10/4/05

I'm not sure why I ever wanted to play an instrument. I was too young to care about impressing girls, I know that. Maybe it was societal or parental pressure... I'm fairly sure it had nothing to do with actual music, or craft, or even sound in general. Come to think of it, it was probably meddling governmental influences... probably some 70s feelgood hippie legislation that not only required part of my elementary school day to be devoted to art and music, but further devoted the cash to put a black plastic recorder in my hands, on which I diligently practiced such classics as Row, Row, Row (Your Boat), Frere Jacques, and Bohemian Rhapsody. Surely my experience was not an isolated one; we had recorder armies of girls in jumpers and boys in clip-on ties, and at every one of our school-wide concerts, my sense was that we were being bred for woodwind combat.

Slowly I suspected that beyond fourth grade there were no recorder virtuosi to be found, and I would need a more mainstream instrument. The first thought, violin, died an early death when none of the instruments at the school fit my arm length. Next was a plan to emulate my mother's high school success with the clarinet; I had her instrument, and my music teacher was Rudy Tapiro, clarinetist for the Oakland Symphony, and... I also had an overbite that was exacerbated by the mouthpiece. My dreams of someday segueing into the saxophone evaporated as quickly as my next idea, the trumpet.

Next, I was taking a class at the rec center, noodling on my sister's cast-off guitar, my fingers aching through the chord changes for Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog, torturing my parents with:

strum, strum, strum, strum.... pause......... chord change...
Jeremiah was a bullll froggggggggggg.....

strum, strum, strum, struuummmmm..... pause........ chord change...
waaaasssss a goooood friend offfff MINNNNNEEE.....

Ah, another instrument clearly bound for my personal graveyard of attempted brilliance.

I was already thinking of begging my parents for a shiny drum set, perhaps even a not-so-shiny one, when my sister, five years older and agonizingly split over her pre-pubescent devotion to Shirley Jones (and The Partridge Family) and her Hormonal Awakening in Awe of Shaun Cassidy, developed a Scheme.

My sister's Schemes usually involved me in a pivotal role, as a Patsy, a Dupe, a Shill, a Fool, a Straightman, a General Dogsbody, a Fall Guy, in short, a sucker. But in an astonishing twist that the reader, and certainly my sister, would never expect, I was happy to play the role assigned. My reasoning was sound and cunning: my sister's Schemes always failed. Always. Without exception. My sister was without a doubt the worst Schemer since Vercingetorix tried to steal Gaul from Caesar, and at a very young age, I realized that as a perceived victim of any given Scheme, I could leverage a Favor or Present out of the inevitable Failure, if only I could prove I'd been Duped Beyond Belief. This might be expressed algebraically as:

(F/P)=Sch f (MRxDb),

where f= catastrophic failure

but I doubt it.

Anyway.


My sister's latest Scheme involved her unfathomable desire to play the piano. This was reaching for the stars; we had a Fisher-Price organ at one point, which we pummeled with Chopsticks, but the idea of persuading my parents to spend a gagillion dollars on an actual, factual piano... this was her absolute looniest idea in over three weeks. It would never work, even given her shrewd decision to hit the soft target: Mom.

There were obstacles even beyond the financial. Even if she could somehow conjure a piano into the house, we would never secure lessons. My father (her stepfather) would have a low tolerance for us banging out nonsense. After all, this was the man who refused to play catch with me until I learned how to play catch. Even though I was willing (nay, eager!) to be her Doofus, I pointed these things out to my older sibling.

She pooh-poohed me, and laid out the plan, in the context of her privately-held corporation, Lisa Rules The World (Ltd.).

Just as an aside, my own role in the corporation ranged wildly between Arch-Nemesis, General Partner, and Deputy Sasquatch in Charge of Missions, depending on how badly I was needed to execute any given Scheme.

The Great Piano Scheme was laid out thusly:

1. Lisa to begin (pretending) to like Shirley Jones more than Shaun Cassidy.

This was a good move, not only because my mother was becoming uncomfortable with all the Teen Beat and Tiger Beat posters of Shaun Cassidy in Lisa's room, not only because Shirley Jones played the keyboards on The Partridge Family, but because our mother bore an uncanny resemblance to Shirley Jones.

2. Lisa to begin acting like an angel any time piano music could be heard. Rex to act esp. angelic.

What can I say? My sister was starting to rebel, whereas I was pretty much angelic as a general rule.

3. Lisa to gush madly about The Music Man.

Oscar winner for best score and nominated for Best Picture, 1963, it had just been on TV and starred Shirley Jones as... God, it was too good... the piano teacher.

4. Rex to start talking with a lateral lisp, just like the Ron Howard character in The Music Man.

Okay, I have to say, this part of the plan troubled me. Not because it involved outright lying... I could blame my sister for that later and perhaps parlay it into a couple of Lego sets... but because it involved further associating myself with Ron Howard. I was already being teased at school as Opie.

Further Editor's Note: This continued unabated through junior high, where I was instead called Richie Cunningham. Thus, even as a child, I was aware of the danger of being labeled.

Further Editor's Note 2: However, after a few baseball cards were bought and I became Lord Grand Poobah in the firm, I began talking with a lateral lisp.

5. Rex to begin whining for a drum set.

A win-win. If I got the drum set, cool. If I didn't, it advanced the Scheme, which was doomed to fail, and algebraically, could lead to a drum set.

6. Lisa to begin openly wondering as to Mom's piano-playing ability.

This to me was the element of the plan least likely to work, and on shaky moral ground. My sister was far from subtle, and lately could be a downright sassypants to our Mom. I thought an attempt to force Mom into channeling Shirley Jones was going too far.

7. Lisa to join Rex in pleas for a drum kit, punctuated by periodic displays with chopsticks during outings at Chinese restaurants.

Cool. Of course, the intent was to play the opposite and demonstrate the annoying nature of childhood percussion, but the prospect of rim shots using the wonton soup tureen was provocative and irresistible.

8. (if needed) Lisa and Rex to break out the Fisher-Price organ and actually learn a couple of tunes.

It should be here noted that I was eight, my sister thirteen. It is further noted that at the time, unbeknownst to me, there were simultaneous Schemes underway to secure cosmetics, a cowboy hat, a cruise to Alaska, and in a truly breathtaking 16-step coup attempt, a Pony Plan. Personally, I was still resting on the laurels of my successful treehouse bid the previous summer. Algebraically, this was treehouse=friends, and the sweetest equation an eight-year-old could imagine, at least until the advent of

(T+D)=F,

where D equals a new drum set.

The idea of my big sister wearing rouge and eyeliner, sitting on a pony, waving a cowboy hat, and playing Do You Believe In Magic on a piano was loony. By comparison, sitting ten feet up a tree smacking a snare drum was sanity itself. So I went along, paying special attention to step 5, Rex to Begin Whining for a Drum Set.

-----

The problem with truth, dear reader, is it isn't always clean or predictable; it doesn't always have clever dialogue or a laugh track or a team of writers to pack the episode with one-liners. And here the truth is I just don't remember exactly what happened. I can tell you the Scheme seemed feasible, at least as feasible as any of the others my sister dreamed up. Details fade after nearly thirty years.

I know that thanks to the recent invention of the (top-loading) VCR, there were so many viewings of The Music Man, and subsequently so many renditions of Trouble, with a capital T which rhymes with P and that stands for Pool! that the Scheme nearly misfired and landed us a pool table. A result, incidentally, that your Mighty Rex could have found immensely satisfactory.

I know that I was so convincing in my assigned adaptation of the lateral lisp that for two solid months I had to stay after school with five or six other kids in a special room adjacent to the principal's office and undergo annoying hearing tests with a speech therapist. I was loyal to my older sib., however, and my answer to every question was a resounding Yeth.

I know piano music still has the power to calm me, to amaze me, to intoxicate me. To this day, I credit these feelings primarily to my sister's Scheme, and all the piano we heard while pretending to be angelic.

Most of all, I know this was a turning point. Like a family road trip ending in a ravine, what started as any other lark seemingly changed our family forever. I know there was exactly one rim shot on a bowl of wonton soup, followed by the sharp twist of a young boys wrist as he was led to the bathroom.

My sister was becoming a teenager, a young woman, and her values and objectives were changing; I was being left behind, my father was the Antichrist, and my mother was quickly becoming the Obstacle. Shirley Jones on the screen was the perfect single mother, and our Mom, feeling alone in the parenting, swallowed the bait more deeply than children, even conniving, plotting children, could ever imagine. She began to question my father's hard line, began ignoring my grandmother's daily phoned-in advice, and began having a voice of her own. She had hopes of being a champion to her changing daughter while still being idolized by her baby boy. Desperate to find a way to keep everyone happy, to live up to everyone's expectations, to BE Shirley Jones, she groped in the air for something to anchor herself, and what she found was eighty-eight keys... to which she latched herself like a Mother Wolf to a fresh kill. Her cubs were hungry, and By God she was going to deliver. How she managed that kill we'll never know.

It was a console piano, a smaller version of an upright, and it sat in our living room, waiting to sing. I picked out the theme to Star Wars; I think my sister managed Edelweiss. My mother, determined to justify her anchor, made concerted stabs at Greensleeves, but we were all somewhat handicapped by the way our haphazard notes resonated through the hardwood floor and filled every corner of the house, making every practice session an unintentional concert that drove everyone bonkers.

The Old Man absolutely forbade any playing while he was home recovering from his daily breadwinning, refused to fund lessons, and even stubbornly ignored the need for tuning. I felt my I Told You So merit badge was as good as in the bank. Soon even Mom's heroic As Time Goes By, something she'd hoped would be redemptive, sounded like a serenade by a tone-deaf Quasimodo. When my sister had me convert the piano into a harpsichord by pushing thumbtacks into the hammers, my Dad went apoplectic. The keyboard cover slammed down and stayed locked for six months.

I suppose our family was never the same, and I suppose it really had nothing to do with the piano. My sister began wearing makeup. Her cruise to Alaska with my grandmother ended badly. She burned a hole in her cowboy hat with a cigarette and actually tried to convince my parents it had been a ray of sunlight, accidentally magnified by a water glass. There was, thankfully, no pony.

I spent a lot of time alone in my treehouse, surprised that my simple Friends equation was so easily disrupted by such factors as baseball, Dungeons and Dragons, and girls. Surprised at how my sister could be so mean. Surprised my parents could yell at each other. Surprised my mother could cry.


-----


After my mother died, my sister, recently married to a colossal jerk of her very own, offered to take the piano, but for whatever reason, it never happened. Twelve years later, minutes after The Old Man died, I sat down and tapped out Star Wars. The piano was in tune.

Maybe my niece knows how to play it.

 

 4/20/2005 When my Dad was terminally ill, we had a scare of about a week when he was in intensive care, with pneumonia. When he was moved to the next-highest watch level, I spent a lot of time at his side; as the local kid, it was my job to take all of the shifts no one else could. Most of the time, Dad was blissed out on morphine and not really there, but one afternoon he woke up and told me this Army story.

My Old Man was in electronic intelligence in the late 1950s... he missed Korea but got moved to Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Kennedy had to know everything, when one little piece of information could make all the difference. As my Old Man said, "that's where we earned our money," but the first part of his Army career "was pretty much bullshit." He had never told me an Army story before.

My Dad was a logistics genius but entered the Army as a private... he wanted to be left alone to read and think. He traded for sucky duties like KP and requisitions just so he wouldn't have to go play with tanks and camp out in the mud. My Dad, in other words, was kind of a goof-off lazy geek, and he hung out with a bunch of guys like that. This came as a complete shock to me. I wish I'd had this information fifteen years ago when I changed my major to Theatre Arts and he threw a fit.

His base was a splat of sand and nastiness and it was incredibly boring. So he and his Gomer Pyle buddies came up with a nefarious plan to amuse themselves, and drew straws to see who would execute the critical component of their vision. My Old Man, of course, lost.

Now back then, there was a term used to describe someone completely without merit, the biggest loser on Earth, the most ludicrous piece of walking phallic symbol you could imagine, and that term was "fuck stick". Much like we would call someone an asshat, or a dickwad, my Dad's Sergeant Slaughter buddies went around calling each other fuck stick. Oh what fun, it is to laugh, hardy har har. My Dad got the job of ordering a nametag through the base PX (supply store), with FUKSTIK on it. Actually, they ordered several.

Army bureaucracy being what it was, and with the multitude of ethnic names plodding through the service, they didn't even blink. Try ordering FUKSTIK on your license plate and see what the DMV says! Not the good ol' US Army. The PX called my Old Man at the barracks, "Private, your tags are in."

So he goes down to the PX and picks them up. The PX employs civilians, in this case, a very pretty brunette named Nancy. Fifty years later and on morphine, my Dad still remembered her name. She must have made quite an impression. "Name?" she asks. My father puts on his best poker face and affects a slight Swedish accent. "Fyook-Stike," he says, "with an 'F', not the PH." She smiles, locates the tags, reads them, and blushes. My Dad doesn't even smile. He pays for the tags and goes back to barracks.

At this point in the story, it's helpful to know that during the Cold War, the Army was always coming up with slogans and morale boosters. They actually hung signs over the urinals that read "Button Flies... Beware of Spies!". Imagine the worst cubicle farm motivational slogans you've ever seen... "TEAMWORK", "SERVICE", "COMMITMENT"... with the pictures of rowers and mountain climbers and shit, and you get the picture.

My Dad and his buds, being in electronic intelligence, I guess, had found out that the officers had a program called "Salute With A Greeting". Regulations required enlisted men and anyone junior to you to stand at attention and salute you as you passed. Of course, regulations also required the senior man to return the salute. Most of the officers on my Dad's base, typically, didn't give a shit about the lower ranks and didn't even know their names. The Army was trying to give the impression the officers had a soul. So "Salute With A Greeting"... snap your hand up and say, "Good-morning-Jones", or "Looking-sharp-Matthews". I mean, they actually had drills on this! If you weren't sure of the man's name, it was okay to sneak a quick look... at his NAMETAG.

My Old Man, the disciplinarian of my youth: "We divided up the base into quadrants and split up with our "FUKSTIK" nametags. At first we just hung out on the steps of buildings and waited for officers. We'd salute as serious as death, and they'd return it, trying to get a glimpse of our nametag, saying "Good-morning-ehh-ummm-Son!" and hustle away. "Carry-on-uhhh-Private!". It was pretty fun. But by the end of the day, we got bored and actually started following officers around and ambushing them. It all came crashing down when two of us accidentally saluted the same officer less than five minutes apart. We were confined to barracks for a week, which meant we could read and goof off more, which was okay with us."

Your forebears' tax dollars at work, my friends.

And in that hospital room, as my Dad dozed off again (days later he was surprised to find out he'd actually told me the story), I suddenly understood levels of family dynamic that had eluded me for years. But that's another blog, I suppose.

5/27/2005


I have a toothache.

Actually, technically, I have a gum-ache. I can trace this back to my periodic decisions to take back my teeth. I mean this in the way you sometimes read about frustrated citizens cleaning up their neighborhoods, routing all the crackheads, and building little benches and trash can holders and picket fences. The way you hear about citizens rising up to vote corrupt politicians out of office to replace them with more corrupt politicians. Okay, maybe not exactly like that, but you know.

When I was a kid, I had a big overbite, bad spacing in the molars, that sort of thing. I desperately wanted to play music... clarinet? No, bad for the overbite. Trumpet? No, trumpet players ended up with smashed-in teeth. My logic, that a boy with an overbite might be cured by a smashing-in trumpet, was met with a curious disdain. Piano, drums, violin, flute all died early deaths, but not owing to mandible-related causes, so we shall set them aside. Eventually I was promised a musical career if I only agreed to visit our dentist without complaint and take care of my teeth. This sacred pact is known to all kids of all times as the parental We'll See.

Examples:

"Mom, can I build a treehouse in the back yard?"
"We'll see."

"Mom, can I go with Crazy Uncle Benjamin on his next adventure to Africa?"
"We'll see."

"Dad, can I have a (dog)(guppy)(death ray gun)(go-cart)?"
"If you feed the cats, brush your teeth, help Mom with dishes, don't provoke your sister, and dig drainage ditches for me in the yard for the next six months, without complaining. Then we'll see."

When you're a kid, you don't pay attention to the impossibility of the task, you just make a mental list and swear yourself to a life in a child gulag if you can only have that go-cart. As an adult, you shoot for the moon. Not provoke my sister. Uh-huh, yeah.

So, wanting to play a wind instrument, I agreed to cooperate with the dentist. I brushed three times a day, even when the kids at school made fun of me for carrying a little travel toothbrush. It said "Plaque-Away" on the side and folded up into itself. On certain Ridicule Days, I would pretend it was a stiletto, or a secret transmitter, depending on who was doing the ridiculing. Despite my efforts, my dentist lectured me (what seemed like) weekly, made me chew those bitter tablets that turn your teeth red, maniacally laughed as he pinned my head to the chair with his drill, and filled every one of my molars with about four pounds of silver. I convinced myself that it was an investment. If I ever became a Masked Avenger with a Faithful Indian Companion, I could knock my own teeth out to make silver bullets.

I think even my parents began to suspect Dr. Pain was a crackpot, possibly due to his habit of giving out candy to well-behaved inmates instead of little toys and such. All I know is I didn't get an instrument, but I did get a nice new dentist, who promptly decided I needed even more denting and moved me up into the world of braces; into the arcane realm of an orthodontist named Dr. Vodzak. I shit you not.

Doc Vodzak, as you might expect, wore a black cape around the office and had fangs. He carried a long curved knife and would routinely carve up little boys and feed them raw to his terrible mutant goat. At least, that was the story from my sister. What I remember is having metal bands tapped onto my teeth with a hammer, wires tightened to the point where my eyes would tear up, and my definition of pain constantly being stretched, because the tighter the neck gear, the sooner my teeth would be right, and the sooner I could be in band. Vodzak wanted me to wear the neck gear eight hours? I'd wear it for thirteen. They thought I was cheating on the little bubble-in timecard but they couldn't deny my progress. I sat in the waiting room during a ortho-parent conference and I could just make out Vodzak asking if I ever complained about pain. My mother said no, why, and Vodzak told her "He should be." Goddamn I wanted that clarinet.

It's people like me that invented "invisible braces" and the kind that they just glue to the surface of the tooth. I suffered through the metalmouth, braceface, freak, geek, magnethead comments and routinely had to ransom my neckgear or my retainer, which bigger kids snatched during lunch, demanding Fritos or some embarrassing chant lest they dunk it in the toilet.

My teeth straightened out, but Vodzak wanted more; I think he believed he could see the Blessed Virgin in my canines. But I was now at an age when I actually cared when girls looked at me, and I pleaded with my mom and dad to not extend my suffering. I believe my principal argument was that in the next geologic epoch, I could see some alien archaeologist excavating on Earth, finding my withered skeleton, and telling his trusty assistant Foopok: "a primitive society, yes, but as you can see by the condition of the teeth, this one was the leader." It would be wrong to be so misleading to future scientists and Foopoks, I pleaded. It would be lying.

Actually I think what probably saved me was the insurance ran out. The Old Man was all for straight teeth, but not on his dime.

Out of Dr. Vodzak's evil lair I strolled, promising to send a card at Christmas, promising to look him up if ever I was in Transylpainya, winking at the receptionist smugly at the ripe old age of thirteen. I would never need a dentist, even a fancy one, again, surely. I had successfully taken BACK my teeth. I'm sure I left that office with the 80's version of "whazzap NOW, biatch!" on my lips.

Two things happened. One, I found out that I couldn't read music. Every instrument I have ever tried has turned to cruelty in my hands. Two, I developed a toothache while eating ice cream right after my divorce fifteen years later.

I just happened to have dental insurance for the first time in my life, so I went in. Guess what? Dentists have some crazy secret society with voodoo membership cards, they all know each other, and even though I picked one completely at random, the Agent of Dental Death that I got was some half-brother of Jack Kevorkian and peering past my mandibles as he stuck four latex-covered fingers into my mouth, said "Hmmmm, Vodzak's work?"

What is up with dentists asking you questions while they're cramming fingers in your mouth? Is that some secret society ritual or something? Like you don't get the decoder ring unless your patient says "Glub snarka rocka farg" and drools on himself?

Mr. Happy Tooth pulled four wisdom teeth, replaced three silver fillings with resin, and sacrificed small furry things on the altar of my tongue while saying "feel that? Novacaine working? No?" I'm still not sure why I let him live. But with my mouth all beat to shit I was pretty sure I could now take BACK my TEETH. I even made a T-shirt with magic markers, a little stick figure Me with fist raised high in a Tooth Power salute, and a big smile clutched in the other hand.

You would think I'd learn to stay up on my dental health, and you'd be right. I brushed more, I made regular appointmen.. okay, I brushed sometimes. What I really learned is don't go to the dentist, man, it will cost you pain and money. If they really want people to go to the dentist, they should show movies, or give blowjobs or something.

Anyway, several years later I was biting on an ice cube and broke off part of a tooth. It was one of four in my mouth that are actually baby teeth; there were never adult teeth behind them, yeah I'm a freak, spare me your whatever. I managed to go nine or ten months procrastinating, but I had insurance again, and my Dad had just died.

My Old Man used the Wisdom Not To Be Ignored superpower, which all dying people have, to get all us kids to get physicals and other medical craziness done. So it was with a ghost on my shoulder that I looked up my childhood non-crackpot friendly dentist, the one who had sent me to Vodzak. He had to go to his garage to find my records (pre-computer days), but he remembered me... seems my four baby teeth are some kind of dental legend back at the Lodge. He looked exactly the same. He laid out a lot of hooey about night guards, bridgework, caps, fillings, and flossing and said my insurance would cover it, which of course it didn't. I let him take charge of my dental health on condition that he understand my obligation, should he try to send me to Vodzak again, to KICK HIS ASS. There would be no return to Vodzakhistan for this kid.

Checkup after checkup, cleaning after cleaning, lecture after lecture. "You're a good brusher, maybe even too aggressive, but you need to floss." "Flossing will save you a lot of money and discomfort later for just two minutes a day!" "If I was stranded on a desert island," he said, "I'd want floss." Really doc? Shit, I'd want Dita Von Teese.

About two months ago, I had to break an appointment for yet another root planing or whatever it is those Filipina hygenists do with swords. That's when I realized I was tired of hearing about the Wonders of Floss, and I had the power to just not go. I wanted some goddamn cotton candy every time I heard about food getting trapped under my bridge. I wanted to stroll into the office with a big ol' Hershey bar and say "mmmmmmmmm" while I mashed it into my teeth and chased it with scotch. I don't want to rinse my mouth out after my cup of coffee. I don't want to gag myself trying to reach the back ones with floss. I am taking back my fucking teeth, for Foopok's sake, and I am an adult with a reasonable smile and a disdain for order. I don't commit crime, I'm a good driver, I don't smoke, or shoot heroin, or beat people up, or welsh on my debts, I think globally and act locally and I think karma should allow me this one little rebellion. I'll floss when the mood strikes me, thank you very goddamn much.

I have a gum-ache.

5/2/2006

"Rex, I'm buying some stock for you, Son."

I was eight. "What's stock?"

"An investment. I'm buying part of a company to share in its profits.  I thought it might be fun for you to pick which company your money is going to be invested in."

"Could I just have a bike?"

"No.  This is money for your future."

"Oh. Okay."

"Now, you can choose Alcoa, which makes aluminum like the cans we collect, or International Paper, which makes, uhh, paper.  Or, you could buy Norfolk & Western."

"What do they do?"

"They're a railway company, Son. Trains."

"Oh."

"Aren't trains fun?"

"I guess so. Thank you."

"Don't you like trains?"

"Umm..."

"Well?"

"Trains are okay.  I wish I could have a bike."


 -----


My parents had been married about a year.  I was still getting used to the notion that I no longer had "two daddies", the flawed explanation foisted upon me to cover the fact that my sister's father still had visitation rights even as my natural parents lived apart and "dated".  This new cohabitation arrangement, "wedding", promoted the concept of "One True Daddy", and thus I was as confused as a passel of Aztecs being converted by a missionary.  This was the new reality, like it or not. Conversations with my Dad were still unsettling for me, even as we looked at the annual report of Norfolk & Western Railroad Co. 

The pictures were pretty.  N&W apparently hauled a lot of coal.  Being a California kid, I wasn't exactly clear on why such stuff had to be moved, but it was pretty, like shiny black sand.  I didn't share this; somehow I gleaned that it would not be a relevant opinion.


-----


"Rex, your birthday is coming up."

Like I needed a reminder.  I was a Sailing! calendar full of careful diagonal marks.  I was still eight.

"There's some question about what you'd like for a present."

"A bike."

"No, I don't mean that.  I think you'd enjoy the challenge of a model railroad, a Hobby we could Explore Together and Build On.  You like trains, don't you?"

"I guess so."

"Your mother thinks you'd be happier with an AFX set."

AFX and its competitors, TCR Total Control Racing, were the modern 1977 equivalent of slot cars.  They were endorsed by Jackie Stewart, Racing Legend, who was always saying "Annnnd heahhrrrr, an Horrrriffick Craaash..." in his exotic Scottish accent, on television.  Our neighbors down the street, the Quilici's, had TCR, and it was the only reason anyone would play at their house.  Adam Quilici once shot a crossbow at me.  Paul once punched me in the face.  But they had TCR.

"But I know you'd rather have a train table, like Grandpa's, right?"

I had recently met my paternal grandparents and been terrified of them.  They smoked, they smelled funny, their house had green shag carpet. But in the garage they had aluminum cans (specifically, someone drank a LOT of Old Milwaukee) to supplement my income, so there was detente.  Also in the garage, taking up most of the space, was my Grandpa's N scale model railroad layout.  Grandkids weren't allowed to go into the garage without adult escort, and I wasn't allowed to touch the tiny trains in any case.  I don't even think they worked; I never saw them move.

"Sure, I guess toy trains are cool."

"Toy trains are for little boys.  This would be a model railroad. Very realistic."

"Okay."

A month or so later, on my Birthday Eve, I couldn't sleep.  Not from excitement or anything, it was the sounds coming up through the floor.  Something was going on downstairs.  Swearing, the occasional thump, the whine of a drill... sounds I knew from Cub Scouts.  Someone was building a heck of a birdhouse.


-----


In the morning, I slid on my ridiculously oversized bunny slippers and ventured downstairs.  My mother played paparazzi as I explored the house, wary of the anticipation in the air.  The Old Man was playing it cool, but my parents were apparently in on some yet-to-be-revealed joke. There was a Whirring Sound. As I stepped into the den, I could see it. 

In an almost separate room, on a hastily constructed 4'x8' surface, an HO-gauge SD40-2 diesel locomotive running around on a closed-loop track, no one at the controls, hauling neither passengers nor cargo, content to complete lap after lap on the shiny, shiny rails, humming to itself as each turn was revealed in unsurprising, featureless normality.  A small unnecessary headlamp confirmed electricity was flowing through the rails to this miniature beast, which reveled in its birth with only a single painted styrofoam tunnel to conquer. This was Adam racing content through Eden, before he got lonely; around and around and around, and my jaw dropped in awe of the magic of life.


-----



I was grateful of course, for this un-bike, this not-TCR, this anti-AFX present.  I expressed my thanks as I had been trained, and then stood by as my Dad demonstrated the controls. "See? This is reverse; only make sure you stop first. And this is the throttle."

"How fast will it go?" I'm not sure how I could have asked such an asinine question, being only eight, errr, NINE.

"The point," my Dad said, "isn't to go fast.  The point is to be realistic.  See those boxcars on the siding?"

"Yeah."

"Right now we only have a locomotive."

"The engine?"

"Right.  We want to make a train."

"But this is a train."

"No, a train is a locomotive, I mean, an engine, plus cars. We want to make a train."

"Can we just play with the engine?"

"No, that's not realistic.  You almost never see an engine by itself, right? It always has boxcars and flat cars and hoppers behind it."

"Oh."

"So we want to make a train.  The boxcars are on the siding.  How could we make a train?"

I leaned over to make a grab at the cars.

"No," he said, stopping me with an invisible hand on my waistband, or perhaps on my neck.  "We could just reach over and pick up the cars, but that wouldn't be realistic.  How do you think real trains get made?  It's not like some giant hand descends from the sky and picks them up!"

This was the fatal blow to our Father and Son Hobby, the bullet in the Explore Together of the Build On.  It wasn't the sarcasm.  It wasn't the notion that a collection of wheeled plastic driving around on a sheet of plywood could ever be deemed "realistic".  It wasn't even the fact that I'd discovered The Great Train Table Manifestation of 1977 a full ten minutes ago, and had yet to actually touch any part of it.  No, what cursed All Things in the Holy Trainity was the Old Man suggesting inadvertently that I was God. Did you miss it? I'm sure he did.  Let me give it to you again, in slo-mo:


like
          some
                       giant                     descends
                                    hand                         from
                                                                            
                                                                              the
                                                                            
                                                                                  sky. I'm sure my Dad went on to explain the complicated ballet of switchyards, and the challenge of getting the cars in a particular order; of coupling and uncoupling, and doing it all on an in-scale timetable.  I didn't hear any of it.  I was still thinking "A giant hand reaches down and picks up a boxcar and puts it back on the rails."  How cool would that be, in real life, I mean? Supercool, that's how. 

And a hand that could beneficially re-rail a boxcar could just as easily place an obstruction on the tracks, say, a pile of giant Legos.  Or crank a locomotive to maximum speed and then throw a curs'd switch as the cars rumbled o'er. As my Dad demonstrated gently bumping cars together to couple them, I had visions of terrifying collisions.  We talked of replacing that single unrealistic styrofoam tunnel (which even I thought was lame) with plaster mountains; I secretly pictured Sabertooth Mountain, Devil's Blood River, and Pancake Valley.  We both wanted to add buildings, trees, tiny scale people... but I suspect I was the only one who wanted to tie them to the tracks.

My Dad spoke of names for our "pike", like Oakland Terminal Railway... Sunset & Western...  Killplant, Dagger, and Hoboken. Okay, maybe that last one was a team effort.  I mentioned steam trains, and he tsk tsked and showed me his collection of diesel-era locomotives and cars, each pristine model in the cardboard coffin in which it had been purchased, each box stacked carefully in a bookcase.

"We have plenty of rolling stock.  No need to buy steam stuff."  I was confused by the mention of 'stock' again, but I let it go.  Why couldn't we have both, is what I wanted to know.  Steam trains, like the one at the park, were neat.

"It wouldn't be realistic.  Of course, you could have some overlap, if you had the right cars, but that's not what we have."

Oh.

"Could I try it?" I asked.

"Yes. Oh, right, yes, here... try it out."

I felt the smooth knob of the potentiometer and dialed up the throttle.  The SD40-2 leapt to life, tearing through a straightaway.  My thought that this might turn out to be cool was crushed instantly.

"EASY!" he yelled, "Start slowly! Real trains don't peel out like race cars!" But then, a real train would weigh 200 tons and would have crushed the house if we put it on the table.



-----



Eventually I got the hang of Model Railroading.  It's hard to say how long my interest stayed obsessive, probably two months at the outside, but my Dad's disappeared faster.  I think he just got busy, or maybe realized he would be happier alone in the hobby. What are railroads, after all?  A means to an end, Point A to Point B, you buy a ticket believing in a destination and trusting in your deliverance. You stay the course and watch out the windows as you surrender control and hurtle on a singular path toward your destiny, someplace like Cleveland.

There is something transcendent in cheating that full-scale predestination, in creating a miniature world to escape your own, in bending the rules and the rails to bring the train looping back to where it started.  History repeats, imagination is necessary, and perhaps we are only a scale model in someone else's den, click-clacking in circles and never finding Cleveland, or watching the big diesels go by and waving at engineers frozen at the controls.

When you're 37, or 39 as my Dad was in 1977, you see metaphors and meaning everywhere, and ponder what it all might mean.  But as a newly-crowned nine-year-old, I stood oblivious to transcendence and transfixed by the overnight efforts of my father to win my heart.



-----




And so the train table stood through the years, suffering the indignities of changes to track layout, the misguided attempts at scenery every time I tried to get interested again.  A boy with no allowance grows into a teenager with other priorities, and both are loved quietly and absently by a father with no time.  Everywhere you look in life there are missed opportunities.  Stack after stack of old magazines and games and random papers accumulate on a flat surface until its original purpose is buried. 

Locked away in a glass cabinet were the hand-made brass locomotives and Pullmans of my Dad's bachelorhood; a trophy case more honest than the cruel fate of my Grandfather's iron horses, which lived on the rails bereft of electricity, hoping to haul their pretend cargo and cut through the dust on the rail heads someday. My own railroading experience was soon locked away in cardboard as I migrated to higher learning, but I remembered the Train Table and when I returned home for a visit I asked my Old Man what happened to it. I guess maybe I hoped he'd expanded it and finally built an Empire in the garage. The house, which had never seemed big, had been lonely for ten years, and was nine months and fifteen days away from getting even lonelier.

"Oh," he said. "Yes, well, I took it out when I decided to remodel the den.  Resale value is important.  I saved the table top, don't worry.  It's in the garage."

I assured him I wasn't worried in the least.  Not about that, anyway.



 -----



"Listen," he confided through Oxycontin and Demerol several months later as he tried to take apart the answering machine.  "There's no point in denying the inevitable.  Don't tell me not to talk about it; this is important.  There are things that people are going to want.  Things that are more valuable than others.  Down in the garage is all my brass stuff.  There's a box under the workbench in the crawlspace.  Well, you're probably the only one who will really appreciate what they are, and how valuable they are.  So I think you should have them.  Or sell them, I don't know, they're probably pretty valuable."

I took the Phillips screwdriver as he completed the telephonic murder.  Every single tiny part laid out methodically on the paper towel he'd laid down.  "There," he said with a smile. "That's done.  Listen, I have to tell you; it's hard for me, but... I'm so happy we were able to share this hobby."  I looked at my father beaming, and it broke my heart to correct him.  So I didn't.



-----



My friend Don helped me heave the stained, rotted piece of plywood into the Dumpster at work.  "What is this thing?" he asked as it crashed down onto the garbage. "Oh, it's nothing," I lied.  It was a perfectly good afternoon, and I burned it telling Don about trains, and how it's perfectly acceptable for them to travel in a circle, even if it's not realistic. 

 

 

May 20, 2005 (1/16/03)

The sunset comes late here. The Irish bar doesn’t serve Harp. It’s a day later than I think it should be, though it seems like a week since I left. The first step was surviving the plane trip; or more accurately, the helter-skelter shuttle ride to the airport in San Francisco. In any case, here I am sipping a Guinness in Pog’s watching the clouds redden at 9:30, on a balmy summer night in the middle of winter wondering where my Wednesday went now that it’s Thursday.

The Old Man is by now sleeping soundly, having survived all that has been set before him, though we both know he is enjoying the procrastination of whatever cosmic forces are conspiring to take him from us at the tender age of sixty-four. He has come to realize his limits are increasing; he is becoming justifiably more selfish and less tolerant of bullshit as his days tick off. He dreads the approaching doom, not of death, but of the day when he is unable to live. We are determined to cheat as much on that test as we can.

----

When you don’t know if you’ll make it to the next summer, when each spin of the Earth marks its passing by taking one more bite out of you, it’s comforting to fight back by bending astronomical realities to your favor. In this case, the Old Man decided not to be satisfied with the short days and rainy weekends in Oakland. So he says to me, how’s your January. New Zealand. Let’s go.

And the truth is, I’m not sure I’m ready to go. My life is complicated. My job is demanding. I can’t exactly ditch for half a month and entertain an international adventure. But, exactly, I do.

Forces conspire to hold us home... among them, a blood clot in the leg, which would scare most people into abandoning plans for a cross-country hike, the centerpiece of our trip. After all, if the clot breaks loose, it will drift to his brain, and he’ll have a stroke. In the interest of full disclosure, he says. I was standing with my mother thirteen years ago when she suffered a drawn-out stroke on the ski slopes. I was the teenaged translator explaining her medical history to the ski patrol... but that’s another story. The point is, I know what they look like. Hope it’s a big one, the Old Man says. I don’t want to be drooly, so root for a big one.

His oncologist, worried about the clot, seems to know better than to advise against the trip. It’s hard to intimidate a dying man. So wear these pressure socks, stay off your feet as much as possible, but walk around a little every hour to keep things moving. Oh, and give yourself an injection in the stomach twice a day along with the pills. And you should probably pass on the bungee jump. Root for a big one, the Old Man says. I don’t want to be messy. Tell you what, I tell him over the phone. Tell you what, Pop. If you get messy, I’ll just toss you off a cliff. I mean it. I’ll be there for you and ensure your dignity. I say this only half-jokingly. He contemplates. Hit me with a big rock first; the fall might be unpleasant. And be sure I’ve in fact had a stroke first; it won’t do if I’m just messy from exertion. We laugh. We understand one another.

----

They talk funny here, of course. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but literally. I can’t help but smile when I listen to New Zealanders talk. They’re inherently friendly, and their free-form use of vowels and aphorisms—no, colloquialisms—well, maybe that’s wrong as well. Anyway, they make me smile. The shuttle driver to the lodge gave us no fewer than fifteen Righty-O’s. That’s what I’m talking about. Noi Wurries, then! Cheers!

I read my guidebook, a gift from my workmate, so I won’t be just another ignorant tourist. And even though I know now that Kiwis are sensitive about sheep jokes and being mistaken for Australians, the truth is I’m still an ignorant tourist, but it’s okay because the Kiwis are inherently friendly, happy to take my tourist dollars, and sometimes it’s okay to wallow in the tourist traps and see what they want you to see. There’s no law that says you have to explore the unknown corners of these places... that’s just something you do to relieve the guilt of being an ignorant tourist like those you condemn in your own city. Sometimes it’s okay to be ignorant. Sometimes it really can lead to bliss. For now, I’ll claw through my Guinness and wish I didn’t know how full of holes the Old Man is, sleeping back at the lodge.

----

After they found the blood clot, only two days before we left, he noticed a lump in his arm which turned out to be blood poisoning or something; in any case, he needed immediate infusions of antibiotics which kept him in the hospital for hours. Then he had to learn to self-administer them and get a supply of drugs FedExed to him in time for the trip. A doctor’s letter gets the drugs and the syringes into the carry-on, but at every metal detector and customs station we go through, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop—and it finally does, literally. The Old Man’s seasoned hiking boots need to be cleaned by the Ministry of Agriculture before we’re let into the country. Quarantine, you know. Sensitive ecology. Conspiring Forces. Not frustrating at all. We’ve got plenty of fucking time.

From 7/4/06

Fear and Justice

I had to go to the bathroom.

My parents had recently gotten married, and as part of my dad's efforts to bond with my sister and me, we'd gone to Yosemite for a three-day weekend. Looking back, I can imagine my dad extolling the wonders of nature, the robustness of roughing it in the open air, the opportunities to be had as a backpacking Brady Bunch. I can also see my mom smiling and setting up a reservation in the tent cabins, which had wood stoves and a central showers-and-toilets facility.

As I remember, my dad's other two kids from his earlier marriage did not come along on this trip. I think he was focused on impressing us, and he and Mom probably didn't want to throw too much at Lisa and me too quickly. For my part, I was focused on impressing too, which is why I went to the bathroom by myself.

It was about two hundred feet in the dark, but I had a flashlight. I knew to watch out for bears, and I felt pretty smug as I counted the identical cabins along the way. Four down, two over, slight diagonal down the hill. I wouldn't get lost, I'd do my business, I'd use my scout skills. Then I'd stride into the tent cabin and say something like "The trees are lovely at night... I've just had a stroll to the loo," and everyone would be impressed, especially my dad.

I got a little nervous along the way, and I thought I saw several bears. At least six, and four raccoons. But I made it to the Facilities, and figured out which side was the MEN side. Ha! I thought. MEN, that's me. I stepped inside across the smooth concrete floor, and though the toilet seat was cold, COLD, I SAY! there were no difficulties in that department.

Stepping out, I saw a boy by the sinks. An older boy, about twelve.

This presented a variable I had not included in my scheme. I was supposed to wash my hands, but he was by the sinks. And I was supposed to be polite, but not supposed to talk to strangers. And he was looking at me. I froze for a second.

After what seemed like an hour with one foot in the stall, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and stepped up with all of my Scoutness on display. Confident, poised, I said "Hello," and "excuse me," and looked into his face.

You read about this moment in stories, how the details of his face have long ago melted away, but you'll "never forget those eyes". This boy had the blankest, most hollow expression I had ever seen, and the eyes that fixed on me were cold, dark, and utterly calm. He turned slightly, took a spray bottle of cleaner from the windowsill, and sprayed me right in the face.

It was set to 'stream' and he kept pumping until I fell to me knees howling. I clawed at my face and pulled my shirt up to try and wipe away the burning fluid, but I had taken several direct hits in the eyes. I didn't even care if he kicked me or hit me, I just curled up fetal on the cold concrete and sobbed. I didn't hear him walk out, but when I eventually managed to stand, I could see the blurry spray bottle back on the windowsill, so I knew he wouldn't squirt me any more. I stood there crying and waiting for an adult to come in and take me back to my cabin, but no one came, and I realized that for the first time in my life I was on my own. No one would rescue me this time. Mom did not know where I was. Strangers could squirt a person in the eyes. Bears were everywhere.

I tried to find my way back, sniffling and mostly blind. I got lost because I had memorized "four down, two over" but forgot to reverse the numbers and had gone up the wrong slope from the bathrooms anyway. I wandered over the campsite for half an hour, wondering if my eyeballs were going to fall out, training my beam on every car until I found, completely unexpectedly, the Ford Fairlane station wagon that I knew meant Home.

I approached from such an odd direction that I surprised my whole family, plus two Rangers, gathered outside the door. My mother nearly fainted but had an idea to give me a piece of her mind first, until she saw my eyes and smelled the cleaner all over my shirt.

"What happened!?!" she cried.

"I went to the BAAAATHROOOOOM!!!"

I'm not sure of the details that happened after that. I just remember it was late at night, and the Rangers took care of my face, flushing it with cold water which seemed just as bad as the initial blast. Then my parents insisted on going from cabin to cabin to look for the Devil Child. One of the Rangers went with us, and one by one, campers were brought to their doors for my review. Some were cranky and had obviously just gone to bed, others were still up and thinking there was a rousing campfire song to be had. All changed their attitudes as soon as they saw my face. All brought their older sons to the front door.

When I saw him, it was the eyes again that burned straight through me. At his dad's elbow, calm and tranquil, he'd changed his shirt and combed his hair. It threw me, caused me to doubt, but really, honestly? Looking at those eyes again, I just thought he'd kill me if I told. I was scared to death. I shook my head no and just wanted to go back to our cabin. Maybe it wasn't him anyway, I figured. Everybody kept telling me I had to be absolutely sure, and well, how could I be? He'd said he didn't do it.

A few cabins later, I knew what I had to do. If I didn't say something, if I didn't stand up for Right, maybe this kid would squirt more people in the eye. Maybe he would punch the next kid, and steal his flashlight. Maybe he'd go through his whole life punching and squirting and getting away with it. I thought back to the attack, and his serene face. I tried to think of why he would do such a thing... and I think he'd just wanted to see what would happen. Well, justice would happen, Pal. Ranger Rex is gonna take you down!

I tugged on my dad and told him I thought we needed to go back. That one boy, a couple of cabins back, that was the guy. My dad sighed. He shook hands with the Ranger. The Ranger melted away. I wondered how we were going to lead the culprit away in handcuffs without the Ranger, but my dad knelt down next to me.

"Let's go back to the cabin, Son," he said softly. "It's late, and we're not going to knock on anymore doors. If you saw him earlier, you should've said something then."

My mother, in an excruciating position, looked away from her Men.

"It's awful what happened to you," he continued, "and I'm sorry we weren't there to protect you. This is why we don't want you wandering off by yourself... it's a mean world all around you. Part of life is facing those who harm you, and if you couldn't be sure when you saw him the first time, you can't be sure now, can you?"

He was wrong. Mom covered her mouth with her hand but said nothing. Things were different now, that much was obvious. I fought back tears and learned far more lessons than the one my dad was trying to teach.


.

2/13/07
I am not sure how my parents ended up owning a timeshare at Sea Ranch, maybe they just were habitual vacation renters, I don't know. I always suspected it was something my father, The Outsider, brought into the equation, just as he brought The Other Two Kids. The trips north were about being squeezed into the middle of the back seat of the 1976 Chevy Malibu, about suffocating between my older siblings, forced to straddle the hump, victim of both the back window that by design did not fully roll down and my parents' thriftiness in atmospheric controls, which is to say, no A/C.

I looked forward to exploring the wilderness, meeting some bears, writing secret codes based on Indian artifacts and generally keeping to myself. None of these things ever happened. Instead, we bonded as a family, and did things like Go To The Pool.

Now, as a sheltered seven-year-old, I did not like The Pool. Perhaps this was something my new Dad had done with The Other Two Kids, but it was damn foreign to me. I was Davy Crockett, I was Daniel Boone, I was not some damn trout. I was not Flipper. I was nervous changing in front of others in the Hippy Clubhouse, the chlorine stung my eyes unreasonably, and I didn't see the point of floating around without a lifejacket in a ridiculous square pond when the mighty Pacific was there, right there, within sight of the concrete shore. Not that I wanted to snorkel or anything, it's just... there were tidepools and rocks and stuff. You know, reality. But I went to the pool because.







Everyone seemed to be having fun, but since I didn't know how to swim, I just clung to the edge and missed the point. I couldn't open my eyes under water, it just stung so badly, so I was terrified of the bigger kids that came over to play games that invariably involved me getting dunked, and eventually murdered. Mostly I just wanted to sit on the edge and play with my treasured Hot Wheels car which I brought everywhere. My Dad had other ideas.

It began, as I imagine it often does, with an assumption that Fun Is Not Being Had. "You'll have more fun if you play with the other kids," he assumed before moving on to Presumed Defect Mode. "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to go down the slide? It's fun, watch."

The repeated demonstrations of Fun. The teasing. The siblings joining in on an easy target. The complete missing of the point that the slide was fun for Them, but I was not Them. The absurdity of my six-foot, two-hundred father tumbling down with a satisfying splash and then comparing the experience to the Brutal Death that would clearly ensue should my 60-pound skinniness attempt same. Ah, no, I think not.

And finally my mother, gently nudging me out of the nest. My father assuring me quietly that he would catch me at the bottom of the slide. The plea for trust. The promise; the sacred promise.

And so I climbed the stairs, shivering in the salty Pacific breeze and determined to conquer. I waited my turn, and thought about the future. What would my tombstone say? What noble sentiment would be chiseled above me forever? Here Sank Rex. Or perhaps, Pool Of Blood. I sucked it up and dripped my way to the edge of the slide.

My new Dad was there at the bottom, a few feet from the end. He beamed with pride, and held his arms at the ready. I think I shouted to remind him that he wasn't to let me fall into the water, and he waved brightly and said Ready. I sat on the blue fiberglass chute and the whole world grew silent. I finally decided to give the new guy a chance; after all, Mom seemed to think he was okay... what with the Marriage and all. I gripped the blue racecar he had bought for me, and pushed toward him.

As my head plunged under the water, it was the sound that shocked me the most; the muffled bubbling rush like a monster swallowing me whole, the silence of the digestive process. My eyes clamped shut and my nostrils burned with bubbly chlorine, and I kicked and wrestled and panicked and gulped and survived, though my car sank to the bottom, martyred in my place.

Strong hands pulled me to air and I was already crying, my father chuckling and ho-ho-ing and hypothesizing That Wasn't So Bad, and strangers around the pool clapping in encouragement as the other kids laughed. You didn't catch me, I bawled, and my mother kicked her chair into the grass.









Twenty-six years later, I was standing atop a 12-meter cliff in New Zealand with my father floating in a pool below. He waved his arms, trying to tell me the jump didn't look good to him. I thought to myself, it's okay, Dad, I don't expect you to catch me.

The impact compacted my spine nicely, and I still have unpredictable back spasms that occasionally drop me to my knees. It's my fault; there was no rational reason for me to make that jump.








.

11/11/07
My mother used to tell a story about when she was very young. In truth, she may have only told it once. My sister and I repeated it with such enthusiasm to anyone who would listen that possibly my mother was not the yarn-spinner I remember.

The original hearing, at least for me, was in the context of a pleading lecture from my grandmother to stand up for myself (for gawdsakes). I was five. "Your mother," she smiled, "she wouldn't put up with that sort of thing when she was a kid." And to my mom, "Tell them. Tell them about the tricycle." My mom went into the kitchen for a cup of Yuban instant coffee. My grandmother turned to us and let the blarney flow.

Seems my mom at three years old was being bullied by an older kid down the block, much as kids are and kids do, or at least were and did before kids carried guns. The little boy in question was mean to her constantly, leading me to question why my grandmother shoved her only daughter unprotected into the street every day. I guess that's what you did with toddlers in 1944 Utah. It's not like the Japs were going to get them, okay? And there weren't perverts back then.

On a particular October 3, my mother's birthday, the weather was bundle-up and for once the present was not wrapped, owing to its size, owing to its being a new red tricycle. Having gratefully played with my grandmother's assortment of beat-to-crap presents procured from the Salvation Army Thrift Store over the years, I can just imagine my mother thrilling to an Actually New, Actually Red, Actually Shiny tricycle, her little brain completely unaware of the freedom it represented, the metaphor I'm sure is there but not worth exploring. All she knew was it was beautiful and fast and hers.

And on that blustery morning, as she rode up and down the block and caught the attention of the neighborhood bully, I'm sure she reveled in the speed and the adventure, the tears forced from her eyes by the wind, her tiny hands ferociously choking the sparkly red plastic grips on her handlebars, their tassels bouncing and twisting. There was a bike bell in thumb's reach, and it had an American flag sticker in the center.

For some reason she parked it, only for a moment, perhaps to run in and say thank you thank you and again oh thank you, it's the best present, the best thing, and thank you, and when she rushed back outside, he looked up from astride her white plastic seat and laughed as his feet hit the pedals of the tricycle which was beautiful, and fast, and now his.

She let out a shriek which my grandmother would always describe as "blood-curdling", and though we didn't know what a curdling was, we knew blood was usually bad and if it got my grandmother to come running it must have been really bad. Grandma got to the screen door just in time to see his look of terror as her sweet daughter summoned the voice of Hannibal crossing the Alps and let fly with "YOU BASTICH! GIMME BACK MY TRIKE!" before flying headlong down the three steps and into the ribcage of the bastich in question. The shock and awe of the toeheaded torpedo amidships was too much and soon everyone was tangled in a mess of limbs, scrapes, tricycles and crying. Excepting my grandmother, of course, who was probably saying Oh Lordy and Sweet Jesus and trying hard not to laugh as she scrambled the rescue mission.

Quite a few lessons were learned, and probably more than a little psychological damage was done, but in the end my mother pedaled out of her innocence. She sipped at her Yuban and rolled her eyes as we giggled, but many years later when I complained about Art Class Matt she advised me very carefully.

"Go for the face, particularly his nose, and don't stop hitting until he bleeds," she said, holding my face in her hands. I had never seen her so serious, and it scared me to my stomach. Her eyes were so blue. "He's not going to stop until he gets his clock cleaned. You can do it. It's okay."

She sipped her Yuban, and thought of the wind in her face, and my fists in his. And we both felt sad, and then I walked to the bus stop.

(Thanks to everyone for the condolences on the loss of Rosco.  He was, as they say, a Good Egg.)


On the career side of things, last week I passed the Foreign Service Oral Assessment.  My fellow passers included two Pickering Fellows, a Rangel Fellow, a recent Harvard BA, and a University of Chicago MBA.  I think I was the only one to pass all three sections of the test. I am now the proud possessor of a Conditional Offer of Employment.

So now I wait while the Diplomatic Security Service does their thing and collects as many facts as they can about my past.  Simultaneously, I get a rather complete physical evaluation by the Medical Division.  Then everyone submits their findings to a Final Suitability Review Panel, which decides whether or not to issue me a Class One (worldwide availability) medical clearance and a Top Secret security clearance.  Ver exciting.

Assuming that all goes according to plan, I then go to training at the Foreign Service Institute, and from there to...? Someplace Special, I'm sure.

Most important of all, I am getting close to 100,000 blog views here on teh Spaze.  So, there's that.

Love to y'all.

.

2/6/07
The Old Man hadn't quite made it to the bathroom in time. We'd been watching TV in my old bedroom, the room in which my mother died, the room my dad had painted a cheery robin's egg blue after tearing out the bunk beds. My uncle, my sister, and I had sort of gotten used to the unconversation and had taken to watching movies in the evenings when I would come to start the night shift.

It's rude to talk about dying people in the third person when they're in the room, but once someone's communication skills have dropped as far as my dad's, it's hard to maintain decorum. Though none of us had seen the movie before, we unconsciously took turns glancing over, looking for any sign of communication as Dad drifted in and out of drowsiness. What we really wanted to do was sit around him in a circle, staring and hoping and pleading and loving. So we watched the movie.

He'd reached the point where solo bathroom trips were ill-advised, but we had such respect for his dignity, and we believed so much in his spirit, that we just helped him out of his chair when my uncle managed to ask the right question at just the right time and get a discernible nod. He did nod, right? Yes, we had consensus. Shuffle shuffle shuffle.

After ten minutes outside the bathroom door, victim of the irony of verbal inquiry through the door, my uncle did the unthinkable and opened it. I have a lot of complaints about my uncle, but here he managed to cross a threshold heroically. I cowered with my sister, determined to remain interested in the movie which we both agreed we hated but had to watch just then.

We rallied at the news that a change of pants was in order, and our little congress went into session. My sister wanted the Hefner look, while I argued for pants of some kind, determined to maintain masculinity. My uncle suggested we move the TV into the master bedroom and just let him rest, but my sister and I vetoed. We knew once the Old Man bivouacked in the bedroom, all would be lost. We settled on wrestling him into his drawstring wet-weather hiking pants, figuring they would withstand any further storms and still be reasonably comfortable.

Despite his distended sixty-inch belly, a gift of his pancreatic cancer, his pants still fit his thirty-four inch waist. In hindsight it seems ludicrous that we debated whether to get his shoes back on, but we did, my uncle finally asking the Old Man his preference; shoes, slippers, socks? I made some smartass remark about rochambeau. Dad just sat on the edge of the bed and breathed awkwardly. He should have risen slowly and slid off to the TV room, but he didn't. He sat in a slump like a mound of wet sand, his head tucked into his chest.

It was the same demeanor I had seen as a child when my parents first got married. I tended to scamper a bit in the mornings, but this new adult force in my life wore a ratty terrycloth robe and battered slippers and didn't talk. His combover in disarray, his glasses a little crooked, his ignorance of me was complete as he stumbled through a foggy routine of Rice Krispies in a wooden bachelor bowl, followed by lowfat milk to make them sing, and a mild sprinkle of sugar to make them taste like something. It was the same thing every morning, and eventually I decided to just sleep in, rather than try to talk to this four-eyed Cyclops hunched over a spoon, staring at toast. There were mornings he didn't say a word, not even to tell me what to do.

After twenty minutes I became worried that my dad's head, tilted so far forward under its own weight, was cutting off his air supply. I could see the bony top of his spine through the skin of his neck. I tried to lift his head, surprisingly heavy, but he grimaced and made painful noises. We tried to pull him into a standing position, with the same result. And then all three of us got scared; the current situation was clearly wrong, but we had no idea how to fix it, and he couldn't tell us even if he knew, through the fog.

Goddamn-it-what's-wrong-with-him, my sister mumbled, and after a second we sort of chuckled about that. My uncle started in with the twenty questions thing again, and I watched for response. The Old Man's brow wrinkled, trying to figure out a complex algorithm, a hypothesis, a quandary. Deep in that face, which I had often been afraid to look into as a child, I could see concentration, determination, a life or death struggle to do, or say, something. I cursed my lack of familiarity with the terrain.

Finally, with a Herculean effort, he did the last thing we expected. He leaned back, his head flopping roughly against the mattress, and groaned. My sister and uncle grabbed his arms to steady him, but at the last second I saw it and in my command voice told them to let him go.

The consensus-be-damned moment was enough, and my dad's hands flopped to his waist, where he managed to undo the smartly-tied bow knot cinching his waist. His body shape shifted past the rope with which we had bound him, and a truly human blend of triumph, pain, and relief escaped his lips.

He had been sitting there like a trussed ham for thirty minutes while three people who loved him deeply struggled to help him in almost complete incompetence. Despite how badly we all wanted to be in his world and understand him, our empathy had limits. So we leaned against the dresser, and sat on the floor, and drummed our fingers on our chin. My sister reminded me about the morphine dose due in two hours. My uncle started the daily load of laundry. And two days later, we called for hospice.




For Mel, for Vincent, and for me.