Frosty

We have been visiting my parents in South Dakota. In my mind there are to types of visits with relatives. Those that go smoothly, and those in which all of the little idiosyncrasies of family drive one to drink (Unless one of the little idiosyncrasies is drinking in which case they drive you to find a meeting) I would categorize this trip as one of the former. However, one of the problems with visiting a place that is horrendously cold outside is that it makes me not want to go outside (unless of course the whole point of going to such a place is so that you can be outside i.e. skiing)

So I am trapped. Trapped in a prison of cold and ice and surrounded with all of the luxuries of my parents home: a well stocked fridge, cable TV, a huge house that the kids can run through without tripping over every single adult in the house, and three cars in the garage. Not that I want to go anywhere, after all I've been to malls, and everything else is covered in snow and ice.

I know that I am whining about having it too good, about having too much free time, after all isn't that what vacations are for? To get away from the routine and try someone-else's cooking for a while? But there comes a time when you begin to feel like a gerbil that has lived in the cage a little too long without anyone coming along to clean it. Not that I am not for wallowing in ones own crapulence, but that even this becomes, well, stagnant.

You know I think I am beginning to think that it is not too cold outside. I am encouraging J. to take a couple of the kids and go sledding tomorrow. There is even a little hill nearby where they can go skiing and snowboarding if they are feeling adventurous. But I haven't really thought too hard about what I would want to do. I'm feel a little too arthritic to go sledding or skiing. But a nice healthy walk might be just the thing. There are deer in parents back yard, so many that I would speculate that there are multiple herds. and there are squirrels so fat that you could mistake them for dogs, honest to god dogs.

However the thing I want to do most if I go outside is to build a snowman. Not any old snowman, but a very special snowman. For you see there is a small bronze statue in my parents backyard of a little boy pulling a wagon. The snow has covered the wagon and the boy simply stands there, with his arms crossed in front of him, standing as if he were waiting for something, and every time I walk by a window and catch this little boy out of the corner of my eye I would swear to Buddha that it was one of my children standing outside in their pj's looking all bronzen blue and frozen. I do a double take every time I see it, and have come to the decision that the little boy needs to become a little frosty the snowman with a corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal.

So I am going to bundle up, put on some warm mittens and tromp through the crunchy snow. The deer will scatter and the squirrels will most likely steal the corn right off of the pipe, but that little boy needs some winter wear. A little transformation for the season, after all, Don't we all? Isn't that what vacation really is, a chance to put on a different costume for a day or a week. To walk around in another man's shoes and see life from a new perspective. I think that statue needs to be a snowman even more than I need to make him one. That is my little idiosyncrasy of the day. Hopefully it won't wear on anyone too much... "hey where did that statue go and where did that little snowman come from?"

Brain Doodling God

I hate it when you read something and your mind wanders in the middle of the sentence. You get to the last word of the paragraph, perhaps even to the end of the page, and I suddenly realize I can't recall anything that I've just read. This happened several times this afternoon as I was reading my friend Oleoptene's blog Betting against Pascal. I wanted very much to hear her thoughts and instead found myself reliving a conversation I was a part of in church a few weeks ago.

I can't remember how it started, but we were talking about the way in which god intervenes in ones life. I think I might have murmured something to the effect that I wasn't sure that god would intervene even if he could. Something like "God doesn't intervene." Memory is so hazy. I believe my comment was shot down by the associate pastor, but in a way that left the question of how god would intervene wide open. The conversation began to shift when one young woman spoke up. Something along the lines of "Wait. I want to know. Does God intervene or doesn't he?"

You know, the more I think about this, the only really clear memory I have of the conversation is the emphatic, even imploring manner in which she asked the question. I can't clearly remember what she said, not the exact words, but the way in which she said it still reverberates through me. "I want to KNOW. Does God intervene or doesn't he?"

Playing the Wii with my sister last night, she was quick to point out on several occasions that the game is always more enjoyable when one is winning.

Is it interesting to think that God would intervene on our behalf if fate were dealing us a rotten hand, but that God would never disturb a glorious run of good luck? Why would god interfere with good luck? God is good n'est-ce pas?

I can hear my children fighting. Big sister is tormenting little sister or the other way around. As a parent I want to intercede. My every pore screams to go and butt in. Sometimes I do, but usually I make things worse. My children can and do play well together, but part of playing is taking a few lumps. Rubbing my hand through my hair I can still feel the bumps of childhood indelibly marked upon my skull. Would you trade any one lesson from your life for something less?

I think the problem I have with the idea that god would intercede on our behalf is that it seems to take for granted the idea that god is good, or that god only wants the good for us? Please let some young Socratic pop up his head and say "pray tell Gorgias, what is the good and how do you know it?" That our understanding of good, and gods might be wholly incompatible.

I have know people, including myself, who have from time to time talked of life's trials and tribulations in a way that suggests that it was "all part of god's plan" or that "god sent me a lesson that I might learn from this" I would be very wary of praying for god's good graces to be visited upon me if this is the case. The cure might be worse than the disease.

But seriously. Years ago, I remember reading an interpretation of the Garden of Eden story as a separation of the immediate reality of God from man. Man didn't leave the garden, we are still here, only we have lost our intimate connection with the divine and have yearned for it ever since.

Now I am going to back peddle a bit and say I suppose it is possible that God intervenes, perhaps even that s/he is doing right now and keeping a blockage in my aorta from becoming a massive cardio-embolism. Or better yet, that through a bizarre connection of events involving a hummingbird, a cup of hot tea, several preschoolers in Connecticut and a dozen or so other rube Goldberg variations god has managed to stave off nuclear annihilation for another day.

I think it all comes down to a question of what is good. Does submitting yourself to the will of god mean that even at life's worst it is possible that god wants the very best for us? That God may even be actively working behind the scenes to procure the good for us, and that our limited perspective means that we simply needs be patient and wait for the will of the universe to unfold itself for us?

That is an ugly list of assumptions. I think that is why I prefer the four nobel truths. It is clean, elegant and, for the most part, summarizes my experience. That life is suffering, that all suffering comes from desire, that it doesn't have to be this way, and that overcoming suffering is possible if one is willing to do a bit of work on oneself. For myself that path also offers another possibility, namely to reunite myself with the intimacy of the divine, not by wagering my way into heaven, but through constant attentiveness to the now.

close calls

Watching a video at the unreliable narrator's website reminded me of a time I was on holiday with D. in Albuquerque N.M. We decide to visit the Albuquerque Zoo. D. loved(s) zoos and while I am a bit conflicted on the issue, we had a great time wandering around looking at all the exhibits. The one that sticks in my mind is, of course, the lion exhibit. We stood behind the retaining wall and barbed wire looking down at the pride when I noticed a small four by six observation window close to the place where several of the cats were napping. We wandered down and stood beside the glass wall for several seconds before I noticed one particular female lion peeking at us from behind a rock. Being a cat owner I recognized the crouch immediately. No sooner had I thought, "That animal is going to pounce" when the lion threw itself at us with all its might. There was a rather comic, if terrifying moment, as the body of the cat was flattened against the windowpane, Shaken, the beast picked itself up and wandered away. D. and I stood in a pool of our own urine for what seemed like several more moments before we gathered ourselves and moved on. Thank god the contractor didn't skimp on the plexi.

Driving to my parents tomorrow several people have encouraged us to "drive safely." Ya know, because a mini-van with four small children, luggage and presents usually encourages one to drive like an nascar racer. The sentiment is actually greatly appreciated but again it makes me think of the night I was driving my 73 convertible ford mustang through downtown Denver on I-25. I remember having a thought that I was going too fast and lightly touched the break. The next thing I knew I had done three complete circles in the middle of the interstate at seventy miles an hour and come to a stop on the side of the highway perpendicular to the road just as two eighteen wheelers screamed past me in quick succession. "Black Ice" I thought. I remained relatively unfazed until I rolled down the window. As soon as the cool night winter air hit my face I broke out into tears and didn't regain composure until I heard the sound of an SUV's horn honking beside me. They were checking to see If I was alright. I waved at them, rolled the window back up, tugged at my seat belt and limped into Greeley an hour later still shaken.

the lion sleeps

I woke up painfully early this morning, around 4:30. Unable to coax myself back into sleep I lay on the couch listening to the groans and squeaks of the house. The "silence" was broken but the thump of little feet plopping down out of bed and scurrying down the hall. The girls are still young enough that they each have their own distinctive shuffle. G. crawled up beside me on the couch and showing none of her fathers resistance to sleep was quickly murmuring dove-like coos punctuated by little wheezes and gasps. As sweet as my daughter is in these moments there is one thing for certain, I would never be able to sleep now. Little elbows and knees are the equivalent of sleeping with a bag of stones. I suppose the easiest solution is to lead her back to her own bed and then make for mine and hope not to disturb J. or baby. But I have never been, well, resolute in executing this kind of plan.

Sleep is precious, and yet I seem to continually make poor choices when it comes to acquiring any. Some of the problem, to be sure, is born of the best intentions. I will usually wake two or three times in a night. Usually once between twelve and two, and then again closer to morning between five and seven. Once woken it usually takes time to fall back to sleep and am often fearful of waking J. during these periods of restlessness. The quickest solution is to move to the couch. However this avenue can be blocked if one of the girls, in their own sleepwalking daze has managed to stumble there before me. If this is the case, I usually opt to take their bed instead, unless, of course it is G. who happens to sleep on a top bunk, the ladder to which requires a kind of acrobatic grace to ascend which I utterly lack at two in the morning, much less any other time. The other option is couch number two which shares none of the comfy qualities of its neighbor. Basically I have become like a house cat, roaming through the house in search of a nice quiet place to lay down for a few hours, my only strength is that I try to keep consecutive hours of rest and not nod off at odd hours of the day curled up on the divan or in the red chair that no one ever sit in unless guests have taken all other available seating.

I keep telling myself that these little interruptions of sleep will pass as the kids get older, but I suspect the truth is that I am teaching myself bad habits that could last a long time. My Grandfather was asleep by eight o'clock every night and up before four in the morning. "It is the best time to get anything done" he used to tell me. My father seems to share in his father's propensity for early mornings. As a teenager I would literally train myself to sleep later and later in the mornings, only to rise to my father's recriminations. I suppose at the time I thought it was because he was jealous, but I suspect now it was because he had trained himself to sleep in the one way that best suited his lifestyle.

My god, can you imagine? I have always supposed that like myself and my dear wife, most of us are struggling to get the prescribed eight hours and long for those mythic saturdays when we can eek out just a few hours more. Could you imagine getting enough sleep every night? It would be like finding the perfect job with the corner office. I am envious of people who rise and fall with their internal clocks, always managing to find the exact right amount of sleep to fit their day. Surely there can't be such a person? If there is, I think I would hate them.

Holi-daze

Woke up this morning feeling feeling fine, totally unprepared for the day ahead. That is the strange thing about life, you can wake up one day and, whether you know it or not, it might be you last day on earth. Other days are more pleasant. They can be full of unsuspected surprises, or they can be like today.

"You are a liar Daddy."

and then

"Make me Pancakes."

and then

"Bring me my clothes."

and when I didn't take the bait on any of these, it was

"Arrrrrrunnnnnnngghhhhhhhh...." for five minutes

Later, holiday traffic tried to kill me, small children seem completely incapable of understanding the concept of the lollipop bribe, and a book store clerk seemed obsessed with offering me service, even after I had shooed him away for the sixth time. It is all madness I tell you. But not all the time.

J. and I went out the other night.

"I think I am dead" I told her.
"Why?"
"Everything is going so well. Nothing ever goes this perfectly." I beamed.
"Am I dead too?"
"You have to decide that for yourself."

Some days I wish the universe would make up its mind, having a great date with my wife one moment, only to be cast down into shade where we are denied, like Tantalus, even the simplest pleasures of life in the next moment.

"Don't get comfortable" I think to myself. "O.K" I think, but It feels like a lie. When you love life how do you convince yourself to mistrust it? Conversely when you hate life how do you ever trust it again?

When I was sixteen I took everything in my parents medicine cabinet because I was furious with life. Nothing, it turns out later, was fatal. The nurses were very sympathetic. "Anything I can get you" she said "anything at all." This offer to a sixteen year old boy by a blond twenty something nurse filled many a fantasy while I lay "recuperating" in the hospital.

The problem with making the decision to take your own life is that, for many years afterwards, it becomes THE solution to virtually any major problem. Once you have made this choice it becomes a reasonable possibility that must be weighed alongside all others.

Today I am fortunate that the only thing I thought about was calling J. We are both running around trying to get ready to go to my parents house for a week. There are so many little chores to get done, it seems at times like they can't all be accomplished before we leave. "How are you doing" was the tenor of the conversation.

"If you're taking a trip to Crazyville, I will see you when you get there."

She laughs. Holidays are crazy. Everyone says so. Sometime good and other times nuts. You have to take the good with the bad, roll with the punches, let it be like water off a ducks back, and so forth. I'd like to say I look into the rearview mirror and see my daughter smiling at me and think "thank god I wasn't successful" but I can't,I am still much too selfish and I still get way too nuts to think this way. But I am thankful to be alive, and believe me that is progress I can be thankful for.

I can't remember the last time I thought about taking my life. It's been a few years at least. Still, I hate the feeling I get when it seems like the universe is trying to pick a fight with me. I want to explain to it:

"Look I am not going to crash my car, fight with my daughter, or buy that overpriced sweater even if it is on sale."

However, I suspect that, like the antagonistic diatribe of my daughter, the universe doesn't really care whether I engage or not. It is going to do whatever it is going to do, and all that is left for me is that I get to decide which part of the conversation I want to join.

Urban Zombies

Another early morning. So far Xmas break feels about like any other week, though J. and I were able to sneak out last night, grab a couple of yellowtail hand rolls and pop into a mall for a few hours of shopping.

"I am done with my mall shopping." she said afterward with a bit of satisfied glee. I think anytime one who can say this understands it comes with a certain sense of relief.

D. and I are at her swim meet again this morning. Two events. They should go quickly. Watching her warm up from the bleachers I can't help but think of my own brief swim team experience.

Like an echo in my mind, "I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me" loops over and over again.

We moved to Sewanee, TN when I was D.'s age. The move interrupted my swim team experience. I kept swimming for for one more year but the bullies made practice almost impossible. Every day I would come home with new bruises, towel welts, missing articles of clothing, flat bicycle tires and an assorted set of tears, stories in injustice and a deflated self esteem.

My Grandmother gave me a Daisy brand BB/pellet pistol when I was nine. When I gave up swimming I spent most of my time hiking around the woods behind our house taking aim at the myriad of targets to vent my frustration.

"What is it Daddy?"
"It is a bird, Baby."
"What happen to it?"
"I don't know, I think a cat might have mangled it."
"What do we do?"
"Well" I said with a sigh "I guess we will have to put it out of its misery."

I climbed into my car and took a pocket knife out of the glove box. D. watched on with a kind of clinical fascination as I lifted the blade in one hand even as I steadied the bird with my other.

"Will it hurt?"
"It is already suffering honey. We are going to put an end to it."

I reached down and drew the edge of the knife long its neck in one smooth gesture. I pulled my hand away. The body of the bird lay motionless for a moment.

"Is it dead?"
No sooner had I said yes when the body of the bird shuddered and came still. D. freaked out.
"What was that!" she shouted in near hysterics.
I grabbed her and put my arm around her. How do you explain the death shudder to a nine year old?

Walking though the woods with my gun I lifted the sights to the edge of a broken branch 20 yards away and squeezed the trigger. The "branch" fell off the tree and and began to flop and cry on the ground below. I had shot a bird. The pellet hit it in the head, but because the gun was not very powerful, and the shot had been taken from a distance, the bird was only wounded. I hadn't killed it.

I walked up to the bird. It was laying on a bed of leaves heaving great gulps of air, its chest rising and falling rhythmically. I felt like crying. I looked around. I was all alone. No one had seen it happen. I felt like running. The bird began to flop again. It totally freaked me out. Finally it came to a rest. I knew what I had to do. I lowered the sight of the gun level with the birds head. Its black eye seemed to stare right at me. Slowly I pulled the trigger.

ghosts

Pulling into the driveway last week, I noticed the back gate of our neighbors house open. The house has been abandoned since she died last spring. I peered over the fence into the overgrown yard. The back door was wide open. Tentatively I decided to investigate.

"Hello? Is anyone in here?" The house was in total disarray. There was a pile of CD's and VHS tapes in the middle of the living room, the labels torn or missing. Most of the furnishings had been cleared out. I walked into the kitchen. "Hello?" Empty wine bottles lined the rack above the stove. I thought about my neighbor sitting on her front porch smoking her menthol slims and drinking a bud light. "Hello?" The noise of dripping water was coming from down the hall. The bathroom? From all apparent reports she had died in the bathroom. The investigation was over. I decided to leave and call the police.

D. took the news that I had ventured into the house very poorly. "You mean you went INSIDE?" Ever since she has developed a slight phobia of our hall bath.

Morning. Rosy fingered dawn was stretching the arthritis out of her joints.

"Hang on baby, I left my coffee inside."

D. looked from me to Laura's vacant house to the car. "I'm coming with you!" she said.

The forty-five minute drive to her swim meet was punctuated with long tired silences. "So, let me ask you a question." I said.

"Yeah?"
"Is it, you believe in ghosts, and they creep you out or do you just have a bad case of the willies?"
"Both."
"Yeah." I said, the fog of morning creeping over my brain. "So what do you think ghosts are?" I asked, probing gently.

"Souls."

"Hmmm. No wonder you're so jittery. That would creep me out too."

No response. "Do you want to know what I think ghosts are?"

Sigh. "I guess so." she complained.

"Impressions. Like footprints in the sand." She thought about this for a minute, but didn't seem eager to talk more about it. Finally I decided to add a parting thought. "Have you ever had a conversation with someone who was talking in their sleep?"

"Yeah."
"I'll bet it seemed to make sense at first and then got really strange."
"You want to know who I had a conversation with?"
"Do you want to tell me?"
"G." she said excitedly. "I asked her what she was doing, and she said 'popcorn' and fell back to sleep."
"That's funny."
"Yeah" she said smiling.
"My point is, ghosts are like that, impressions, like footprints, but footprints can't get up and walk around. And while a soul's impression is more... complex, ultimately it is just an impression, It might seem like it is interacting with you, but pretty soon it stops making sense,"
"I guess."

Silence. I thought about ghosts for a while, trying out my description with my own experience: walking into my grandparents apartment after my grandfather died, or my grandmother's body lying motionless on a hospital bed. The thoughts feel foreign, strange. What were these memories?

I looked at the clock and made a few mental calculations involving distance and driving time.

I thought about people I had known, people I might never see again, or have rediscovered on the internet, on face-book, or in blogs. Sometimes these re-encounters feel so familiar and other times not.

Descartes compared memory to impressions in wax. Its funny, the description seemed so medieval when I first read it that I immediately dismissed it out of hand. Memories seemed more fragile than plastic, at least at the time. Like wisps of smoke floating on the breeze before a strong wind came along and extinguished them forever.

Nowadays memories have more life in them. They can pop up unexpectedly, or dissolve before your very eyes. There is a kind of melancholy whimsey about them and a plasticity. I seem to be forever mooshing them into one form or another only to have them spring back to their old selves with startling longevity.

I stare forward through the windshield. "Ghosts." I mutter, turning off the highway.

"Daddy! Please, I am trying to sleep!"

Who are we?

There is an old woman sitting crouched in the corner. Her wrinkled hands on her cheeks, she is close to death. Beside her are a young woman, and a strange bird, possibly a dove. Though she is at the end of her life, she sits on the left most edge of the canvass; she is the beginning of the story, the past and the future. In her, we are meant to see ourselves, our mortality.

The overcast morning is still and dark and everything around is silent, a kind of glorious moment for reflection, and all I want to do is curl up beneath heavy down blankets and sleep like ol’ Rip van Winkle himself.

I think about sleep a lot. I think about it in the mornings, climbing out of bed early to get the children ready for the day. I think about it in the evening as I slumber down the hallway, past the boxes of unfinished projects, unshelved toys, bits of paper and unswept dust bunnies that can wait till morning.

I woke up and hour early Friday and drove to school to take my final. Take seems like the wrong verb for an experience that is akin to a defendant sitting in the witness box being grilled by a group of seasoned prosecutors hell bent on sending you up the river.

“Well, you passed.” My professor said “but what was up with that piece of shit artist statement?”

I emailed the statement to no less than four of the seven faculty members the week before looking for feedback and didn’t receive a single response. Well, that is unless you count the email from one faculty member the night before explaining that he wasn’t going to look at the statement sent a week before because he was far to busy today.

Still, criticism aside, I passed, which makes me wonder why I am picking the experience apart in my mind. I begin to wonder if I am only happy when I am complaining. That and the surreal response I had to the whole damn affair.

I spent Saturday with D. at a swim meet as an official timing the competitors. The chlorine air made my eyes burn and my head throb. The stopwatch in my hand, the pool beneath my feel, the mechanical pulse of the start gun, watch, wait, listen. Later, in the evening J. and I went to the church Christmas social at another couples home. J. left to pick up the children and I stayed behind for another hour chatting and having fun. The feeling of exhaustion swept over me all at once and I began to make my goodbyes.

“Where are you going? If you wait a while we can give you a ride.”
“I think I will walk. It’s only seven blocks. I think I’ll manage.”
“Are you sure?”

The cold air was like a tonic.

The next day at church there seemed to be sentiment of general amusement at my decision.
“It was only seven blocks. You would think I was walking home in a blizzard.”
“Nobody walks in the city” said J.
I tried to picture myself, as I thought they might have, lying passed out in someone’s lawn, or huddled over a hot air grate trying to fend off the chill in the air.

The Chair said his piece and walked out of the studio. I was left there standing like I had been gut punched with my mouth gaping open in disbelief. I fumbled for the edge of the door and pushed it shut just as the first spasm of tears began to well up out of me. The feeling was one of confusion, panic and fear and I pushed them down again determined to make myself feel happy, but instead felt only the dry stale air in my lungs as I heaved a great sigh. I put my hand on the door knob and imagined for a moment that I would cross the threshold in jubilation, but as the door swung wide I had a kind of panicky feeling like I had been inside for hours and that people had begun to wonder where I had gone.

I think of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

There are many interpretations of this work, as there are of life. Many eyes seem poised to make an accounting for our behavior, some favorably, other with a bemused indifference.

"I believe that this canvas not only surpasses all my preceding ones, but that I shall never do anything better—or even like it.”

Standing in front of my installation the night before the final I felt an indescribable feeling of accomplishment. Everything we have in life goes into these moments. There is a kind of clarity that comes from these experiences, from intense focus brought about be repetition, the cold air on your face, and by the feeling of having done the best you can and given all you have. How can someone saying "Well, you passed" compare? I think about Gauguin's painintg full of women, full of vitality, of potential, all is creation, birth. The end is but a beginning.

Merry X-mas

The posting for my job went up this afternoon. (That's right- I get to reapply!) I took the job on a temporary full time basis with the understanding that I was welcome to resubmit my application along with everyone else in 1 year.

Forecast note:
While the Doubt Bunnies are inevitably bound to dance a jig across my front lawn, there are none about in in the foreseeable future.