November 2011 Archives
It is that time of year. It has dawned on me...although this is hardly the right expression. The night has advanced into the afternoon, evening now much like the black construction paper that materialized around grade school Halloweens. It is cold, this is part of what's happening. There is hardly any cold in the central Californian cold, I concede this. Still, there is enough of it to force one away from the windows. Particularly mine, single-pane glass dating from the 1950s. Still, for sheer atmospherics, there is something to be said for these old pre-energy-consciousness bits of fenestration. They bring a bit of the winter inside, heightening the effect, and one would otherwise forget.
Cozy is the result. Or the possibility. My mother seemed to come to life in the winter months in the desert. She made soup. Do I recall her boiling a beef bone in the pot? Almost. Yes, she must have done this, and cut up vegetables, simmering the whole mixture in a large pot on the stove. It is hard to say if my mother disliked cooking, being so turbulent and emotionally off kilter much of the year. Clearly, she did not dislike it all the time, for these pots of soup sprang to life on their own, her expression of the gray skies hanging over the chaparral. Garlic, I am certain there was a certain amount of garlic, doubtless onion, and certainly diced carrots. The soup was good, and the feeling of hearth most tangible and welcome. On such days, the vapors of our bubbling dinner fogged the windows. We ate at the kitchen table, the north-facing glass obscured with a runny gray much like the rainy windshield of a car. However welcome, this soup dinner table experience feels unfamiliar. Perhaps we did not do this particularly often, sitting down together. My father worked a lot. I do recall TV dinners on trays. The marriage and the cooking and the psychic atmosphere brewing something entirely different from food, and the opposite of nourishing. The details have faded.
Still, there was about the soup something of winter. And the fires. We had a fireplace, and the thing was a matter of fascination for a little boy. Most of the year it was out of action, of course. I remember climbing into it, staring up at the flue and the chimney and marveling at the sooty world above. A black handle hung down from the mechanism. It was out of reach in every sense, function murky, forbidden and adult. The set of fireplace implements were more accessible and fascinated year round. Their black, heavy solidity put them in a special class of object. The tongs in particular. They had the look of something quite nifty, an enjoyable way to squeeze a summer lizard, for example, when's mother wasn't looking. In reality, they were impossible, their sheer weight making them best left on their fireside stand. The poker, with its sharp point and hook, looked most intriguing. It had too much heft to provide much fun. The shovel-like scooper, who cared? The broom, forget it.
There was also a metal fireplace screen, the function of which I did understand. One had only to watch the occasional ember land on our gray wool carpet. They had left their mark, these miniscule glowing meteorites. In retrospect, I am not quite sure how embers could have gotten out of hand. But my father's hand was shaky and feverish in such circumstances. He had a definite thing about fire. As an adult, I joked that he was a pyromaniac. Old family friends found this amusing. With time, the joke seems unclear. He spent long summer hours wandering about our property, tossing lighted matches here and there to create a supposed firebreak. Hours. We followed, one or two or all three of his offspring. Fire fascinated us too.
Who knows where the cardboard came from? Doubtless a carton from some shipment of something. Upon reflection, the whole thing ranges from silly to suicidal, but I recall looking on in fascination. My father had placed the carton, all of it, and our fireplace. My mother seems to have been out. But most likely, only out of the picture. From our remote desert location, there was not much of anywhere to go. Was she in the bedroom? It was nighttime, that much I do recall. Perhaps she had gone to bed very early, was reading, who can say? I was watching my father, of course. It was going to be quite a conflagration, that was clear. Having shoved the cardboard in the fireplace, placed the screen around the opening, my father lit a match. The cardboard first burned, then erupted. My father rushed outside, returned with a garden hose, the anomaly of this object from the grounds being dragged across our carpet was not lost on me. Was the hose running, water streaming across the wool pile? Perhaps. I could see that my father was bewildered, overcome, at the mercy of whatever was happening to him. What was next? My father must have been frightened, then relieved. Did my mother appear at the last moment, and was there a fight? Oddly, I do not remember this. Hardly a detail I would have forgotten, unless at this stage of things I was forgetting much of what I saw or sensed. What happened to the rest of the cardboard...a detail forgotten too.
Oddly, the most grim and tumultuous autumn-into-winter experience, the one that came when I was 12 years old and my family flew off in separate directions across the country in a children-tug-of-war prelude to divorce...well, it doesn't have the same ominous feel. Perhaps because when everything is going wrong there is nothing to dread. It is the sinister possibilities that arise from this season that easily dominate my consciousness.
For some reason I can recall driving along the 101 motorway, Silicon Valley's main artery, south toward some meeting in the late 1980s. I was with my business partner, and business was not going well, nor was partnership. We were writers, both of us, and we were staring at the road and the graying November sky, heading south in every sense of the word. Doubtless we were meeting with a client who was not paying us enough, providing enough work, or something. The details have faded, as has the experience, and here I am.
All of which brings me to my foot. The right one, to be exact, where cramps have become a nightly feature. For those of us with a special...to use the politically correct word...neurology, such foot pain takes on odd dimensions. The spinal-cord-injured person, particularly one with an asymmetrical paralysis, can feel nothing on one side and experience heightened sensation on the other. This is radically oversimplifying, but it will do. The point is that, fate being what it is, it is the feeling-too-much-pain foot that is experiencing the cramps. Causing it into both burn and jump, not a restful 4:30 AM experience. This is the neurology bewitching hour, it seems. Yes, I have attempted all the usual remedies. Lots of water. Potassium-rich bananas. All to no avail.
In short, the foot is sliding toward late autumn. Another thing is going wrong, and the possibilities are so many, too many. There is more loss. And what can one do but accept defeat and go down with life's sinking boat? Which is not so simple, fortunately. For one does not have to go down alone. And it is the anticipation of loss that makes one feel a loser, not the real taking away. I do listen to Jane, that is the point. She has had her own losses, has her own perspective and is here to remind me that there is a difference between giving out and giving up. And, by the way on this November day, Happy Thanksgiving.
Cozy is the result. Or the possibility. My mother seemed to come to life in the winter months in the desert. She made soup. Do I recall her boiling a beef bone in the pot? Almost. Yes, she must have done this, and cut up vegetables, simmering the whole mixture in a large pot on the stove. It is hard to say if my mother disliked cooking, being so turbulent and emotionally off kilter much of the year. Clearly, she did not dislike it all the time, for these pots of soup sprang to life on their own, her expression of the gray skies hanging over the chaparral. Garlic, I am certain there was a certain amount of garlic, doubtless onion, and certainly diced carrots. The soup was good, and the feeling of hearth most tangible and welcome. On such days, the vapors of our bubbling dinner fogged the windows. We ate at the kitchen table, the north-facing glass obscured with a runny gray much like the rainy windshield of a car. However welcome, this soup dinner table experience feels unfamiliar. Perhaps we did not do this particularly often, sitting down together. My father worked a lot. I do recall TV dinners on trays. The marriage and the cooking and the psychic atmosphere brewing something entirely different from food, and the opposite of nourishing. The details have faded.
Still, there was about the soup something of winter. And the fires. We had a fireplace, and the thing was a matter of fascination for a little boy. Most of the year it was out of action, of course. I remember climbing into it, staring up at the flue and the chimney and marveling at the sooty world above. A black handle hung down from the mechanism. It was out of reach in every sense, function murky, forbidden and adult. The set of fireplace implements were more accessible and fascinated year round. Their black, heavy solidity put them in a special class of object. The tongs in particular. They had the look of something quite nifty, an enjoyable way to squeeze a summer lizard, for example, when's mother wasn't looking. In reality, they were impossible, their sheer weight making them best left on their fireside stand. The poker, with its sharp point and hook, looked most intriguing. It had too much heft to provide much fun. The shovel-like scooper, who cared? The broom, forget it.
There was also a metal fireplace screen, the function of which I did understand. One had only to watch the occasional ember land on our gray wool carpet. They had left their mark, these miniscule glowing meteorites. In retrospect, I am not quite sure how embers could have gotten out of hand. But my father's hand was shaky and feverish in such circumstances. He had a definite thing about fire. As an adult, I joked that he was a pyromaniac. Old family friends found this amusing. With time, the joke seems unclear. He spent long summer hours wandering about our property, tossing lighted matches here and there to create a supposed firebreak. Hours. We followed, one or two or all three of his offspring. Fire fascinated us too.
Who knows where the cardboard came from? Doubtless a carton from some shipment of something. Upon reflection, the whole thing ranges from silly to suicidal, but I recall looking on in fascination. My father had placed the carton, all of it, and our fireplace. My mother seems to have been out. But most likely, only out of the picture. From our remote desert location, there was not much of anywhere to go. Was she in the bedroom? It was nighttime, that much I do recall. Perhaps she had gone to bed very early, was reading, who can say? I was watching my father, of course. It was going to be quite a conflagration, that was clear. Having shoved the cardboard in the fireplace, placed the screen around the opening, my father lit a match. The cardboard first burned, then erupted. My father rushed outside, returned with a garden hose, the anomaly of this object from the grounds being dragged across our carpet was not lost on me. Was the hose running, water streaming across the wool pile? Perhaps. I could see that my father was bewildered, overcome, at the mercy of whatever was happening to him. What was next? My father must have been frightened, then relieved. Did my mother appear at the last moment, and was there a fight? Oddly, I do not remember this. Hardly a detail I would have forgotten, unless at this stage of things I was forgetting much of what I saw or sensed. What happened to the rest of the cardboard...a detail forgotten too.
Oddly, the most grim and tumultuous autumn-into-winter experience, the one that came when I was 12 years old and my family flew off in separate directions across the country in a children-tug-of-war prelude to divorce...well, it doesn't have the same ominous feel. Perhaps because when everything is going wrong there is nothing to dread. It is the sinister possibilities that arise from this season that easily dominate my consciousness.
For some reason I can recall driving along the 101 motorway, Silicon Valley's main artery, south toward some meeting in the late 1980s. I was with my business partner, and business was not going well, nor was partnership. We were writers, both of us, and we were staring at the road and the graying November sky, heading south in every sense of the word. Doubtless we were meeting with a client who was not paying us enough, providing enough work, or something. The details have faded, as has the experience, and here I am.
All of which brings me to my foot. The right one, to be exact, where cramps have become a nightly feature. For those of us with a special...to use the politically correct word...neurology, such foot pain takes on odd dimensions. The spinal-cord-injured person, particularly one with an asymmetrical paralysis, can feel nothing on one side and experience heightened sensation on the other. This is radically oversimplifying, but it will do. The point is that, fate being what it is, it is the feeling-too-much-pain foot that is experiencing the cramps. Causing it into both burn and jump, not a restful 4:30 AM experience. This is the neurology bewitching hour, it seems. Yes, I have attempted all the usual remedies. Lots of water. Potassium-rich bananas. All to no avail.
In short, the foot is sliding toward late autumn. Another thing is going wrong, and the possibilities are so many, too many. There is more loss. And what can one do but accept defeat and go down with life's sinking boat? Which is not so simple, fortunately. For one does not have to go down alone. And it is the anticipation of loss that makes one feel a loser, not the real taking away. I do listen to Jane, that is the point. She has had her own losses, has her own perspective and is here to remind me that there is a difference between giving out and giving up. And, by the way on this November day, Happy Thanksgiving.
Things were very confused round about August, 1969. I had come to Britain for a short-term visit. How long could the thing last, after all, but a few months? I had traveled about the Continent. And now there was this confusion about my going home. Was I going or was I staying? The latter had seemed preposterous only a few weeks before. But somehow I already had London connections, family connections of all things...unexpected and baffling. And as though to further cloud the picture, something was happening outside. It was what the British call weather, and the cold mists of August already swirling about London nights defied reason and explanation. Where was I? And why, of all things, was I making an appointment at Stoke Mandeville Hospital?
Then and now the place was a renowned center for spinal cord injuries. Having survived mine, I wasn't terribly interested in pursuing the matter further. After all, I was up and about and walking everywhere with one crutch. I had mastered the London tube system, regularly stepped on and off buses, escalators, and every other inner urban mechanism thrown my way...so why more medical care? Because I succumbed. A flock of German Jews of my parents' age was strongly advocating this. And to a delayed adolescent, this was not good news. More persuasive, cousins my own age were telling me Stoke Mandeville was a good plan. In retrospect, everyone must have been rather proud of this particular medical institution. Caroline, my doctor cousin, rather mildly and soberly suggested that yes, this was probably a good plan. In short, the sense of familial concern, cloying from one generation, inclusive from another, tilted the scales. People cared and I cared that they cared, so who cared whether or not I actually needed to schlep into Buckinghamshire to see a doctor? Besides, this was one of those moves that had a note of permanence about it. A move that suggested a move.
We drove there, I do remember that much. We very likely had a country tea at some point in the day, for I had become a major fan of this British pastime...a cozy, gemütlich gathering about a table over warm liquids. A most attractive experience to one who has been low on family. The hospital probably startled me a bit with its architectural remnants. Stoke Mandeville had been a Victorian hospital, then a World War II hodgepodge of temporary buildings, then whatever it was now. I do recall walking through one of the wards. The ceilings were impossibly high, everything brick, a definite Dickensian feel to the whole. The sisters, nurses still being called that, were dispensing tea, of course. The place looked cold, even in September. But I was only passing through, fortunately, the ward being en route to the office of Dr. Walsh.
He was a tall, easy-going man who seemed to take his time. I told him I had encountered some knee pain a few months earlier when visiting New York, the subway steps getting to me on a couple of occasions. He did not seem concerned. No, I was not doing anything wrong. In fact, I was doing everything right. He seemed most impressed that I was already trying to find some sort of work. He asked about my sex life, an embarrassing matter, but just asking was enough. This set a tone. Everything was okay, no holds barred in terms of discussion. Get a job and get laid, good advice for anyone...and that was more or less that. Except for my brace.
It was an American monster. A huge stainless steel contraption that fit under my trousers, extending from my crotch to my shoe. Why I needed this long leg brace is beyond me. But my circumstances were beyond most medical professionals. People with my sort of spinal cord injury were generally in wheelchairs, and that was that. I was schlepping about, and this leg brace was the best that physical medicine types of that era could imagine. Getting it on and off seemed to take days. I do believe that Stoke Mandeville was the place where someone suggested that my brace need only extend to some point below the knee. This was a major breakthrough. It was the difference between driving a semi truck and a minivan. The short leg brace slipped on more or less like a boot.
The problem was my spasticity. The short brace worked fine, but the involuntary strength of my leg also worked it to death. The metal posts designed to hold the shoe onto the brace kept bending. I made countless trips to Stoke Mandeville, then to a brace maker in North London. Then back to Stoke Mandeville where the brace fitter, a Scot who had seen it all, including his own polio, kept staring at my bent leg braces. 'Aye, he's a strong laddie,' the man observed.
Dr. Walsh wanted to see me again in six months. Then another six, and another. The same thing transpired each time. Was I working? Was I getting laid? There were no wrong answers. But the trip to Aylesbury, a major undertaking involving a train and taxi, made my Stoke Mandeville visits something of a burden. I wondered if they were really worth it, these trips. Eventually I stopped. Meanwhile, I always had the sense that whatever happened to my body, well I wasn't alone. There was always Dr. Walsh. And being a disabled person wasn't like being sick. It was much like being anything. Work and sex were the secret to health, it seemed. In short, health would largely take care of itself.
The older generation of my British extended family seemed quite pleased that I had paid a visit to Stoke Mandeville. It was as though they had expected a cure. I never told them how little had transpired there. Nor did it occur to me that my assessment was wrong. Plenty had occurred. This was another country, Britain. The idea of preventive healthcare, of ensuring that a person had a life, which is to say, some reason to be healthy...none of this occurred to me at the time. But it was characteristic of the British approach to rehabilitation medicine. And I thought I was going through the motions, pleasing everyone by making these needless trips to Aylesbury. But I was slowly redefining needless and need. While learning most of what there was to know about healing.
Then and now the place was a renowned center for spinal cord injuries. Having survived mine, I wasn't terribly interested in pursuing the matter further. After all, I was up and about and walking everywhere with one crutch. I had mastered the London tube system, regularly stepped on and off buses, escalators, and every other inner urban mechanism thrown my way...so why more medical care? Because I succumbed. A flock of German Jews of my parents' age was strongly advocating this. And to a delayed adolescent, this was not good news. More persuasive, cousins my own age were telling me Stoke Mandeville was a good plan. In retrospect, everyone must have been rather proud of this particular medical institution. Caroline, my doctor cousin, rather mildly and soberly suggested that yes, this was probably a good plan. In short, the sense of familial concern, cloying from one generation, inclusive from another, tilted the scales. People cared and I cared that they cared, so who cared whether or not I actually needed to schlep into Buckinghamshire to see a doctor? Besides, this was one of those moves that had a note of permanence about it. A move that suggested a move.
We drove there, I do remember that much. We very likely had a country tea at some point in the day, for I had become a major fan of this British pastime...a cozy, gemütlich gathering about a table over warm liquids. A most attractive experience to one who has been low on family. The hospital probably startled me a bit with its architectural remnants. Stoke Mandeville had been a Victorian hospital, then a World War II hodgepodge of temporary buildings, then whatever it was now. I do recall walking through one of the wards. The ceilings were impossibly high, everything brick, a definite Dickensian feel to the whole. The sisters, nurses still being called that, were dispensing tea, of course. The place looked cold, even in September. But I was only passing through, fortunately, the ward being en route to the office of Dr. Walsh.
He was a tall, easy-going man who seemed to take his time. I told him I had encountered some knee pain a few months earlier when visiting New York, the subway steps getting to me on a couple of occasions. He did not seem concerned. No, I was not doing anything wrong. In fact, I was doing everything right. He seemed most impressed that I was already trying to find some sort of work. He asked about my sex life, an embarrassing matter, but just asking was enough. This set a tone. Everything was okay, no holds barred in terms of discussion. Get a job and get laid, good advice for anyone...and that was more or less that. Except for my brace.
It was an American monster. A huge stainless steel contraption that fit under my trousers, extending from my crotch to my shoe. Why I needed this long leg brace is beyond me. But my circumstances were beyond most medical professionals. People with my sort of spinal cord injury were generally in wheelchairs, and that was that. I was schlepping about, and this leg brace was the best that physical medicine types of that era could imagine. Getting it on and off seemed to take days. I do believe that Stoke Mandeville was the place where someone suggested that my brace need only extend to some point below the knee. This was a major breakthrough. It was the difference between driving a semi truck and a minivan. The short leg brace slipped on more or less like a boot.
The problem was my spasticity. The short brace worked fine, but the involuntary strength of my leg also worked it to death. The metal posts designed to hold the shoe onto the brace kept bending. I made countless trips to Stoke Mandeville, then to a brace maker in North London. Then back to Stoke Mandeville where the brace fitter, a Scot who had seen it all, including his own polio, kept staring at my bent leg braces. 'Aye, he's a strong laddie,' the man observed.
Dr. Walsh wanted to see me again in six months. Then another six, and another. The same thing transpired each time. Was I working? Was I getting laid? There were no wrong answers. But the trip to Aylesbury, a major undertaking involving a train and taxi, made my Stoke Mandeville visits something of a burden. I wondered if they were really worth it, these trips. Eventually I stopped. Meanwhile, I always had the sense that whatever happened to my body, well I wasn't alone. There was always Dr. Walsh. And being a disabled person wasn't like being sick. It was much like being anything. Work and sex were the secret to health, it seemed. In short, health would largely take care of itself.
The older generation of my British extended family seemed quite pleased that I had paid a visit to Stoke Mandeville. It was as though they had expected a cure. I never told them how little had transpired there. Nor did it occur to me that my assessment was wrong. Plenty had occurred. This was another country, Britain. The idea of preventive healthcare, of ensuring that a person had a life, which is to say, some reason to be healthy...none of this occurred to me at the time. But it was characteristic of the British approach to rehabilitation medicine. And I thought I was going through the motions, pleasing everyone by making these needless trips to Aylesbury. But I was slowly redefining needless and need. While learning most of what there was to know about healing.
It has been the Addled Era, a time of being consistently disturbed and off base, my thoughts corkscrewing around nothing and everything. Take the garden. There is something happening there, and having to do the simplest Archimedean principles of volume and displacement, and yet the whole thing obsesses me. I take pride in having brought to a halt, more or less, the grinding and flushing of kitchen scraps down the sink, a.k.a., garbage disposal. For a year or more virtually everything has gone into my compost tumbler and down the Bacterial Road to decomposition.
The Filth Eaters are a staple deity among an indigenous tribe of French Equatorial Africa, thus my unending education at the Minnesota Men's Conference. Such a good thing, the eating of filth, the ingestion and breaking down of waste. As for my fascination with the process, well that is another matter.
In the present, not to mention the concrete and material, I am running out of space. Decomposition, it seems, goes only so far. Both of my raised beds are raising their levels. Each has become so full that routine watering from a garden hose drives soil over the edge, down the wooden supports, and into the pathways. I don't know what I expected. That rubbish would decay forever, everything disappearing into zero volume? And at least one bed has become a subterranean home for tree roots, the neighbor's oak having ascertained that burrowing into the rich, loose soils just beyond the fence is an easy and efficient route to nourishment. Which raises another problem, if you are me. How to decompose the oak roots. Volunteer Paul has been ripping them out, but what then? They are biomaterial, after all. But I have given myself a pass on this one. They are woody, this is my judgment. No need to try to make wood rot. The oak roots can go into the city's biomass system. I wash my hands of the matter.
Washing one's hands is an extremely good idea after handling the compost tumbler, by the way. It is an odoriferous thing, the plastic door only opened when necessary. On a warm day, its decompositional odors verging on the embarrassing. Good thing it's up against the back wall, as far from any neighboring apartment as one can manage. And a biodegradable metaphor for some other life process currently under way. Siblings in my family have been having some difficult discussions over old matters. The details are beside the point. The effects are most remarkable. This has stirred up some rather intense feelings in me. And forced me down the road of another bout of Facing What Must Be Faced. Just when one had had enough of this sort of thing...there is more.
How interactions between siblings can be so intense so late in life...well, upon reflection, it is hardly surprising. It's like the eyewitnesses to some disaster getting together and, first, reliving the experience. Then noting discrepancies in their accounts, moving on to discussions, then arguments, about who saw what, who saw more of what, who got hit by the debris and who didn't. Reminding me that the milk of human kindness and the spirit of generosity did not ooze out of my childhood self. I felt desperate most of the time, and it was everyone for himself. Which has left us siblings fractured. And yet, it must be noted, working rather hard to stay in touch. The challenge being now to get in touch.
The problem is in facing my petty nature. It is easy to remember being victimized. Thus, childhood. It is harder to remember being the victimizer. But I was, it must be admitted. I took it out on both siblings. And why get into this old stuff now? Oh, why not? Yes, it is filth. But like the African tribesmen, one can rely on the Filth Eaters, to some extent. It's just that, like my raised beds, an accretion of old stuff, nasty, smelly old stuff, may not decompose quite fast enough. The level keeps rising, the quantity of dirt or earth or growing area...the variety of terms and perspectives being quite illuminating...under increasing threat. So what is there to do but dig?
In the case of the raised beds, the situation and corresponding tactics are both looking desperate. I retired one of the plots after discovering that the apparently dormant lettuce was not just hanging out, but turning bitter...doubtless another botanical metaphor lurking in this. Anyway, ripping away the lettuce, digging out a couple of onions. And now what to do with the empty ground? My perennial answer is to sow a dense cover crop of ryegrass and fava beans and vetch. Not a good idea with the bed already bursting at its horticultural seams. So I toned the concept down. Some clover seed, of the sort that cohabits with lawn grasses, sprinkled everywhere, sprouting a low green carpet of nitrogen fixing growth. Somehow very gratifying that all this bacterial-root symbiosis is going on. Until the whole thing gets pitchforked under and become soil again. Too much of the latter being the problem.
An excellent way to sidestep a much bigger problem, the remains of the eight-foot tomatoes in the adjoining bed. Volunteer Paul, sidelined by hip pain, vows to get back into the suburban agricultural game as soon as this next Tuesday. Hard to say what we're going to do about this mass of tomato detritus. Somehow, it's my belief, the vines are going to be chopped, mashed down, some dirt sprinkled over the whole mess...and, yes, clover seed atop that. I don't know about this. We'll see. Or we won't. The bed is full, that is the point. It will take some sort of magic to make way for new organic material. Which seems to be the point. There is something magical about the process. Bacteria growing underground converting the stuff that was recently growing above ground into...well, more stuff. And hard to say how much constitutes too much stuff. It may depend on what one grows. That one grows anything, or that anything grows at all...falls somewhere between baffling and awe-inspiring. In short, I don't really have a plan for the beds. Yet they may have a plan for me. Meanwhile, what can one do but dig and rot and grow?
The Filth Eaters are a staple deity among an indigenous tribe of French Equatorial Africa, thus my unending education at the Minnesota Men's Conference. Such a good thing, the eating of filth, the ingestion and breaking down of waste. As for my fascination with the process, well that is another matter.
In the present, not to mention the concrete and material, I am running out of space. Decomposition, it seems, goes only so far. Both of my raised beds are raising their levels. Each has become so full that routine watering from a garden hose drives soil over the edge, down the wooden supports, and into the pathways. I don't know what I expected. That rubbish would decay forever, everything disappearing into zero volume? And at least one bed has become a subterranean home for tree roots, the neighbor's oak having ascertained that burrowing into the rich, loose soils just beyond the fence is an easy and efficient route to nourishment. Which raises another problem, if you are me. How to decompose the oak roots. Volunteer Paul has been ripping them out, but what then? They are biomaterial, after all. But I have given myself a pass on this one. They are woody, this is my judgment. No need to try to make wood rot. The oak roots can go into the city's biomass system. I wash my hands of the matter.
Washing one's hands is an extremely good idea after handling the compost tumbler, by the way. It is an odoriferous thing, the plastic door only opened when necessary. On a warm day, its decompositional odors verging on the embarrassing. Good thing it's up against the back wall, as far from any neighboring apartment as one can manage. And a biodegradable metaphor for some other life process currently under way. Siblings in my family have been having some difficult discussions over old matters. The details are beside the point. The effects are most remarkable. This has stirred up some rather intense feelings in me. And forced me down the road of another bout of Facing What Must Be Faced. Just when one had had enough of this sort of thing...there is more.
How interactions between siblings can be so intense so late in life...well, upon reflection, it is hardly surprising. It's like the eyewitnesses to some disaster getting together and, first, reliving the experience. Then noting discrepancies in their accounts, moving on to discussions, then arguments, about who saw what, who saw more of what, who got hit by the debris and who didn't. Reminding me that the milk of human kindness and the spirit of generosity did not ooze out of my childhood self. I felt desperate most of the time, and it was everyone for himself. Which has left us siblings fractured. And yet, it must be noted, working rather hard to stay in touch. The challenge being now to get in touch.
The problem is in facing my petty nature. It is easy to remember being victimized. Thus, childhood. It is harder to remember being the victimizer. But I was, it must be admitted. I took it out on both siblings. And why get into this old stuff now? Oh, why not? Yes, it is filth. But like the African tribesmen, one can rely on the Filth Eaters, to some extent. It's just that, like my raised beds, an accretion of old stuff, nasty, smelly old stuff, may not decompose quite fast enough. The level keeps rising, the quantity of dirt or earth or growing area...the variety of terms and perspectives being quite illuminating...under increasing threat. So what is there to do but dig?
In the case of the raised beds, the situation and corresponding tactics are both looking desperate. I retired one of the plots after discovering that the apparently dormant lettuce was not just hanging out, but turning bitter...doubtless another botanical metaphor lurking in this. Anyway, ripping away the lettuce, digging out a couple of onions. And now what to do with the empty ground? My perennial answer is to sow a dense cover crop of ryegrass and fava beans and vetch. Not a good idea with the bed already bursting at its horticultural seams. So I toned the concept down. Some clover seed, of the sort that cohabits with lawn grasses, sprinkled everywhere, sprouting a low green carpet of nitrogen fixing growth. Somehow very gratifying that all this bacterial-root symbiosis is going on. Until the whole thing gets pitchforked under and become soil again. Too much of the latter being the problem.
An excellent way to sidestep a much bigger problem, the remains of the eight-foot tomatoes in the adjoining bed. Volunteer Paul, sidelined by hip pain, vows to get back into the suburban agricultural game as soon as this next Tuesday. Hard to say what we're going to do about this mass of tomato detritus. Somehow, it's my belief, the vines are going to be chopped, mashed down, some dirt sprinkled over the whole mess...and, yes, clover seed atop that. I don't know about this. We'll see. Or we won't. The bed is full, that is the point. It will take some sort of magic to make way for new organic material. Which seems to be the point. There is something magical about the process. Bacteria growing underground converting the stuff that was recently growing above ground into...well, more stuff. And hard to say how much constitutes too much stuff. It may depend on what one grows. That one grows anything, or that anything grows at all...falls somewhere between baffling and awe-inspiring. In short, I don't really have a plan for the beds. Yet they may have a plan for me. Meanwhile, what can one do but dig and rot and grow?
One can put too fine a point on the concept of the 'haunted house.' The old place my father bought in the center of a small desert town certainly had the weight of years about it. It also had the weight of the future about it. For after his divorce, my father told me that he had been planning for this all along. His office downstairs, living accommodation upstairs. At the time, this seemed to me very adult and prescient. Now the arrangement appears defeatist and inappropriately adaptive. But there we have it.
It was an old place, a wide porch with Grecian pillars. The same pillars repeated in a surrounding high fence, all wooden latticework interrupted by round concrete stanchions. And by the time he bought it, slightly decaying, like a desert version of Tennessee Williams. A single family must have lived there originally, perhaps a banker...someone who wished to cast an image of neoclassical substance. There were concrete Grecian urns on either side of the front steps. Each had dirt inside, and anyone but a kid would have realized they were planters. But this never occurred to me. I was about nine years old when my father bought the place. I was 12 years old when I moved in upstairs, now in his custody, divorce having flattened my family like a steamroller. My brother was about 10 years old. Which would make my dad about 47.
Just after my father bought the place, I began exploring. The upstairs sunporch was a place of utter mystery. There were bedrooms at either end, and each had a small screened window that led from a walk-in closet directly to the outside porch. Even more intriguing, there was a portion of the closets that tapered under the slanting roof, tall enough for a short kid to stand up at one end, forcing him to crawl at the other. All the hardwood floors shone with decades of wax. The sunporch was drowning in pine needles from several years of accumulation. Just before its sale, the place had been a rooming house. A number of people, including a bus driver who had taken me to and from school in the mid-1950s, had moved out. The town's main grade school, low earth-toned buildings, some of which dated from the first world war, squatted among tan acres of hard packed desert. Sliding across such ground in the course of softball games left a bloody trail of scraped skin and embedded pebbles.
The old garage behind the house could barely accommodate my father's Desoto, such was the narrow width of the entrance. Sliding barn doors hung at either end, rumbling on pulleys that moved along a rail. It was all wooden clapboard. Up toward the ceiling, exposed rafters. Down below, along the edge of the cracked concrete floor, a strange collection of stored objects. Plywood kits of PT boats. A big vat of cooking grease. Old rolled posters. The manager of the Fox Theatre had lived in the house, probably with just a room, using the old garage for storage.
The place could have been rehabbed into something more comfy and modern. Instead, it followed the general course of my family, toward decline. Against the back fence, another stretch of repeating plaster columns and splintering white latticework, a thicket of out-of-control bamboo had choked off one corner of the property. My brother had acquired a small puppy, a soft-eared little thing, probably a tiny hound. He watched as it went exploring among the bamboo. The puppy was never seen again. He told me this on one late afternoon, his sadness tangible. I recall poking around the edge of the bamboo jungle and sensing the hopelessness of the search, and probably of much more. At some point I went inside, stealing myself against the poignancy of the small, lost, motherless creature.
At the front of the house a gravel driveway split in two, one branch continuing under a port coucherre, the other swinging wide to skirt the side fence. There was a triangular space at the division that I identified as harsh, revealing the mineral ground unpleasantly. I resolved to put a garden there. Splintering strips of wooden lattice, white paint uniformly peeling from them, had come detached from some portion of the fence. I tried to prop these up to define the edge of my triangular garden. Yet there seemed no easy way to do this, let alone work the soil, which was hard as a brick. Water seemed the only answer. And so on a Saturday morning I stood outside with a hose, soaking the ground, hoping to create a trench for my latticework border.
My father approached. I liked having the company. The new school year was starting, a new life with him, my single parent. My mother's explosions were far away, increasingly long ago...and this was a Saturday. A family day. My father stood at the edge of the garden plot, staring at the ground, rocking slightly back and forth on his feet. He was clad in khaki Bermuda shorts, attire he had worn around his marriage home in the desert to the northeast. He was frowning, jaw tight, fists clenched. I had certainly taken good care of myself, he told me. Yes, I had set myself up nicely. While he had been here in California dealing with his divorce, I had ensconced myself with his sister and brother-in-law in upstate New York. Quite a cushy set up while he bore the brunt of domestic strife on his own.
I must have tried to protest but began crying instead, rushing indoors. There the scene stops. I had been taking care of him, in my mind, since I was eight years old. Apparently something very similar was going on in his mind too. It was all hanging out, whatever it was. As a child, I could not connect my father's prescriptions for diet pills, a form of Dexedrine, with his violent temper. He sent me down to the local drugstore on a regular basis. I remember handing the pharmacist a prescription on one occasion and watching the man slowly spread the small piece of paper across this counter. He stared at it for a disturbingly long time. Something like a minute passed. He said nothing, just staring at the paper. Until he sighed, wandered into the back, and returned with a bottle of pills.
Drugs provided a sort of fuel, but the vehicle? I have my own ideas about my father's disturbed personality. The more interesting question is why now? After all these years, what is there to say about this? Two children, deep in codependency, having an argument. The fact that one was approximately four times the age of the other seemingly irrelevant. What a strange childhood.
A warning here. Something about not taking care of people inappropriately. And how the past can grow around us like an enchanted bramble from a fairytale. Preserving things in time, things that are meant to grow or atrophy, one or the other. Getting lost in the depths of an old house...where you either raise the dead or they raise you.
It was an old place, a wide porch with Grecian pillars. The same pillars repeated in a surrounding high fence, all wooden latticework interrupted by round concrete stanchions. And by the time he bought it, slightly decaying, like a desert version of Tennessee Williams. A single family must have lived there originally, perhaps a banker...someone who wished to cast an image of neoclassical substance. There were concrete Grecian urns on either side of the front steps. Each had dirt inside, and anyone but a kid would have realized they were planters. But this never occurred to me. I was about nine years old when my father bought the place. I was 12 years old when I moved in upstairs, now in his custody, divorce having flattened my family like a steamroller. My brother was about 10 years old. Which would make my dad about 47.
Just after my father bought the place, I began exploring. The upstairs sunporch was a place of utter mystery. There were bedrooms at either end, and each had a small screened window that led from a walk-in closet directly to the outside porch. Even more intriguing, there was a portion of the closets that tapered under the slanting roof, tall enough for a short kid to stand up at one end, forcing him to crawl at the other. All the hardwood floors shone with decades of wax. The sunporch was drowning in pine needles from several years of accumulation. Just before its sale, the place had been a rooming house. A number of people, including a bus driver who had taken me to and from school in the mid-1950s, had moved out. The town's main grade school, low earth-toned buildings, some of which dated from the first world war, squatted among tan acres of hard packed desert. Sliding across such ground in the course of softball games left a bloody trail of scraped skin and embedded pebbles.
The old garage behind the house could barely accommodate my father's Desoto, such was the narrow width of the entrance. Sliding barn doors hung at either end, rumbling on pulleys that moved along a rail. It was all wooden clapboard. Up toward the ceiling, exposed rafters. Down below, along the edge of the cracked concrete floor, a strange collection of stored objects. Plywood kits of PT boats. A big vat of cooking grease. Old rolled posters. The manager of the Fox Theatre had lived in the house, probably with just a room, using the old garage for storage.
The place could have been rehabbed into something more comfy and modern. Instead, it followed the general course of my family, toward decline. Against the back fence, another stretch of repeating plaster columns and splintering white latticework, a thicket of out-of-control bamboo had choked off one corner of the property. My brother had acquired a small puppy, a soft-eared little thing, probably a tiny hound. He watched as it went exploring among the bamboo. The puppy was never seen again. He told me this on one late afternoon, his sadness tangible. I recall poking around the edge of the bamboo jungle and sensing the hopelessness of the search, and probably of much more. At some point I went inside, stealing myself against the poignancy of the small, lost, motherless creature.
At the front of the house a gravel driveway split in two, one branch continuing under a port coucherre, the other swinging wide to skirt the side fence. There was a triangular space at the division that I identified as harsh, revealing the mineral ground unpleasantly. I resolved to put a garden there. Splintering strips of wooden lattice, white paint uniformly peeling from them, had come detached from some portion of the fence. I tried to prop these up to define the edge of my triangular garden. Yet there seemed no easy way to do this, let alone work the soil, which was hard as a brick. Water seemed the only answer. And so on a Saturday morning I stood outside with a hose, soaking the ground, hoping to create a trench for my latticework border.
My father approached. I liked having the company. The new school year was starting, a new life with him, my single parent. My mother's explosions were far away, increasingly long ago...and this was a Saturday. A family day. My father stood at the edge of the garden plot, staring at the ground, rocking slightly back and forth on his feet. He was clad in khaki Bermuda shorts, attire he had worn around his marriage home in the desert to the northeast. He was frowning, jaw tight, fists clenched. I had certainly taken good care of myself, he told me. Yes, I had set myself up nicely. While he had been here in California dealing with his divorce, I had ensconced myself with his sister and brother-in-law in upstate New York. Quite a cushy set up while he bore the brunt of domestic strife on his own.
I must have tried to protest but began crying instead, rushing indoors. There the scene stops. I had been taking care of him, in my mind, since I was eight years old. Apparently something very similar was going on in his mind too. It was all hanging out, whatever it was. As a child, I could not connect my father's prescriptions for diet pills, a form of Dexedrine, with his violent temper. He sent me down to the local drugstore on a regular basis. I remember handing the pharmacist a prescription on one occasion and watching the man slowly spread the small piece of paper across this counter. He stared at it for a disturbingly long time. Something like a minute passed. He said nothing, just staring at the paper. Until he sighed, wandered into the back, and returned with a bottle of pills.
Drugs provided a sort of fuel, but the vehicle? I have my own ideas about my father's disturbed personality. The more interesting question is why now? After all these years, what is there to say about this? Two children, deep in codependency, having an argument. The fact that one was approximately four times the age of the other seemingly irrelevant. What a strange childhood.
A warning here. Something about not taking care of people inappropriately. And how the past can grow around us like an enchanted bramble from a fairytale. Preserving things in time, things that are meant to grow or atrophy, one or the other. Getting lost in the depths of an old house...where you either raise the dead or they raise you.
A bad sign that the 8:39 morning express to San Francisco is running late. This rarely happens on Caltrain. Save for the occasional suicide, locals hurling themselves upon the tracks in frightening numbers...a sign of the times, one cannot say. The times one can count on being of the daily schedule variety. I have an appointment. I need to see a woman about my book. Yes, there is one. I have seen the cover. I have seen the beautifully designed pages. I have seen the future, and it is in Berkeley...at least this morning.
In another phase of life I had a briefcase. Downright handy, it was. But it seemed to be an artifact of work. And supposedly work is over. I mean, one can't call a novel, a newspaper and New Yorker, work, can one? They are incompatible, these objects, the shiny book cover, newsprint and slick magazine pages shifting around my lap like tectonic plates. Worse, with numbed fingers it is hard to feel what is happening, let alone correct the slippage...of one thing under the other, and ultimately off my lap to the Caltrain carpet. Never mind. We are late but pleasantly rocketing along. Rushhour.
Which explains why the men's toilets at the San Francisco station are jammed. Worse, when I find a vacant urinal, life presents an essential problem. I have all this junk on my lap. There are no shelves or available servants to hold these items...although with the United States hurtling toward underdevelopment, the nation's workforce may soon expand beyond homeless windshield cleaners to India-style book holders in our men's rooms. A bright future. For now, the dull present forces me to lean my book against one wheelchair tire...the edge resting on a rather septic floor...and jam newspaper and magazine behind me on my seat, while I stand. It all works out, although I do forget the book, knocking it right onto its cover and against the grimy, suspiciously wet tile. Never mind. Across the street a tram awaits.
Or to be more precise, I wait for it. Interminably. The electronic signs announcing tram times are usually fairly reliable, but not this morning. And four minutes soon drags into 14. Until the tram pulls up, I roll on, and everything should proceed swimmingly. But there are complications. This is one of those rare moments when another electric wheelchair rolls on too. I eyeball the chair in a manner only known to wheelchair insiders. His is a good one, a Swedish model much like mine, only newer. He is also rigged out with a lap top computer mounted on a lapboard, mobile phone hooked to a flexible stand. Not to mention a GPS screen slightly to his left. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle is no better equipped. But the effect on the disabled occupant seems paradoxically weakening. He needs all this gear, that is the thing, and so seems to be drowning in it. I wonder if he has ALS. He is younger than I am, fortyish. And he wants the 38L. I want the 38L, he tells the driver in a voice that is loud and clear...but muffled, if not obliterated, by its context.
This is the City. The provincial capital, the big city, relatively speaking. The driver tells him that he needs to go up. That is to say, get off at the tram's first underground stop, Embarcadero Station, and proceed to the surface. Except that he doesn't say this. Only I can see disaster looming, along with my fellow wheelchair guy, because of a certain level of experience. It is frightening rolling about anywhere in a wheelchair, more so when you are a country mouse among city mice. Actually, San Francisco is a small city, and the possibilities for travel going awry are just as small. He will make it to Market Street, fumble about and find the 38 Geary bus stop. What I am sympathizing with is the anxiety, the sense of being defenseless in a wheelchair...having to turn the entire mechanical device around, lazysusan-style, just to see who is talking to you. Still, somehow he will find the bus stop, or a stranger will point it out. He will reach his destination, but not without a troubling and lonely journey. He proclaims the 38L one final time, as though sheer volume will make the bus materialize. I can't help admiring him. Loudness, anything that raises the disabled profile is not easy to muster. Not that it matters. The driver isn't listening. He has other fish to fry.
There is a spatial problem developing. Actually, it is a very simple one, but the parameters are new, not yet known. It amounts to this. I have wedged myself between the driver's compartment and the tram's far wall. This gets me out of the way of passengers and normally provides a place to hang out for a few stops. But the other wheelchair is blocking the entrance door. The quester after 38L has to move inside, which necessitates a three-point turn. I am occupying one of the three points. I need to get out of the way. Except that he is blocking me. He can't move unless I move, and vice versa. And there is more. A homeless guy with a walker. Actually, to make a badly needed distinction here, I have no sense of his residential status. He is poor. And neglected, an image that adds up to 'homeless' at this sad moment in our national decline. But for the time being, in terms of spatial transit relationships, his walker is all that counts. There are now three vehicles, all four-wheeled, and somehow they have gotten irretrievably jammed. How did we get here? Or why are we staying here?
Well, one of us is visibly anxious, out of his suburban element, and excessively focused on the 38L bus. Another is trapped in a corner and awaiting an opportunity to move his wheelchair. And the only ambulatory one among us is pushing forward, blindly, purpose unknown. For the poor walker guy acts like he is trying to get off the tram, when really he wants to stay on. He wants a space, I think. And precisely why he is pushing against the 38L wheelchair guy is impossible to say. What we need is leadership. And we have it in the form of a Muni driver, a take-charge stalwart of the city's municipal railway. You back up, he instructs 38L. Now, you wait, he tells me. The walker guy he more or less prods, back, back. And it is true that a space is now opening. The driver asks people seated in one of the tram's seats along the wall to stand and sit elsewhere. He folds the seat out of the way. Just long enough for 38L to try maneuvering his way into the tram. I sympathize with the guy. He is actually quite good at steering his wheelchair, but conditions are against him. The tight spaces and severe angles of a tram require a certain level of experience and expertise. He will get the hang if he does this a few times, but we are not there yet. In fact, he has gotten himself slightly hung up on a metal stanchion. Ah, now he has rounded the corner. We are all in position, more or less. All that lies ahead...is Berkeley.
In another phase of life I had a briefcase. Downright handy, it was. But it seemed to be an artifact of work. And supposedly work is over. I mean, one can't call a novel, a newspaper and New Yorker, work, can one? They are incompatible, these objects, the shiny book cover, newsprint and slick magazine pages shifting around my lap like tectonic plates. Worse, with numbed fingers it is hard to feel what is happening, let alone correct the slippage...of one thing under the other, and ultimately off my lap to the Caltrain carpet. Never mind. We are late but pleasantly rocketing along. Rushhour.
Which explains why the men's toilets at the San Francisco station are jammed. Worse, when I find a vacant urinal, life presents an essential problem. I have all this junk on my lap. There are no shelves or available servants to hold these items...although with the United States hurtling toward underdevelopment, the nation's workforce may soon expand beyond homeless windshield cleaners to India-style book holders in our men's rooms. A bright future. For now, the dull present forces me to lean my book against one wheelchair tire...the edge resting on a rather septic floor...and jam newspaper and magazine behind me on my seat, while I stand. It all works out, although I do forget the book, knocking it right onto its cover and against the grimy, suspiciously wet tile. Never mind. Across the street a tram awaits.
Or to be more precise, I wait for it. Interminably. The electronic signs announcing tram times are usually fairly reliable, but not this morning. And four minutes soon drags into 14. Until the tram pulls up, I roll on, and everything should proceed swimmingly. But there are complications. This is one of those rare moments when another electric wheelchair rolls on too. I eyeball the chair in a manner only known to wheelchair insiders. His is a good one, a Swedish model much like mine, only newer. He is also rigged out with a lap top computer mounted on a lapboard, mobile phone hooked to a flexible stand. Not to mention a GPS screen slightly to his left. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle is no better equipped. But the effect on the disabled occupant seems paradoxically weakening. He needs all this gear, that is the thing, and so seems to be drowning in it. I wonder if he has ALS. He is younger than I am, fortyish. And he wants the 38L. I want the 38L, he tells the driver in a voice that is loud and clear...but muffled, if not obliterated, by its context.
This is the City. The provincial capital, the big city, relatively speaking. The driver tells him that he needs to go up. That is to say, get off at the tram's first underground stop, Embarcadero Station, and proceed to the surface. Except that he doesn't say this. Only I can see disaster looming, along with my fellow wheelchair guy, because of a certain level of experience. It is frightening rolling about anywhere in a wheelchair, more so when you are a country mouse among city mice. Actually, San Francisco is a small city, and the possibilities for travel going awry are just as small. He will make it to Market Street, fumble about and find the 38 Geary bus stop. What I am sympathizing with is the anxiety, the sense of being defenseless in a wheelchair...having to turn the entire mechanical device around, lazysusan-style, just to see who is talking to you. Still, somehow he will find the bus stop, or a stranger will point it out. He will reach his destination, but not without a troubling and lonely journey. He proclaims the 38L one final time, as though sheer volume will make the bus materialize. I can't help admiring him. Loudness, anything that raises the disabled profile is not easy to muster. Not that it matters. The driver isn't listening. He has other fish to fry.
There is a spatial problem developing. Actually, it is a very simple one, but the parameters are new, not yet known. It amounts to this. I have wedged myself between the driver's compartment and the tram's far wall. This gets me out of the way of passengers and normally provides a place to hang out for a few stops. But the other wheelchair is blocking the entrance door. The quester after 38L has to move inside, which necessitates a three-point turn. I am occupying one of the three points. I need to get out of the way. Except that he is blocking me. He can't move unless I move, and vice versa. And there is more. A homeless guy with a walker. Actually, to make a badly needed distinction here, I have no sense of his residential status. He is poor. And neglected, an image that adds up to 'homeless' at this sad moment in our national decline. But for the time being, in terms of spatial transit relationships, his walker is all that counts. There are now three vehicles, all four-wheeled, and somehow they have gotten irretrievably jammed. How did we get here? Or why are we staying here?
Well, one of us is visibly anxious, out of his suburban element, and excessively focused on the 38L bus. Another is trapped in a corner and awaiting an opportunity to move his wheelchair. And the only ambulatory one among us is pushing forward, blindly, purpose unknown. For the poor walker guy acts like he is trying to get off the tram, when really he wants to stay on. He wants a space, I think. And precisely why he is pushing against the 38L wheelchair guy is impossible to say. What we need is leadership. And we have it in the form of a Muni driver, a take-charge stalwart of the city's municipal railway. You back up, he instructs 38L. Now, you wait, he tells me. The walker guy he more or less prods, back, back. And it is true that a space is now opening. The driver asks people seated in one of the tram's seats along the wall to stand and sit elsewhere. He folds the seat out of the way. Just long enough for 38L to try maneuvering his way into the tram. I sympathize with the guy. He is actually quite good at steering his wheelchair, but conditions are against him. The tight spaces and severe angles of a tram require a certain level of experience and expertise. He will get the hang if he does this a few times, but we are not there yet. In fact, he has gotten himself slightly hung up on a metal stanchion. Ah, now he has rounded the corner. We are all in position, more or less. All that lies ahead...is Berkeley.
