Sommerset

Thought I'd try to use Paper Logic as a travel blog for a bit.

After just over a month on the road, with adventures to Hawaii, Maine, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, Memphis, North Carolina, DC, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New York again, and DC again...I'm now in a Starbucks in Sommerset, PA.

After a quick look around, I opted against pitching a tent at the Woodside Campground, and instead checked in at the A-1 Budget Motel. My room is off of what looks like a greenhouse for entirely artificial plants. Kathy, the front desk worker is exceedingly friendly and helpful. It was her promise of free waffles for breakfast that really drew me in.

In giving advice about restaurants in the area, she plugged the Pizza Hut. But she also noted the Ruby Tuesdays down the road, "which, as you know, is a more upscale restaurant. They usually don't build them in towns like this--only 5000 people or so--but they did so because we are located right off the Turnpike, so they do well."

Sadly, the wi-fi did not work, despite Danny's, the Indian maintenance man's, best effort. He wanted to know why I got an Apple. "They're the most expensive computer on the market. Did your family tell you you would get no viruses? My friend who has a new Apple paid $3000 for his. For that, you could get a giant-screened PC. The Dells, the Acers, the Gateways are so very, very cheap."

I've been kicked out of Starbucks. The nice girl who was happy to describe to me all the different flavors of tea--"since I've basically had them all," she confessed--and her manager, who might be her mother, informed me that it's time to go. And so it is.

Rainsummer

I love the hour before an evening summer storm. By seven o’clock, the long sunset has begun anyway, and the cloudveil merely adds to the darkening. It gives you the feeling of being a kid, staying out later than you were allowed tonight, because something special is going to happen. The air smells like a woman cooling off from exercise. You tilt your head upward and wince because you can expect at any moment the first pebbles of water to plummet down from three thousand feet above at tremendous speed and plink you in the eye. And once you’ve seen the drop growing bigger it’s too late to avoid it.

I remember in the summertime as kids, my sisters and I would go out into the driveway, or sometimes just out on the front porch and watch the leadgray curtain approach our neighborhood. Linen shorts and t-shirts, maybe thong sandals too, but most likely bare feet. We’d skip-toe out to the grass and roll around, daring the storm to come. The bugs had all fled, even the bees that gave us so much fear. It was just the prickly soft grass and its the hard dirt scalp, and we’d press our faces into it making our noses itch and run. Dane Espegaard was across the cul-de-sac, and if he and his brother Ryan appeared, and their big cat Abraham, I’d go to meet them in the middle, carefully picking my feet up to avoid a shard of brown glass or a larger tooth of gravel. Abraham would stalk the boulevards on the perimeter never looking at us.

The rain came and it was always too short. I loved the rain because something was happening. When you’re a kid, you get impatient for that. When you’re an adult, you just want someone to share the moment with.

The rain, the rain, the rain, fat and cold and riding a cool front. Abraham trotted for cover under the eaves in the bushes at the tall gray Barnell house. Sometimes we’d play in it and get our hair and cotton t-shirts plastered to our skinny little bodies. But I also liked to abstain, upstairs on my bed in the corner, reading the Hardy Boys in the gray light in the shadows, or else downstairs folded over the back of the couch, looking out of the front windows as the world got drenched. Never much liked it after the rain was done—everything was wet and muddy, grass clippings clung to your ankles, the late summer sun came back again and nothing was special anymore. No, I liked the rain, when the world was different and you had the sense that someday you’d share this with someone.

While Jesus Waits in Hell

Flip flops slap across the freshly mopped marble floor of the new Cathedral. Outside, it is the first hot day of the year in Houston. Inside, the shade is cool—people in t-shirts enjoy the feeling of their own bare arms, swinging free, uninhibited, putting flowers around the statutes of the saints, around the Roman altar, the brass-plated tabernacle, still open and empty, but without so much of the horror. We committed murder yesterday, but that was yesterday. We’re different now. Time has passed—last night, this morning—and things are different now.

The candles are still not out; all the sticks stand empty. The rose quartz basins of holy water at the entryways are still padded dry; nothing for the people in t-shirts to bless themselves with as they slip in and out through the heavy doors, going for another load of clean linens, reserved pew placards, boxes of new candles, more flowers—lilies, petunias, forsythias, hydrangeas—nothing to bless themselves with except their own hands. The baptismal font, though, has been refilling since early this morning and its granite lips are now brimming over again. The sound of the fountain’s trickle, running out of the mouth, down the chin, down the neck, shoulders, spreading over the torso of the interior column, soothes the anxious brows of the t-shirted people as they make the preparations. Tonight, the font will be the co-Star; right now it supervises.

Across town at a supermarket, someone has just purchased the last lamb roast from the butcher. Raise the interior temperature to 160º, says the meat man. It is high strawberry season in Texas, and you can purchase a whole box of them for 99¢ (limit of four). In dairy, the sample lady is giving out brochures and little medicine cups of ultra-active yogurt culture drink—new from Japan, she says, sold in little five-pack bottles, one for each day’s lunch. At the front of the store, Janelle is slicing samples of bunny cakes patted with coconut flakes to give Peter Cottontail the impression of fur.

Further out to the west, rollerbladers enter Memorial Park from the bayou mo-pac trail. The foliage is lush and green in many places now, but the leaves still droop limply, like a stilt-legged colt not yet used to its own weight. Wick-away mesh shirts and sports bras and a Big Brother throwing routes to a Nike-ed kid over a broad-blade grassy patch where the ground warm and damp with life. A man and wife push their rubber tire stroller under the shade of an oak and pull out foil wrapped sandwiches.

Houston bakes. It is Saturday, this Saturday, this one, holy Saturday. Inside the Cathedral, flip flopped feet slap the floor on their way out of the sanctuary—whap, whap, whap, whap—to return again soon in full-toed leather.

A Microcosm

Two months ago, I moved to a new city, to Houston. I had few worldly possessions to carry with me into the sprawl of hot concrete and iron. For instance, I did not have a toaster.

Before I left, though, my grandparents had bequeathed to me their old cast-iron skillet: chipped orange enamel on the outside, and thirty years of blackened grease coating the inside. It was heavy; it was perfect. You can’t buy skillets like this; they have to be earned over decades of use, so that all of the oils and fats of meals past soak into the iron and add their bouquet to meals present.

I didn’t have a toaster, and until my first paycheck, I didn’t have a whole lot of money either. So in the start-up trips to Ikea—make that Target—make that Walmart, I had to pick and choose. A toaster missed out of the first cut. Butter was cheaper, though, and I soon discovered a secret: melt a little (or more than a little) butter on the skillet, put a slice of bread face down on it, then flip and repeat, and you’d get toast. In fact, you’d get great toast, a crispysavory crust of fried butter locking in a chewybready core, at the ready for jams or fried eggs and cheese or even just plain. The technique worked so well that I began buying higher quality bakery bread to go with it. It just seemed fitting.

Pass a few weeks, establish ruts of the daily routine, and I noticed something I’d missed before: it takes a long time to make toast on my skillet. For one thing, my skillet is really only large enough to toast one regular-sized piece of bread at a time. And another thing is that you have to watch the toast all the time, to flip it at the right moment, just before golden brown would turn to smoke and charred black. You can’t just press and button and trust springs and levers to do the work for you. I began to have toast less frequently.

Then one day in Target, I noticed some very inexpensive appliances. I’d gotten a little money by then, a couple of paychecks, so that a $7 toaster didn’t seem like all that big a deal. At least it wasn’t on the margin anymore for making my month’s rent. I brought home the cheapest one, a little aluminum box painted white.

Now I have toast more frequently again. It’s nowhere near as good delicious, but it works as a vehicle for peanut butter and jam. Now, I pop down my bread—pre-sliced—while I’m frying my eggs and the two come up done at just the same time. And that is just how things are now.

Fearfully and Wonderfully

The world's best hairdresser: Miriam, a 40-something Colombian immigrant, now a U.S. citizen, who learned how to cut hair by practicing every weekend on her family members back home--8 siblings and God knows how many cousins. We found each other by accident my 1L year of law school. After the first haircut in October, I went to no one else. Miriam was a true craftswoman. It took her 50% longer to cut my hair than other stylists, but when she finished it was perfect. It's not easy to make my hair look handsome, but she did it. Miriam cut my hair each month of that year, until one day in late May I stopped in the salon on Broadway and she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. She'd talked in the past about attending secretarial school at Gateway Community College, so I figured she'd made good on her plan.

My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.

All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.

A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.

At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."

Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.

The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.

Old Rugged

I saw his billboard--www.VaticanHidesPedophiles.com--and drank it in. He saw me, and I saw that he saw, and we locked eyes. His twinkled like Kris Kringle. He wasn't irate; he was exuberant, rather like a convert. He shuffled forward and reached over two rows of passengers to hand me his pamphlet, a cut-and-copied sheet railing against the moral imbecility of Pope Benedict and all the progress haters in the Vatican. I drank this in, just like his sign, just like his face. I absorbed it. I drank.

The only butterflies came when I gave him a cross of blessing. By then, though, he was on the other side of a window and I was on the platform. It was a moment of perfect indeterminacy: he was looking down when I began the cross; the train rolled forward; my hand slid across the horizontal space toward the third nail; his neck creaked up; by the time his eyes could have possibly followed I was turned, taking my own way. And he passed beyond me.

Godspeed.

.

On Venice Beach

The ocean is like my breath; except that it will go on longer.

If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.

The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.

But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.

Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.

As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.