is a pathway for greater understanding about countless things, many of them ineffable, almost impossible to describe in a short on-the-fly essay/blog post.

Ah.

In many ways, because a baby is better than smart, it makes you better than smart in return.

Leaving Missoula: 1990

2010-01-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

I think it was by late spring in 1990 that Fru and I decided we'd leave Montana. We were poor in Missoula, I'd already quit the writing program there and was working full time as a janitor (at the university, no less), it had been a long winter and we were thinking of Portland, Oregon or Seattle as places to go. We ended up going back to Champaign.

We were living in our little "doll house" home on Rollins Street, a cottage to be exact. Fru got a job offer as controller back in Champaign, at her old bank, and her pay seemed like a lot of money to us (it wasn't, but it seemed like it at the time: as said, we were poor) and since I had a good time in Champaign back in '88, I said, "Okay." So we did the move back in two installments.

First we packed some stuff and drove back in her little brown Honda Civic. We took M.R. the cat with us then. We went to her father's house and she started her job and then I went back to the empty cottage on Rollins to do the final move.

Now, getting back wasn't too simple. I wanted to save money and have a bit of an adventure, so I got a ride from Margaret (I think, maybe I took the bus) to Sioux City. In Sioux City I hung with Matt and I contacted Bill Brown--a pal of mine from Missoula who had moved back to Minnesota--Mankato/Medelia--and he agreed to drive me back out to Missoula and help me out. Ah. But that wasn't so simple either.

If I remember right, Matt took me up into Minnesota where I met Bill. I do remember Bill Brown and I traipsing around that part of the state, southwestern MN. We spent some time in small towns like Pipestone and Blue Earth, we went to Madelia. We went into Mankato. I was there for a few days and in those days Bill lived with Barb (about twenty years his junior) and we all got along well. Oh, we went to New Ulm as well. But then Bill and I set out for Montana, driving through North Dakota and when we got to eastern Montana we stopped in the little town of Forsyth, just west of Miles City. Bill had spent a week or two or a month in Forsyth a year or two ago when his car broke down on his escape from Missoula. So, we settled in to a bar and we talked to people in the bar--the bar that had been Bill's hangout when he was stuck in Forsyth with major car trouble--and we got drunk.

It si happened that there was a duck race going on in that little western town. Now this duck race was simply a load of yellow plastic rubber duckies that they released in the river. The Yellowstone River. People bought ducks in the stores and schools and bars for the race. So, Bill and I each plunked down some money and each bought a duck and we stuck around for the race. We--drunk--went down to the riverbank where the race ended, watched the ducks float in, thought about what we'd do if we won--which was maybe a five grand pot--and watched as they selected a winner. It was not us. But the problem was, those ducks kept coming down the Yellowstone and someone had to scoop them up so that they didn't simply become yellow duckie pollution. It was a haphazard effort, this clean up, consisting of locals with small boats buzzing around in the river with scoop nets and netting the little plastic buggers. Bill and I found a guy who was buy himself with his boat. We offered to help and he said, "Okay". So, Bill and I--when I was supposed to getting back to Missoula and packing a UHaul and getting my butt back to Champaign, IL--were out on the yellowstone scooping up plastic ducks. We actually found the ducks we had bought at the bar (they had our numbers written on their bottoms in permanent marker--I think I still have that duck somewhere), so we kept them and went back to the bar in town.

The sensible thing would have been to get a room and some sleep, but no, we were cheap. So, off we drove into the twilight and got tired and stopped along the lonely Montana road and slept in the car--except Bill snores like a jet plane. I didn't get any sleep and began to drive again because I had nothing better to do. I almost fell asleep at the wheel, but did make it into Missoula by daybreak or so.

I still had our place in Missoula, so we stayed there. We met up with the usual suspects--Ken, Steve, others(John had graduated and moved to Portland OR by then)--and maybe needless to say we went around to the bars, to Charlie B's, and got drunk again. Ho. But the next day or two I got around to packing and renting a UHaul with a car tote to tote my red Custom Deluxe pickup truck behind the UHaul truck. I got'er done. I even trough in Jack, the neighborhood cat (who looked a lot like M.R.) who had been living with Fru and I for the last year or so (more on Jack some other time, perhaps). So the deal was, I'd drive the UHaul full of belongings while towing my pickup and Bill would follow in his little car. And so off we went.

It was south of Billings where Bill and I lost each other. It was at the Little Bighorn Monument park, or whathaveyou, and Bill wanted to go in but I turned around because it was crowded and I had my big truck with smaller truck in tow. This was before cell phones and we had no walkie talkies, but he said he'd catch up with me.

Okay.

To tell the truth, I was a wee tired of Bill by that time. He's a great, smart guy, but can also be a monologuist. I really doubted that he'd catch up with me. I drove deep into South Dakota before calling it a night.

I was in my cheap roadside motel room, talking to Fru on the phone, joking and both of us laughing about Bill and how I'd lost him, when there was a knock on my door.

It was Bill.

I laughed some more and, as I thought about, was glad to see him. It turned out that he'd been stopping at every exit in South Dakota, tooling around the parking lots of the numerous motels, looking for my truck. Okay. Well the, It was the me and Bill show, back on again.

The next day we drove and parted ways by Sioux Falls--Bill back to Madelia, MN, me onward to my parents house in Des Moines--and it was a semi-emotional good bye (as far as guy good byes go) because Bill and I had been through a lot and had had a good time.

I did stop in Des Moines. Spent a day with my parents, Then it was the six hours to Champaign and the life that awaited me--us, Fru and I--there.

I didn't get real emotional about leaving Missoula, but in many ways Fru and wished that we hadn't. I often had dreams about that city, often about being in that house and that little house was empty and I was alone, often about the city and in the dreams Missoula is this wild and fantastical town and I want to be there again. I often think we shouldn't have left. Often wished we had gone on to Portland or Seattle. But in the long run, Champaign served Fru and I well.

But we both talk of Missoula, of Montana. We both miss it.

Drinking Beer In A Cold Rain: Grayton Beach 1987

2010-01-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

It's raining here today--cold and damp and overcast--like a late fall day in Seattle or a March afternoon in Iowa City or mid-winter in the Florida panhandle. And thinking of a cold rain in the panhandle reminds me of one time when I lived in Seagrove Beach, not long before I moved away from Walton County for good.

I was living with dave then--who was co-owner of Bud and Alley's in Seaside--in that house among the oaks along Highway 30-A. I was working painting houses, specifically Mr. Hyatt's house, in Seaside, working for Mike (Bellville IL/St. Louis Mike) who was working for Hubert who was working for Peter, the contractor for Mr. Hyatt's house. Anyway, it was a cold day, a rainy day, that day, and so there was no going to work.

I had the downstairs bedroom which opened out to a screened porch among the trees. (It also had another door that went to the hallway that led to the stairs--upstairs--where the kitchen, living room etc were.) I liked to go out to te porch and watch the rain, smoke cigarettes, maybe write out there (though it was wet and cold). So, I was standing out there, dumbly getting the feel of bad weather, when I heard a car pull in at the house. The house had a sand/red-dirt/fallen-oak-leaf drive with a sand/red-dirt/fallen-oak-leaf little road alongside it, so I heard the car engine more than any tires or anything else. I went out to look and it was Robert.

Robert was older than me. He was a local guy--raised in south Walton since a boy (maybe born there)--and he was a carpenter. A good one. he was working for Peter but was the one who had taught Peter the trade of house-building. He was also, by my own observations and others, an alcoholic. But he was a good-natured, short, smiling, southern-boy, friendly to all. He drove this old Toyota Land Cruiser--4 wheel drive--that had no windows and usually no top to it. He had the top up that day--as it was raining and it was cold (in the high 30's probably)--and he also had a six of Red Stripe beer. He didn't get out of his truck/car but sat and drank, said it was a good day to be drinking, and we chatted. He gave me a beer. Then he was off again.

I remember first seeing Robert at the bar at Bud and Alleys. He sat at the bar with his young son, buying the boy cokes as he drank his beer. His kid was cute, funny; Robert was funny. Another time I recall saying to him that I remembered when Grayton and the other beach towns didn't have so much traffic, that there didn't used to be the new Highway 90 north of the beach and he said he remembered--as a kid--when there didn't used to be any bridges between the towns on 30-A, that you had to drive up and down around the lakes and creeks to get from say, Grayton to Seagrove or Seagrove to Panama City Beach. Yes, he was an old-timer for that area. But I also had the impression that drinking had held him back, that he'd lost work and jobs because of it, even though he was a "good" drunk.

I also recall one day at work, early in the next year, that Peter warned him not to go out and get drunk, not to be unable to work the next day (even though Robert was Peter's carpenter mentor) and that Robert just laughed and went out and spent the day drinking and did not come to work and Peter did indeed fire him.

Not good.

Not good for all of those involved.

Anyway. I drank Roberts beer and decided that he was right. That it was a good day to drink beer. And I went out and bought me my own six or more of Red Stripe (I usually bought cheap cheap beer--Goebels Beer, about $2 a six) and came back to the house, back to the screened porch. I drank. Smoked. Watched the rain. Soaked up the lonely depression of the day, that life.

It felt very good.

The House on Miller Street: Champaign 1991

2010-01-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

When we first moved back to Champaign from Montana, Fru found us a place on Union Street. We only rented back then (though Fru had owned a duplex on Ivy Court when I first met her). It was an okay place. It had heated floors--using a water system--which was nice. But when she became pregnant, she wanted a different place, so we moved into the little house on Miller Street.

And it was little: two bedrooms, one bath, small garage, tiny kitchen, a back and front yard. But it was cozy. It had been fixed up a little. And the house opened up to a large, long park across the street, a park with grass and big oak trees and catalpa trees, a playground. That was nice.

Inside the house, it was heated by a floor furnace. There was no basement, only a crawl space, and this strange furnace hung halfway down into it from the living room floor. It was rectangular--about the size of a foot locker--with a metal grate above it. It was gas. And when it came on, there'd be this rumble then whoosh--you could feel the sucking and projection of air--and then this constant run of noise as it blasted it's heat through the vents. There are cold winters in northeastcentral Illinois (yes, they actually referred to the area as northeast central Illinois), so that furnace would run and run and we'd have to talk louder or turn up the teevee or music or whatever. Oh well, we got used to it.

There was no central AC in the house. There was one window unit, then we got another: both in the bedrooms. We talked our new landlord into putting a unit into the wall of the living room, but the way the house was built the only way to accomplish this was to use the wall that was next to the garage. So, that AC unit drew air from the garage. So, I often opened the garage so it could have fresh air and someone stole my bicycle because the door was open. Yes. Okay. But at least we didn't sweat so much--northeastcentral Illinois also had hot summers. (We never had AC in Montana--didn't need it.)

I recall we had two landlords at that place. The first guy who rented it to us was kind of wacky. He was trying to build some kind of real estate empire and was buying things up, refurbishing them, trying to sell them--both small and big properties. When First Daughter was born, that landlord decided to re-shingle the roof. So, here we had a newborn (and we were brand new parents) and he's up on the roof all day for a week banging away with a hammer. Ah. But First Daughter slept fine and it never bothered her. Oh, and on the first day we moved in with all of our furniture strewn about and things in boxes and Fru pregnant and us trying to sleep in, here comes a gaggle of realtors to our door. The landlord was trying to sell the house as we rented it and he never told us he had scheduled an open house for realtors on the very next day after our move in. Crazy. The guy eventually got in over his head and had to do quick-sales of most of his property.

But the good thing about that realtor convention in our little rental house was that a realtor from that day bought it later and he was a good guy. We were good tenants and he was a good landlord. That worked. I remember once we'd called about the smell of gas in the house and a gas man came out, gave it the green light that all was okay, and I was home with First Daughter and she took a nap and so I--any new parent knows you can't get any sleep in those first days/months/years/decades--I fell asleep on the couch. I think my baby was asleep on the floor. We had a glass window on the front door and the landlord came over to check on our potential gas leak, saw us zonked out, and assumed the worst. He was quite relieved when I got up to answer the knock on the door.

The house on Miller Street turned out to be fine. We had fun--Fru and I and First and Second Daughter. There were nice spring days on the back porch, hot summer days, I planted some trees from seed (catalpa, locust; which I think are still there--decent-sized now) and had a great garden with carrots, onions, garlic, leeks, broccoli, green peppers and hot peppers, corn and tomatoes, eggplant and huge sunflowers. That garden was fun, fantastic (good old northeastcentral Illinois soil!) and we ate fresh food--oh, spinach, lettuce, kale--and the girls enjoyed picking the veggies with me.

We lived in that house from '91 to the spring of '96. We enjoyed the park across the street. We liked the proximity to other parks and downtown and the Schnucks grocery store, proximity to the Interstate to get out of town, too. There were snowy winters with the white piling up out the back french doors. There was a woodchuck--and actual woodchuck--living in our backyard for a few months. There was a squirrel--Lulu--who came to the back doors to beg for nuts. There was Kittycat Stone, a big orange Tom we adopted who would not come inside and lived around our house. He had been the backyard neighbor's cat--the old man behind us--but when the old man had fallen ill, his family came and got him but not his cat. He was a friendly cat to us but would not come inside--even during the coldest winters--but he survived. I passed the duties of taking care of him off to other neighbors when we too went away. In the spring and summer I left a section of the backyard unmowed so that wildflowers could grow (Blackeyed Susans, mostly) and rabbits moved in there.

Yes, we moved out of there and went to Florida. When we go back to Champaign--where Fru's father still lives, her sister and niece also--we drive by the place, we sometimes go to the park where my girls, now grown, swing in the swings, slide on the slide.

The Lusk: Champaign 1994

2009-12-28T04:37:00.000-08:00

One good thing about the return to Illinois in the nineties was that I discovered the Shawnee National Forest. The forest is in the southern part of the state, in and around Carbondale and Harrisburg, Illinois. And it's pretty.

The first time I went was with Chicago Mike and Chuck (who was also from Chicago). Mike was back in Chicago by then (from L.A.) and they drove down and picked me up in Champaign. I had my daughter by then and it was a nice break from child-rearing to be able to go camping for a weekend. We headed for the Garden of the Gods (not the one in Colorado Springs, CO) part of the park, where big sandstone formations and cliffs were scattered among the trees and hills. It's a surprising area for the midwest and not a lot of people outside of the area know about it. Yes, we had a nice time. But there was a lot more to the forest, so I wanted to return sometime.

And I did.

The next time I went to the Shawnee, I went alone. This started my habit of camping alone--and preferring it alone--which I still do to this day (when I can). This time I went to the Giant City area of the park. Giant City is an area where huge stones are cast about in the forest, with pathways and cliffs and trickling waters (it looks like a giant city, see?) and I had a great time hiking about. My campground wasn't among the boulders, but I was there in the early spring and there were dogwoods abloom and russian olive trees abloom and their scent and beauty permeated my camping spot. I was also alone in the spot--had the whole tent-camping area to myself to wander and sniff and see. I came back to that spot the next year, but later, and missed both the dogwood and olive blooms and also had much company--college kids getting done with finals at Southern Illinois in Carbondale--who partied into the night.

That second experience around Giant City led me to find more primitive and less-traveled accommodations the next time I went (and the last, before we moved to Florida).

I knew the forest better and chose to visit the Lusk Creek Wilderness my last time in the Shawnee. I'd drive from Champaign to Highland, Il (near St. Louis), taking Fru and our two baby girls to visit Fru's grandmother--Mormor--and then I'd hop on down to the southern part of the state to do some lonely camping. (We went to Highland often, to visit Mormor or Fru's aunt and uncle and their daughters; sometimes I'd stay there, sometimes I'd go to Belleville, Il to visit Mike and Denise [who I knew from my FL panhandle days] or sometime I'd come back to Champaign to work on my novel or, go camping.) This time in the Shawnee I camped at a small campground tucked in among the hollows where a rocky stream ran and there was a big pond with lily pads. It was not in an area of sandstone formations or big boulder rocks, so there was no one else there but me--it was rainy and cool also, which helped. And from there I hiked into the Lusk, which was a true wilderness site among the protected woods of the Shawnee (semi-protected: there was a lot of logging still going on in those Federal woods).

In the Lusk there were pines and hardwoods, there were white birch trees and cliffs and a river that ran slowly through it all. There was a place called the Indian Kitchen which was high on a bluff trail, a half-cave whose walls were blackened from long-ago Indian fires. It was all very peaceful, all very nice. I had a great lonely time, better than the other places. And like I said, this set off my solo camping career (though I did do dome solo camping back in Montana, at least once along Lake Como [yes, named for Italy's Lake Como] in the Bitterroots). (Maybe this trip was in 95, not 94'.)

I'd like to get back to the Lusk. To the Shawnee. Every midwestern state (every state, really) has some hidden landscape gems among them. Most people don't think of a forest with hills and swamps and cliffs and boulders when they think of Illinois. They think of Chicago. Maybe of corn and soybean fields. I'm not crazy about Illinois, but then again, I know and like Illinois. I know and like the Shawnee National Forest.

Muchos Gringos: Mexico 1990

2009-12-26T03:36:00.000-08:00

Just a quick memory. This was when I'd gone into Mexico by myself about a year after Fru and I were married. We were still living in Missoula, MT and she went back home to Champaign, IL while I went down to L.A. (saw and stayed with Mike--Chicago Mike) before going into Mexico by myself.

I'd been in the country for a little over a week, from Tijuana to La Paz, to Mazatlan to San Blas. Then I'd left San Blas on a bus on a weekend to head home. It was a crowded bus and I had no place to sit for the first day or so, then I had a stool to sit on in the aisle, then I'd finally gotten a seat as the bus crawled north towards the border with Arizona. I'd made a small cadre of friends on the long bus ride, particularly this old man and this young kid. The old man sat next to me and he'd worked in the States and spoke a little English, but I mainly spoke my lousy Spanish with him. The kid--maybe eighteen or less--spoke mainly Spanish and he sat in front of me on the bus. They both knew I was headed for Nogales and then into the U.S. and back to Montana.

Anyway, I was exhausted the whole ride. Had left early early in the morn in the little Pacific seaside town of San Blas and so by the time I got a seat I mainly slept. And when we got to Nogales the old man woke me up, nudging me, saying the name of the town.

"Es Nogales?" I asked in my broken Espanol.

"Si, si," they told me.

I opened my eyes and stretched my neck to look out the window. We were in the main part of town. I could tell it was a border town as there were many shops and that tourist-bustle along the sidewalks. There were a lot of U.S Americans. The boy and the man watched me look out the window.

"Hay (aye)," I said, "muchos Gringos!"

The old man cackled. The boy, turned around in the seat in front of me, looking at me, gave me the most quizzical face, as in, how could I refer to my own countrymen as gringos? This made the old man laugh even more and I just smiled at the boy. Yes, U.S. Americans had a sense of humor and irony, I guess.

It was but a funny moment, a last moment. Because it wasn't long after that that I crossed back into the U.S of A. and took a bus to Tucson and then all the way back to Missoula. That little happening was my farewell to my Mexican trip.

I've been back to Mexico since then--in the 2000's--but only along the border. In fact, it was in Nogales. I wandered the streets with a friend, very much the Gringo.

Walking My Daughter to School: Fort Lauderdale 1996

2009-12-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

You know, you have a child and you don't realize how many things there will be to do for and with that child or how it brings many thing into a new perspective . . . By the fall of 1996, Fru and I were in South Florida and had two children: First Daughter and Second Daughter, five and three years old. By then we'd moved out of the hotel and rented a house on SE 10th Ave in Victoria Park. One of the reasons we chose the Victoria Park neighborhood was because of the school there: VSY (Virginia Schuman Young--a public Montessori school). That's one of those things you don't think about much as you hold your new baby: what school will I send her to? What neighborhood will I choose so that she can go to a certain school? But, as we settled in, we were very happy with our decision.

Though we didn't end up buying a house there, Victoria Park is a cool little neighborhood very close to downtown, it has cute houses and small, palm-lined streets. It was down one of these palm-lined streets that I would walk each weekday with my two daughters to take First Daughter to school. Right on our street there were three other families that had kids about the same age and they too would walk to VSY, so we got to know them well and they are--to this day--still friends. So, it was a group of us walking 10th Avenue back and forth down to the school and back. A daily ritual that helped us feel connected and at home in a place like South Florida (none of us in the group were native Floridians--except some of the kids). This daily walk was especially fun for Second Daughter and her friends who also did not go to school yet--they'd goof around and find small things of great interest as we walked. They had no pressure--it was only a walk--and had a year to see and accept the routine, the idea of going to school. This, however, was not true for First Daughter.

First Daughter--like me when I was a child--would have much preferred to stay home. She was brave and did well in school, but was never comfortable in doing it. I knew this. I also knew what it was like, because I'd always seen school as a chore, as duty rather than choice (until about my last year of high school, maybe). So everyday as I walked her, I knew she didn't really want to go, was reluctant to leave the sanctity of home and family and our close relationship, to leave her in this imposing building full of other kids (mostly older) and then, hours and hours later, come get her and walk back to where she'd rather be. First Daughter had been to a pre-school of sorts in Champaign, IL: Busy Bees. That class met for a short period--four hours?--maybe three days a week. So, when we got to Ft. Lauderdale and she had to start real school, maybe she wasn't quite prepared for the commitment. (Second Daughter started Pre-K at VSY the next year--same hours as regular school--and she loved it for the most part.)

But this is another thing you really don't think of when you have a child: the reliving of aspects of your own childhood. Whether it be toys or old cartoons, the memories of games or experiences (like having to go off to school, like walking to school), these are things that crop up if you're close to your child and worry about your child (and who doesn't do that?). Perhaps some of it is transference, my own memories and worries, but I think it was more just good old recognition. But you feel that same low-grade pain, worry, sadness; but you also get over it and do what's right, just like your child does.

Ah, but these were long years ago, the 1990's, though it doesn't seem like it to me. My kids are still kids, even though one's in college now and the other is close behind. To them, memories like walking to school in the streets of Fort Lauderdale (and we only did this for one school year, I drove them after that) are but building blocks of larger memory, are a very distant episode. The 90's are ancient times . . . To me, they are but yesterday.

And then my daughters will have their own daughters--or sons--and then they themselves will discover all these ancillary details and concerns that come with having a child. Back and forth we go. Back and forth.

Just like walking to school.

Special Edition #6: Cars

2009-12-19T05:56:00.000-08:00

I was never a big car person. Sure, I liked cars, fantasized about owning certain vehicles, desired different fast or big or silly or exotic cars over my many years, but I also was practical about them: cars required money and maintenance. I've had enough trouble with vehicles to enjoy not having them as much as having them--which is a bit odd, since I always loved to drive long distances, loved the road and that form of travel.

My first car was an old car. It was a 1966 Ford Falcon wagon. Dark metallic green, so dark people mistook it for black. It had been our family car--bought new in 1966 by my father in Vancouver, Washington and I still recall the day he drove it home, all of us kids and my mother standing out in the street to see the new car--and the Falcon had been used and used for many years. It was in the Falcon that we went all over the west on camping trips and to visit relatives back in the midwest, it was the main car--our only car--while in Tennessee. It was our car when it was common to only have a single car per family. And it was the family car when we moved to Des Moines, Iowa. It was the car I learned to drive, pretty much--though now that I think of it, I learned to drive in that '72 Chevy Impala, a big blue-gray beast. But the Falcon, over the years, became my car. I didn't buy it outright from my parents, but they gave it to me right after high school and I used it to tool around Urbandale and Des Moines, to go to work at Younkers, etc. I took it to Lake Okoboji (in NW IA) with Bobby--where his parents had a trailer--and on the way back the brakes went out and I had to coast downhill through a busy intersection, then backwards a bit before I figured to use the handbrake. But it was a cool car, it became old enough and was still in good enough shape to be different, almost classic. Of course, it eventually got too old. It still ran, but in the late seventies or early eighties, Father got rid of it, he actually drove it to the junk yard where the guy told him most cars there can't be driven anymore. My father did this by himself and I think it was an emotional moment for him--it had been his brand new car, THE family car, and life and time had moved on beyond all of those days. (Ah, I remember now: he drove it to the junk yard, with my mom following in the Impala, then my father had to go back to look at it again because, "I think I left the lights on.")

My next car was a van. It was a Ford Econoline with fuzzy carpeting, a cooler and other strange stuff. I'd bought it from a friend of my brother's who lived up in Nevada, Iowa (a small town) and I paid too much for it and it was a crazy vehicle. It was a 1960's/70's van, not quite a hippy VW Bus van, but close. It was when I had this idea that I'd live in my van and drive around the country with a dog at my side. So, I did get the van, I did get the dog--then I gave up the dog (too much work) and went to college at the U. of Iowa (no traveling and living in the van) and that vehicle sat at my parents' house, an eyesore more or less, until a neighbor finally found someone who would buy it. Good bye. I was glad to be rid of it.

I didn't own a car for quite a while after that, though I traveled to Alaska and New Mexico and L.A. and north FL and on and on. But then I bought the old powder blue Ford Maverick from my parents after grad school at the Iowa Writers Workshop fell apart. I needed a car and it was a cheap choice. But a strange choice, because I hated that car more than any vehicle I'd known. Yet, the Maverick became a reliable beast. It served me well. It took me back down to Walton County and a beach life in Florida, then across country to L.A. and then up to Seattle. It took me up to Bellingham and out to the Olympic coast, it took me back to Des Moines and back down to Florida's panhandle once again and it took me to Illinois twice and stayed in Champaign, IL with me. That old stupid car got around some. And I eventually traded it in for a friend's--Kurt!--red pickup when I (we, Fru and I) moved out to Montana.

And so in Montana I had a red Chevy Custom Deluxe full-sized pickup. I liked that truck. It had been Kurt's work truck--concrete construction--so it was a little beat up, but I liked that. It fit in well with Missoula. And it was a good truck, didn't give me much trouble. Fru had a little brown Honda Civic, which we used for long trips and to buzz around town, but I used my truck quite a bit. And when we left Missoula, I hauled it behind the U-Haul when we moved back to Champaign. I kept it in Champaign for a couple of years, then sold it. We got by with one car for a while.

By the early 90's it wasn't me anymore, it was Fru and I and then Fru and I and our first baby. That's when the truck went goodbye, that's when we traded in the Honda for a little Suburu (a nice car but it didn't last long), then, before we moved to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Fru's grandmother--Mormor!--gave us some money and we bought a brand new Volvo 850 wagon. Nice. That's what we used to move down to Florida with. Then my parents gave me their old car, a Chevy Cavalier, as a second car.

We still have the Volvo. I sold the Cavalier to Bill (MA, MN, MT Bill) a long time ago and it caught on fire and burnt up--after good years of use by him. But the Volvo still runs, has its issues and we don't really need it (my girls refuse to drive it most of the time). We have a new Volvo XC 90 and a new little Nissan. We had a Saab (S-something) Turbo convertible for quite a few years: loved that car, fun to drive, top-down-in-Florida fun, but it had its problems and I was glad to sell it off. We had a Nissan Pathfinder as our primary family car for years, but got rid of it--Cash for Clunkers (though it wasn't quite a "clunker" yet)--and got the little Sentra for my daughter. But I've been thinking about getting a pickup truck once again.

Yet, what to do with the old bluegreen/tealish colored Volvo 850 wagon? No one seems to want it besides me (and now I want a truck). Kids don't drive old beaters like they used to--and be glad they had one--especially here in South Florida. So, do I sell it? Do I simply drive it to the junk yard and have the guy tell me most cars they get can't be driven? Will I feel sentimental about this and think of the family life that was lived through this car, this old Volvo? Will I go back for one last look because "I left the lights on"?

Of course I will.

Myopic And Self Indulgent History #6

2009-12-10T01:47:00.000-08:00

Childhood friends, that's what I was thinking of. Though I've been mainly writing about the 90's now--and with it being November, December, January 1st rolling up, I haven't been writing that much (plus I'm working on a novel)--I was thinking of the neighborhood kids who used to make up my universe.

In Sioux Falls, in the Hilltop house, there were the Bosslers across the street. There was Myron down the street--a kid my age who I used to wrestle--and there were other kids whose names I no longer know, whose faces I can't even recall. And then in the 2nd House in Sioux Falls there was the girl who lived next door--the one who always cut her toe in our sprinkler--and, again, there were other children whose names and faces elude me yet I can recall them hanging around and playing around the house. But when I was five we moved out West to Vancouver, Washington.

In Vancouver we moved into a new house on a small street--Enid Avenue (though it was not a true avenue, just a little street--not far from George C. Marshall Elementary School). Already living there at the time were the Alvicks, next door to us, with Bobby and Cathy and Mark--their ages roughly the same as us (Oldest Brother, Second Oldest Brother and me, then Sister and Youngest Brother--Bobby was my age, Cathy older, Mark younger). They became our best friends. Across the street were three brothers--the youngest as old as me--but they rarely played our games. Those boys were a little rough, a little serious when it came to games, though I used to "fight" them (fighting consisting of wrestling and shows of strength), but they were okay kids. Then to our left a new family moved in with two older boys and a younger girl. I think her name was Liz and she joined our group. The boy--whose name I can't recall--was Second Oldest Brother's age and he goofed around with us some. Really, Second Oldest Brother didn't play with the rest of us as much either--he often did his own thing, had his own set of pals. One of those pals was Mike Gust, who did not live in the neighborhood, and Mike would come over quite often. We went to his house as well. Mother was not all that fond of the boy--"THAT Mike Gust" was how she referred to him--but we did many things with him and sometimes his older brother, Lynn. Then Joey Hanes moved down the street (Joey was from Albuquerque--which sounded exotic to me) and he was in my same grade (the Alvicks went to the private, Catholic school) and class at George C. Marshall and we became best friends (though that friendship was tested when we both liked Kathy McKay in 2nd grade and she liked me in return). There were others--some boy who moved into a house behind us, it was a big house with an intercom system. There was a kid--Robert, I think--who lived around the block, a friend of Oldest Brother, whose last name was different than his mother's: she was divorced and had remarried or some such. And there were others, school friends (Dale didn't live too far away, he had white hair--White Hair!--at the age of six), but the main neighborhood gang was who we spent the most time with, them and That Mike Gust.

Then we moved to Tennessee.

At first we lived in, or just outside of, Jonesborough. There was a small boy next door who had a cat named Mr. Whiskers and who called poor behavior "ugly": "You're acting so ugly." He had a thick accent when he said it, too. There were a couple of kids next door that we played with some. This was all out in the country, really, though there were plenty of houses, along a rural road/highway. There was a kid named Judge down the road a ways--nice kid. There were some bad kids who tried to steal our bicycles. My best friend (for a while) lived a few houses down, but I can't recall his name. He and I tried to walk home from school once--maybe about ten miles, or longer, and my mother had to search for us. Then there was Rocky and his brother Stoney (I'm serious, these were their names). Rocky was in my grade, Stoney younger. They were shy kids, small, Rocky was picked on at school and I came to his defense, which was how we became friends. He was a good, sensitive kid and he lived a few houses down from us--I think they had an orchard. This wasn't a defined neighborhood like in the midwest or most cities or suburbs and people had ersatz houses and big lots of land--a few acres. We even had a an acre or so of woods on our rented property. Then we moved into a brand new house closer to Johnson City where my father worked at the V.A.. Here, in this new, small development, were new kids. Probably my best friend at first was Kent, who lived up the hill. But there was Maryellen and her sister down the hill and across the street, there was this little kid named Foy (FOY!) who would lick spit up in the street and was deathly afraid of masks. There was Kurt up the hill who was a liar and a delinquent, there was another boy up the street who could kick the heck out of a football (except once he missed, fell down and had the wind knocked out of him) and there was the mysterious girl who lived up, past our street, in a trailer on the land where there was a cave. And down the hill and across Antioch Avenue, a few people moved in to the otherwise empty development: Greg and his sisters Lisa and Joy, the boy Bobby who had a glass eye and his sister. I was always in love with either Lisa or Joy or Maryellen. There were a handful of others and, of course, friends from school. Two boys moved in next to us who I hung out with--but can't recall their names (Joey and his older brother?). But between ourselves and the neighbor kids, that made up our core group, our everyday group, wherever we lived.

Then we moved to Iowa and it was 1970 and things were different. My older brothers--and I--weren't such little kids anymore. We were still kids, but adolescence was taking its hold. So, that's different, friendships were different, family life shifted as well.

In Iowa--Des Moines/Urbandale--childhood (at least my definition of it) came to a close.

Watching the Bulls Win Another Championship: Fort Lauderdale 1996

2009-12-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

Ah, the Chicago Bulls. Fru was originally from Chicago (the South Side) and I'd lived in Illinois long enough to feel connected to the city (and had had a girlfriend, Cin, who was from there and had spent a lot of time there). So during the Michael Jordan era of the Bulls, Fru and I--not really big NBA or basketball fans in general (I'm a football guy, baseball and basketball an even distant second)--she and I always watched the Bulls in the playoffs. (I saw Jordan play twice in Chicago, at the old stadium.)

One thing I recall is that the playoffs and championship were always on NBC. And in Missoula and in Champaign, NBC was always a station that came in horribly . . . We had no cable TV--by choice--back then, so we relied on rabbit ears and signal strength. And for whatever reason, NBC was always weak. I recall I'd have to fidget with the antennae, try the TV out in different spots and still put up with snow or static while watching the games. Well. But it was fun. It connected us to each other and to Chicago. But then we moved to Fort Lauderdale, in May of 1996.

We stayed--lived--at the Riverside Hotel those first few months. Fru and I and our five and three year old daughters in one double queen bed room. And the Bulls were in the playoffs once again, this time in the finals against the Seattle Supersonics (another team I liked, along with Portland and Miami) (but I was for the Bulls). I'm sure the Riverside had cable TV, but I seem to recall that it was the same story: bad reception. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I do know that when we got into a house and we watched TV (we were not big TV watchers--hence, why pay for cable?) we found--AGAIN--that NBC was fuzzy and static-y! So, we struggled to watch--but that ended up being part of the fun--like tuning in a game that is far distant from some remote corner of the world, or finding a distant game on your radio while driving through empty landscapes on a long distance trip--it added to the excitement and pleasure and specialness of watching the Bulls win once again.

I can't place it all exactly--what years and where we watched the Bulls, but because the won so many championships and because they were Chicago, it was a yearly event for us for a long time.

No matter where we lived.

No matter the poor reception.

The Second Banana: Seattle 1987

2009-11-29T05:36:00.000-08:00

This is but a tiny memory. It's from when I was working at Brock's father's print shop in Seattle. Brock, Matt and I lived in the house next door to the print shop, on First Avenue West in Queen Anne--the house belonging to Brock's father--and so Brock's father--a good guy--was nice enough to give us some work at the shop. So, I worked there for a while and it was a noisy place. This was before the computer revolution and desktop publishing, so there were big machines clacking and clanking away all day long, there was ink and paper and box sets, dust and dirt. It was sad and interesting.

So, Brock's dad was the owner, he ran the shop and made the big decisions, but beneath him was his right-hand man--and I can't recall his name right now, but we'll call him Herman--the shop foreman. This guy, Herman, was middle-aged, balding, had a family. He had worked for Brock's father for many years and was in line to buy the shop and business when Brock's father retired (a retirement which was, in my impression, always imminent but never quite there year after year). Herman probably had a high school education. I'm not trying to say he was stupid, because he wasn't. He was a quiet guy, really, soft spoken, a nice guy, but he also had an edge about him, a side that you could tell was hidden--he had more to him than he revealed at first. Anyway, I had no problem with Herman. I recall a story Brock told me about him: Herman was driving out across the west, moving from somewhere--this was in the 1950's or 60's or something--driving across the vast western states and in Montana his car broke down; I think he had his wife with him, possibly a child; a man stops to help him with the car and, seeing how Herman handled the situation, right then and there offers him a job to work his ranch, to be the foreman for the ranch--Herman didn't take the job, but I found that a strange thing, to be offered a job because your own car broke down.

Anyway, the shop would always take a coffee break at 10am. The whole business would stop and we'd all gather together in the small front break room for free coffee, maybe a snack. It was that kind of business--friendly, family-like. What I remember was that, after the break, I went back to my machine, got it going and watched it make its canned salmon labels or Seattle Opera pamphlets or whatever it was making at the time and Herman was standing near me finishing a soda and suddenly he balls up the can and violently throws it into the small trash can near the door. I see this out of the corner of my eye, but more than that I hear the balled metal can crash into the metal trash can and it made me jump. I mean, the printer machine is clacking along, loud and in rhythm (it always made the song Cecelia by Simon and Garfunkle get stuck in my head) but the can smashing in the trash is big enough to startle me. And so I jump and look over at Herman and he looks at me and he's got this very stern and angry look on his face, anger and despair, and I just shrug and go back to attending my machine, but that's when and where and how I had a different opinion on Herman's character. I could tell that he'd been thinking of something other than just tossing away a can.

A small thing, but I saw and heard how he line-drived that can into the wastebasket.

What I found out later was--this was the start of Seattle's housing/real estate boom--Herman had put his house up for sale, on his own, I think, as a lark maybe, and it had been snatched up in one day. He had sold his house without thinking it through, had probably asked too little on the price, and now he had to find a new place to live (and prices were rising). Ah. Herman had screwed up. But to me, it was more than that. He had mistakenly sold his house, but he was also tied to a print shop that wasn't his--a small business where he was always promised something that seemingly wouldn't come--and he had to work day in and out in this noisy little place as the second banana. Like that ranch job he'd been offered, where he would have been the second banana--the ranch owner saw this in him, that he'd make a great second-in-command, the bridesmaid but never the bride--he was or had been a second banana all his life. (This is my pop-psychology analysis anyway.) So, there was a lot of anger and despair built up in Herman and it came out as he so violently--and out of the blue--threw that can into the trash.

He finally did get to buy the business--many years later--just in time for the advent of computerized and electronic printing.

Hotel Life: Fort Lauderdale 1996

2009-11-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

In 1995 I'd been accepted at Florida International University for graduate school. I'd started my MFA at Iowa back in 1986--but dropped out. I'd gone to the University of Montana in 1988--but quit after they wouldn't give me a teaching assistantship. So, now I was ready to do it and finish it. But . . . though we'd come to Ft. lauderdale and Fru had been offered a job, when we got back to Champaign her bank offered her a great financial deal to stay for one more year, so, I deferred my enrollment at FIU for one year and we finally moved to South Florida in May of 1996.

As good luck would have it, by that time Fru had been offered a better job at Sun Trust Bank in downtown Fort Lauderdale--so our move and our first lodging was paid for by that company. And they put us up at the Riverside Hotel.

Ah. Hotel life.

We'd stayed at the Riverside before, by blind choice, when we first came as a family to visit the city. And we'd loved it. It was an old hotel right on Las Olas Boulevard right in the heart of downtown. Sun Trust Bank was almost across the street from the hotel, so when they put us up there we were very pleased.

And we lived there for over a month, in a single room with two queen beds, on the third floor. I watched the girls, who were five and three years old, respectively, and prepared for grad school at FIU (where I would teach as well). But that late spring into summer, Fru would get up and get ready for work and walk across the street and I would get the girls up and, usually, take them to the pool. And the Riverside had a fantastic pool. It was big and heated, it was across the small back street and along the river so that you'd see big boats go by as you swam. The girls would bring their toys and other stuff and we'd swim and play and lounge. Yes, a tough life, I know . . . Of course we did other things, but it's the pool I remember the most.

We had a small fridge in the room and there was a Hyde Park Market next door, so I'd go there to buy drinks and snacks and deli meat and cheeses for sandwiches. We ate out now and then, had room service once in a while, but mainly it was just the four of us ensconced in the Riverside. And it was fun. Sure, it got old, it was crowded, the girls became bored. There was one other family living there at the time who we became friends with, they had two daughters about the same age as ours, so the girls swan with them, etc. That family was prepping their sailboat to get ready to live on it (a typical Ft. lauderdale thing, as we discovered over the years).

There was a small Lebanese sandwich shop on Las Olas near the hotel which we frequented. The guy who ran it and owned it was a nice guy, his wife was Swedish and he was Lebanese. Fru and I thought we'd have to buy a house out in the west of Broward County because of schools and prices and such, but I talked to this guy one day and he said, nah, there were good schools right in town, one in a neighborhood just blocks from Las Olas. Hmmm. Fru and I had looked at some homes and condos out west, the realtor taking us into the nether-reaches of Broward to new home construction sites, but we didn't like them. We wanted to live in town. So, one day I took a walk over to the neighborhood the sandwich shop owner had told me about and I was delighted: small homes, small streets, heavenly vegetation and a cool public magnet school--Montessori--named Virginia Shuman Young.

The neighborhood was Victoria Park.

So, it ended up that we rented a house in Victoria Park, that First Daughter started kindergarten there. We loved it. And though we ended up buying a house south of downtown a year later, both daughters went to VSY and it was a great school, and we still have good friends in Victoria Park . . . but our first taste of living in South Florida was the Riverside Hotel in Fort Lauderdale.

The hotel has changed quite a bit--it's grown, things have been redone and moved around. But it still looks pretty much the same from the front, it still has the Mexican tiled floors, the same garden and the same old-south subtropic vibe. And the pool is still there. We go to the hotel now and then, have even stayed there again and swam there agin.

You can still watch the boats motor by as you swim.