For Adulthood

I recently found out, on the very same day, that one of my friends was engaged to be married and was expecting his first child, and that another had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer.  I felt terrible. Such a tragic waste of life.  So much needless suffering.  As to the other friend, I’m hopeful that against long odds, chemo can reverse the cancer’s progress.

                                    --Excerpt from “Against Adulthood,” Washington City Paper, January 6, 2012

                 

It’s less fun than you imagine childhood was, but more fun than childhood actually was.  Magic dries up, but you’ll observe that real things have a certain sheen to them, like the scrambled light coming off the surface of one particular pearl, or like the whoosh sound of air ripping across a pond, right as a skein of geese coasts down to land.  And seeing that shimmer is astounding.

There is sadness, which if handled artfully, can leave a satisfying aftertaste of wisdom.

Most importantly, there is choosing, a land of opportunity, each day giving the chance to measure the angle, to weigh the force of the stroke, and then to strike the nail and fasten a moment of yourself to the board of history.

One thing more: If you choose this life, the life of adulthood, one day—many days—you’ll be caught, suddenly, by the spectacle of yourself playacting, doing adult things, making such important decisions under the influence of the role.  Then (and only then) can you be born again, a wiser child.

My morning hot chocolate

To top off my morning hot chocolate

Here at the office

I open a carton of milk,

One of the small ones--

Tear away the glue

And peel back two

Cardboard flaps along

Ready-made creases.

I pull back the triangles, and there,

Greeting me,

The Milk Carton Smiley Face.

Two eyes to show

Where to press your fingers,

A dotted smile,

Arrowed at the corners

Showing where

To push the triangles back,

To squeeze the smile

Into a fish face, and then

Release back:

A perfect diamond milkspout

Is created;  

Just like new, like every

Milk carton ever.

I remember how Will Schmeeckle

And Anthony Flores

And me in the second grade lunchroom,

Would fold the cartons

Around little red straws

So the carton became

A tank.  And we’d impale

Helpless tater tots,

Dipping their chunky corpses

In ketchup blood.

Back then we never said anything

(Though we saw it every day)

About the Milk Carton Smiley Face.

But twenty years later,

Now, in a place I never

Imagined I’d be

That face appears again

And looks at me.

Prayer for a Parking Lot

The world is full of non-places.

The parking lot outside the window of Room 212 at the Sleep Inn in Omaha, Nebraska is one of them. On an autumn night, wind makes the plexiglass window hum, and so I peel back the shade of the tomb of a room and look.

It’s a parking lot, entirely empty. The few guests here tonight have parked out front. Beyond the blacktop and curb is a bank of trees, a field, an office park, and, at last, a regional airport whose last flight already left.

The parking lot is a space created by man and left alone by man. Out there in the dark, windy, unknown and unnoticed spot, no two human bodies have ever met in passing, never touched, never spoken. Never admired, never even thought of. Maybe, once, a confused deer or a rabbit might have emerged from the little group of trees, suddenly tense at the exposure, wide-eyed at the flatness. But that would be all. This place has no retrievable past and no hope of anything happening here in the future. The last moment in history for this place was the day it was paved.

Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come, come to the place outside this window, and night shall be no more. For where can I flee from Thy presence? If I run into the windy, abandoned parking lot behind Room 212, Thou art there before me, and after I leave, Thou remainest behind, dwelling in a place Thou lovest and that Thou rememberest in the midst of all the changing universe.

The Bicyclist

Pudgy, you’d call him, or squat, a smallish boulder of a man, but in any case well-balanced. With two bearskin hands bearing down on the handlebars, he whizzes through dew-laden traffic in the early morning suburban outpost of a metropolis. Beneath his bulk, the bicycle looks like it could snap, like the just-too-thin tree branch giving way beneath Pooh on his way out to the honey hive. But up he stays, and then some, cutting off cars, torpedoing down the hash marks while they, the inflexible hulks whose mirrors reach out to clip his elbows, wait at intersection lights.

He’s older than you’d expect, and he wears no underwear, a fact abundantly revealed as he glides past the corner crosswalk, hunched over for speed, pulling the fringe of his pleather Redskins jacket up, and the beltless hem of his light blue Levis down, revealing a wide fleshy band of gargantuan pinkness. We on the corner pretend not to notice the magnificent jest of his enormous presence.

Sea-Tac Burger King Girl

“Can I help the next person!” It’s not spoken as a question. Nargiza (so says the gold bar name badge pinned to her black polo) calls me to the newly opened register. She, the manager, is hopping on to open the relief valve on a line building up behind me.

“I’ll take a number one,” I say, “with no mustard or mayonnaise.”

The number one comes with no mustard—only mayonnaise and ketchup. Did I want just the ketchup then? Yes. With cheese on that? Yes, with cheese.

“Nargiza. Is that how you say it?”

It is.

“What a beautiful name.”

“Order number five,” says Nargiza and hands me my receipt. For a moment, half a moment, she smiled. “Next in line please!”

I step back into the school of circling passengers, waiting with one hand resting on the raised handles of our roll-away suitcases and the other cradling our smart phones. Reflexively, I reach toward my pocket, to sate the ever-present hunger for a morsel, just a morsel, of email. That’s when I see her.

Over the counter, beyond Nargiza’s round, sloping shoulder, through the cut-away window linking the broiler room to the registers, I see her. She’s sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen with a young face, her features delicate, long, dark hair pulled off of her neck by the strap of an oversized visor that matches the polo shirts. She’s wearing crystal studs in her ears and, visible when she smiles to herself, braces on her teeth. Both her lips and earlobes are like her visor, a little too big for her head, a little bird-like and cartoonish as a result, and all the more lovely for it.

She’s absorbed in her work, which I watch, a theme with variations. First she looks up at a screen of some kind, invisible to me, hanging slightly above her (she is quite short). Her eyes move to precisely that point on the hidden surface where they will glean the information they need. Then her chin and attention tilt down to the stainless steel counter, she reaches to her right, presses her fingers onto the corner of a square of wrapping paper upon which an open-faced burger lays prostrate for its adornment, and slides paper and burger in front of the hard plastic tubs nestled in front of her. Her hands, wrapped in oversized plastic gloves, move quickly to the pale tomato slices, the ridged pickle chips floating in saline juice, a pinchful of diced onions and a handful of shredded lettuce—then out come the flat-edged blades to slab ketchup, mustard (not mine), and mayonnaise (definitely not mine) on the naked half of the bun, which she then flips on top of the veggie-and-patty pile—immediately, her hands move outward to the corners of the waxy paper, which she folds into triangles and brings in to the center above the burger, tucking in the edges with her spare fingers all the while. She turns the package, lifts it; her right hand produces a black artist’s pencil and marks something on the paper. Finis. At last she turns outward, through the window, toward me, drops the burger down the sloped aluminum chute, where it rests for a moment, before Nargiza picks it up, puts it in a brown paper bag already steaming with fries, folds down the top of the bag and says:

“Order number two!”

It’s horrible, of course, what lies behind that burger. You think of the cows. There are many, many sharp machines between a calf in her momma’s belly and the burger in that bag. You think of the kids in college who became vegetarians over that.

I think they became vegetarians because they hungered for the real, for Reality, more than a comfortable hamburger. Wake up! This is really happening, and you’re a part of it! That’s what their choices said. It’s pretty unimpeachable, that witness to, not just violence, but hidden violence. Shine the light on reality. How does a burger really get to you in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?

And yet, and yet, and yet…Reality is like a germ, or a bamboo plant, that you can’t snuff out, can’t quite root out of the system, no matter where along the production line you find yourself, because part of how a burger gets to you in the lonely, invigorating amoeba of strangers in the airport food court is through that girl.

Three bags later, Nargiza calls my number. She almost smiles at me again, and then I’m gone, she’s gone, the girl in the window is gone, just like all beautiful things eventually.

Cutting My Lawn In A Hurricane

You waited two weeks, say the neighbors to themselves, two whole weeks to let this veritable prairie grow in your yard, and now you pick now? Now? Now that it’s about to hurricane, you decide to cut the grass?

It’s true. Dark all morning, the first spit of the storm is just now carrying in on the wind. It is time for action.

Progress is a steady, unflinching process in the front yard, one damp row after another. Wet grass clumps to the blade and mattes the head of the mower, but I plow straight through. Behind me, the finished patches look like a wide-eyed young marine after his turn with the razor.

My back yard, though, is deep, dark even on a sunny day with all the tree cover, and the lawn is a woodsy salad of blue grass, clover, and broad-leafed vines hung over the wooden fence and carpeting the ground with generous leftover portions. By the time I reach it, the rain is picking up; the drops are fatter and colder. Looking up against a framed patch of polished silver sky, the drops look like shards of ice, tossed around in the wind.

Back on the green, green ground, the blade catches on a particularly wet and tangly patch. The engine coughs, loses its breath for a moment, then kicks back in. The wind whooshes. The blade catches a second time and its heart stops beating, just for a moment, before the engine-spirit takes pity, turns away from the light and decides to remain with me for a little while longer down here in the storm. A third time and it just dies.

There’s still a triangle left though, the thickest part of the whole yard, and although that vegetative cholesterol killed the engine once, I’m determined to see it devoured before the fierce part of the storm arrives. I scamper to get the gas can, pour unsteady elixir into the open, empty mouth of the engine while trying to shield the water from getting in as well, screw the cap back on with wet, grassy, gassy fingers, and pull the chord. Life!

Life, life, life. I finish the job, remembering this storm is called Irene, which is Greek for peace.

Feathers

From the train window, the wet blacktop behind the warehouses of these Connecticut towns slithers by. Banks of dark green foliage on the other hand—dark because it is August and also eight o’clock—they whoosh by, like wings.

My taxi driver this morning, who took me from mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to the wedding at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, was named Steve. He used to be a sausage salesman, which he liked for the same reason he liked the taxi business: he took care of people. Losing that sausage job, he said, was harder than his divorce.

And there were friends, friends I saw this weekend, though not as many as there used to be. Ray and Sherri, who took me in, even as they were packing to move to Florida. And Phyllis, Phyllis my Oracle, eighty-seven years old and tucked away in a houseful of antiques on Edgewood Street; Phyllis, who asked me in all earnestness what it was like to break someone’s heart.

There was a toast at the wedding reception this afternoon, (held on cotton table cloths and paper napkins in the church hall) a toast given by a friend of the bride, a searching-eyed, long-haired young man who quoted from Emily Dickinson. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” He and the bride used to memorize poetry together, and she used to love him, but he never did. Then he sat down.

Before the train got to this great iron bridge, the color of cities in Connecticut, the color of rust, we passed by a lake, filled in among reeds and cattails. Two swans were swimming across the surface of the black water, cutting V’s into the gloss.