Paper Route: Urbandale 1974

I never had a paper route as a kid. I had a paper route for a couple of months at the age of thirty while in Missoula, Montana--a second job, more or less, to make money for a trip to Mexico. But that's not what I'm thinking about. My friend at the time, Mark Neil, he had a paper route and I subbed for him at times.

It's early morning, still dark, the cold and wetness of October now overtaking what is left of summer. That's today. Right now. And I was up--as usual--and went outside to put the trash and recycling out and for whatever reason, the look and smell and feel of that small moment made me think of Mark and his paper route, or more specifically, of my subbing for his route.

It was a morning route. It was in a part of Urbandale I was not really familiar with at that time--from Prairie Street to Douglas Avenue, across to Oliver Smith Drive and then down to 86th Street (as best I can recall). I really hadn't quite adapted to being in Iowa--well, I hadn't really quite adapted to adolescence or high school or wha-thave-you--and any experience out of my norm heightened my senses (and I was a sensitive person) . . . Anyway, it was a morning route. It was the dead of winter. Mark walked me through the route once, maybe twice, before I took over. I was not a morning person, had never really worked before, was not used to being out on my own at that time of day. Or should I say night? because it was dark. Streets were empty. It was quiet. Snow was banked along the road, buildings, sidewalks.

There was certainly some fear on my part--fear of the unknown, fear perhaps of entering adult activities (work, responsibility, being alone, the making of money) but it was not an acknowledged fear, really and it was also the novelty of being up and in the dark with a duty to execute, it was the newness of the experience. That's what I'm thinking of and how that experience--even this morning, even a good forty years after the fact--still sticks with me. Or resurrects itself within me given the right conditions. That's all I'm really thinking of here--at least I think that's all I'm thinking of.

Yes, there were some events on that week or two I subbed for him and upon consequent ones when I did it--maybe only three times at the most. mark and I were decent friends early on in school, not so much later, and then not at all by the time high school was gratefully over with. I have no idea what happened to him other than his younger sister--who I eventually saw a few times at the University of Iowa--told me he'd gone into the military or was ROTC or some such. (I knew his mother half-way well and would see her now and then, or a few times, at the Merle hay Mall where I had a reoccurring job at Yonkers for many years.) Okay. I'm losing my thread here or making a longer one than intended . . . Events. Paper route. Dark cold mornings. Let's see: I messed up his route; delivered papers to the wrong person for a while, not delivering to the right. Mark had never made a mistake and I blew his perfect record. (Sorry, Mark!). I was once cornered by a barking dog (I had a fear of dogs at that time) and knocked on a customer's door and a man came out in his t-shirt and threatened the dog with his fist and the dog shrank away and I felt very and rightfully foolish and there were a few other things. The route started with an apartment building and I always felt strange in its eerie hallways with its too-bright lights. I don't know. I was a weird kid.

So, that's it. Another small memory of no real importance, except that it is what it was, was what it was, as best I can recall.

The Death of Your Parents

I don't really want to write about the deaths of my parents. The demise, the death (singular) of my, your, our parents. Who wants to think or write about such things, really. But, it's there.

My mother died two years ago. My father has been gone for twelve years now. I and my four siblings grew up in a tight--if not completely close--family. We were the typical nuclear family of the 50s and 60s--we had limited contact with extended family, lived away from the places my parents had grown up in, our parents did not divorce, we all had food and shelter and education and we all went on to college.

I don't want to get into the specifics of their deaths--at least not at this time, in this post, at this hour. I don't even know why I chose this topic to write about when I don't even want to. It's not that I'm upset or in denial. By no means am I traumatized by their deaths. And I know that, when parents are gone it means that, essentially, you are next in line.

That's life. That's death.

I have my own children and they too will have to cope with the deaths of my wife and I. I certainly hope that will be the case. Anyway, this is a morbid subject and again I don't know why I chose it. Or it chose me, this morning.

Maybe I'm feeling the pull of uncertainty regarding my own age--what will it be like from here on out? How much health do I have down the stretch? How long is that stretch? . . . Bah. I rarely think that way. But maybe that will change, too. I'll come back to this with specific experiences at some point in this blog, at "somewhere down the stretch" . . .

Mortality. Morality. Morbid. Moribund.

You are born to die.
Every soul becomes extinct.

Seattle In Bits And Pieces

I finally made it back to Seattle. My wife and two daughters and I flew in from Chicago a couple of years ago. 2012, I guess. Summer. June.

We stayed at the Edgewater Hotel. We stayed only about three days before renting a car and driving down to Oregon and then on to Missoula, Montana . . . Anyway, Seattle.

Although my wife and kids and I did most of the requisite things while in Seattle (Space Needle, Pike Place Market, seafood--including geoduck--and riding the monorail) I also got up earlier than them each morning and walked about 'the old haunts', as they were, by my lonesome.

The 'Old Haunts As They Were' consisted of Lower Queen Anne, basically. I mean, I'd visited and stayed in Seattle as a young boy, with my family, when we lived in Vancouver, but that was then and my memory was better in my late twenties when I lived briefly in Lower Queen Anne with Brock and Matt on First Avenue West. So they were not the haunts of boyhood (if boyhood can have haunts) but rather the haunts of young adulthood . . . Of course my wife and I were married in Seattle--Gethsemane Lutheran Church downtown, March 1989--and spent our first honeymoon nights at Inn At The Market. We also visited often enough when we lived in Montana--so there are those haunts as well and we visited them together, in June 2012. We showed and told our kids . . .

So, I would get coffee at a shop near Seward park where I used to run. I ran because I'd just left Theresa (back in Florida) and had dropped out of the Iowa Writers Workshop (back in Iowa) and had driven by myself from the panhandle of Florida to L.A. to Seattle and I was very much adrift. This was 1987, if I remember correctly. But, back to 2012: coffee, a look at Puget Sound, then I'd trudge uphill in the cool/hot humidity to see what I used to see.

The Seattle Center--still there of course and one of the few places I can indeed connect to my boyhood. Queen Anne Boulevard, before the big hill, but most of the places I hung out were gone: The Ginza, Sorry Charlie's, The Sea Otter. I think Dukes was still there (I'd worked there for a while, not hung out) and the Irish Pub close to Dukes which I can't recall the name of . . . . But, the best of those places, was still there. The Mecca.

The Mecca was good for corned beef hash, for bloody mary's, beer, simple quiet eating and drinking. I think you could still smoke inside back then and Brock, Matt and I would go there often and sit in the booths and roll our own Drum cigs and eat, drink, talk, tell each other lies, believe in our own fantasies because to do otherwise would be too depressing. I did go to the Mecca and had corned beef hash )I couldn't finish my plate) and had a bloody mary (finished that) and read The Stranger. But I was alone. My wife and kids were back in bed at The Edgewater.

I visited the old apartment on First Avenue West, only it was completely gone and in its place was a spanking new bank of condos. It used to be an old house next door to ADSCO Print which was owned by Brock's father. Brock's father--a really nice guy, as is Brock--also owned the old house with the upstairs apartment. The bottom of the house was used for storage for the business except for the kitchen. The upstairs had no kitchen so we'd have to cook downstairs, take our food out the front door, go to the door that led upstairs, take our food up the steep narrow stairs and eat it there in the living room. What fun. I remember being up there where there was a large picture window (more or less) that looked out towards the Seattle Center (and the Space Needle) which was only a few blocks away. I remember seeing once a family park their car in the street--a man, woman, two small kids--who were headed for the Seattle Center with its museums and amusement rides, its gardens and Space Needle and such. They had no idea I was upstairs watching them and when the woman got out, she had to pause for a moment and then she vomited in the street. She did this ver calmly and nonchalantly and it took awhile for me to understand that she was pregnant (Again!) and that this was just normal for her. I still recall this, though it's not a big thing. Yet maybe it's because it finally gave me a inkling as to what women go through and men never do.

I walked to the old Safeway store that didn't look old anymore--where we used to buy cases of cheap Heidelberg beer (Rainier beer when we were feeling rich) and boxes of cheap fatty bacon bits-and-pieces that we'd cook up and toss into giant pots of grits. Mmmm. Dinner, not breakfast. Out the front door and in the side door and up the stairs . . . Anyway, there was really only one house left on the block and, lo and behold, it was Jerry Smith's grandma's old house. the house was empty and had a condemned sign on it. No doubt--two years later now--it has been torn down and there is a very nice condo (condos--os--I should say) there.

I went to the Metro market and wandered street. Did not go up the hill to see if the S&M Market was still there. Did not go other places. The revolving pink elephant car Wash sign was still there on Denny Way.

I could live in Seattle. A lot of people could live there and do live there. It's an expensive place, like most cities these days. I could and would live there but I doubt that I ever will.

Pay Phone Call

I guess there is now a generation of people who hardly know what a pay phone is, let alone what a phone booth is. But I remember a time where I lived with no phone at all.

I'm not sure we had a phone in Seattle. I didn't have a phone in New York, but there was a phone in the sublet. There must have been a phone in Santa Fe. I know we had a phone in L.A. and certainly my wife and I had a phone in Montana.

But I'm thinking of the Florida panhandle--Grayton Beach, Seaside, Seagrove Beach--of south Walton County. I'm not sure, when Brock, Matt and I lived in that stilt house in "New Grayton", that we had a phone, but perhaps we did. I do know that when I returned to that area I did not.

What I'm specifically thinking of is when I came back maybe the third time to south Walton County and I lived with Brad for a spell, a place east of Seagrove but west of Panama City, and found a job painting houses close to Destin--some place called Topsail, if I remember right. This was all after the fiasco with Teresa, with the Iowa Writers Workshop and being in Seattle. If I remember right . . .

What I do remember right is stopping now and then at a lonely pay phone near the beach to call my parents.To reassure them that I was okay, working, that I was still alive. It was a pay phone near a quiet road under ragged live oak trees. It was not a phone booth. I'm not sure why it was located there, as it was not connected to a store or gas station or such. I'd usually call at night, once a week or two weeks--maybe on my way home from work or coming back from the little store in Seagrove Beach--and the phone had a single light above it and the road would be carless, the landscape desolate in its way. Quiet. Dark. Wind blowing in off the Gulf. The smell of the Gulf and trees and decaying plants and, well, just the sounds and smells peculiar to that region, to the proximity of that heat and saltwater and plant material, the southern sandy loaminess . . . And here I was, not exactly immune to loneliness, making  a brief call to Des Moines, talking to my mother, my father, standing in the cone of light cast over the phone, feeling the aloneness, the alienness of where I was compared to where I had come from, that sense of both failure and survival, of renewal and end-of-youth ennui. I guess. Or, it was just a sad little phone call to my folks at night from a pay phone near the beach.

Old Mornings, With Eggs

I'm thinking mainly of Vancouver, Washington here, but it would also be a little of Sioux Falls, SD and Johnson City/Jonesborough TN and, I suppose, Urbandale/Des Moines IA. I'm thinking mainly of my mother, in the morning, cooking eggs. I'm thinking early, me lying in my bed, trying to stay asleep while the dread builds within me knowing I have to get up and go off to school. (I hated school for most of my life--unfortunate but true.)

We were a family of seven--five kids--in a not very large house. I could hear my mother rise most of the time, hear my father, smell coffee, then smell the eggs. Sometimes bacon or sausage--but almost always eggs. My mother in the little kitchen frying on the little stove those little eggs over-easy for my father, eggs with butter, salt, pepper, turned and cooked at a high temp so that the edges burned brown to black. And if she cooked we kids eggs later it would be in that same pan and the eggs would get progressively darker, crisper on the edges depending in what order your serving fell. And peppery.

My mother was not the best of cooks. I miss my mother's cooking.

My father had a loud voice. My mother and father had a sometimes contentious relationship. Not a volatile one by any means, but there were arguments, a daily yelling of instructions if not true insults. So I would hear that each morning. And I could hear my father drink his coffee as he sat at the table with my mother at the stove frying his eggs. Slurrrp. Ahhh. Slurrp. Ahh. Slurrp. Ahh. Like that. Repetitious and constant and familiar as anything in the morning.

That was mainly weekday mornings. Maybe weekends were not that much different, though we'd be more likely to eat all together at times on weekends. Or, we kids would eat our bowls of sugar-cereal and line up in front of the TV to watch cartoons. Cartoons cartoons cartoons: Saturday mornings. More sugar than eggs.

Then there were the days when we were going on vacation. Vacation meant a long car trip somewhere. My father was a firm believer in an early start and that meant getting up well before dawn, having my mother cook eggs for everyone before dressing and packing and getting in the car--all seven of us--and rambling off in the just-before-dawn light to whatever destination we were destined for: The Black Hills or Red Oak, IA; Yellowstone or Crater Lake; Myrtle Beach or the Smokey Mountains; Arlington, SD or Leech Lake, MN. But being up so early with the clear purpose of hitting the road was kind of exciting. Eating eggs at four or five in the morning was also special--a full stomach for a full day's drive. My father would also buy a loaf of ham sandwiches to eat along the way--a time-saving and economical lunch, I suppose. Thin ham on thin white bread with butter. That was it.

Those mornings. These mornings. You can't stop morning's arrival. What's past is gone, what's coming will be gone as well. And it's best not to think about it for too long. Eat some eggs. Slurp your coffee. Get out of the house and soon it will be afternoon.

The Pacific Once Again: 2011

I had lived in Florida for close to seventeen years and could drive five or ten minutes to the Atlantic. But the Pacific was the ocean of my childhood and I had not seen the Pacific Ocean for twenty-one years or so.

In 2011, Fru and I went out to Oregon, to Bend, which is inland over the Cascades. We were there--Fru was there--for a job possibility. I convinced her, before we left, flying out of Portland, to drive to the coast for one night.

And so we did.

I chose Lincoln City and picked out a place called the Coho Lodge. I didn't know either place. As a kid, we used to drive down from Vancouver, WA to Tillamook and other spots in Oregon, and had been along most of its coast and a lot of California's coast and, of course, Washington's, but that was so long ago and, as I said, i was just a kid.

So we went over the Cascades, through Corvallis, through the costal range and into Newport. And there was the ocean, the Pacific. And I drove us upwards--north--through Depot Bay and into Lincoln City.

Lincoln City was a crowded town, a bit haphazard, but I didn't care. Our room at the Lodge, which was small, in elegant yet pleasant enough, looked out upon the ocean I'd come to see.

We went down to the water. We went out to eat at a place along the water. The next morning I wanted to go back down to the beach and the water.

"You're like a little kid," Fru said about my impatience as I waited for her to come with me that morning, waited to get down the bluff to the beach with its dark cold sand and wave-carved rocks.

Yes. I guess I was.

I don't know. It was just nice to see it. Smell it. Touch it. It's just a name--The Pacific Ocean--but it was a name, a huge body of water, that meant something to me nonetheless.

It was, you know, just good to see it again after all that time away.

Michigan 1988

In the summer of 88 I was working concrete construction in Champaign, Illinois. I worked with a number of good guys, but my best friend from that job was Kurt Strube.

At some point in the summer, I mentioned that I'd like to go to Michigan because I'd never been to Michigan. So, Kurt and I decided to go.

We only had the weekend, so there wasn't much time to get very far into the state. I'd wanted to go to Traverse City, to Mackinac Island, to the U.P. and places of the far north. But, looking at a map, I settled for a state park north of Muskegon.

Yes, we planned to camp.

But first off, Strube wanted to go to Holland, MI because he had an old friend--who used to work concrete construction in Champaign--who had moved there. So, we went to Holland.

No cell phones in those days, but Kurt had his number and he used a pay phone at some strip mall to call this guy and this guy said he'd come meet us at said strip mall. We waited and the guy walked right past us until Kurt made a quacking sound which was some kind of inside joke between them. Anyway, the guy was okay, kind of wacky like Kurt himself. I'm not sure what we did: drove around to see the town, known for its tulips (I think), drank a few brews at a bar and played pool.

Evening came and we told him we wanted to camp. The guy said he knew a place. we followed him there.

The place was some bottomland beneath a bridge along a river. It had weeds and trees and lost of junk.

Now, I don't mind camping, don't even mind sleeping in a car or truck, but I don't usually sleep beneath bridges in strange towns or even in familiar towns. But, this place was just fine with Kurt.

Okay.

It was summer. It was hot. There were tons of mosquitos. Who knew what kind of people came to a place like that beneath the bridge--evidence said people who drank beer and whiskey and dumped bulk trash and had furtive sex. But, again, this was fine with Kurt.

I elected to sleep in the vehicle--I think we took his truck, but maybe it was my ugly Ford maverick. Strube wandered around the detritus and picked out an old soggy stained mattress that someone had dumped in the weeds.

Okay.

So, he slept out there with the mosquitos and who knows what. I slept in the car with the mosquitos and, at least to some degree, I knew what.

Nothing happened beyond that, so the next day we drove up to Muskegon and past and to the campground of Silver Lake State Park, which was more to my liking and which was fine with Kurt.

We camped. Went swimming in the lake. Climbed dunes to see the bigger lake--lake Michigan. Later that evening we drove out to some bar.

The bar was next to a concert venue. The band Aerosmith was playing at that concert venue. There were crowds. In the bar some motorcycle guys wanted to play pool. We played pool. The biggest of them said to me: If I was going to fight you, I'd have to knock you out really quick because I'm in too bad shape to fight for very long.

I didn't feel too threatened by that statement, but it did give me pause to think . . . Anyway, they were okay and we went out with them to stand along the fence as the Aerosmith concert wound down.

There were security people around this chain link fence. The motorcycle guy--who mentioned his need to knock me out quickly--asked the security guy how he could stop him if we rushed the fence to get in to the concert. I personally had no plans to rush the fence, but it was nice of the motorcycle guy to include me.

Well, we didn't rush the fence.
I didn't get knocked out.
I didn't sleep on an abandoned mattress under a bridge.
I did finally go to Michigan.