Mary in the snow

I’d passed her a dozen times or so on my way home from work over the past month. She was always there on her knees in the front yard as the early dark fell. I scarcely noticed her most days—just another ornament lost in a jumble of giant inflatable snowmen or illuminated candy canes. She was just part of the scenery.

But two day after Christmas as I headed home from the office, something stopped me in my tracks. She was alone now—no Joseph looking placidly over her shoulder and no baby glowing on the ground before her. Now her lowered gaze fell only on blank snow and her face, once seemingly serene, communicated grief instead.

She invoked another image, a painting I’d seen depicting the hardships of the Mormon pioneers, a windswept figure standing ankle deep in the snow, looking down at a small brown square of earth. A mother suffering the bitterest loss.

This association brings a darker tone to the Christmas spirit. We celebrate the baby’s birth precisely because of his divine and redeeming death. The mother who was called to bear the baby will be called to bear the premature loss of her child. In short order, Herod’s slaughter of the innocents will bring that specific hardship to many other mothers in the city of Bethlehem. The little town so peaceful and calm in all the Christmas carols will be the scene of tyrannical brute force, desolation, chaos, and the weeping of the bereft. Mary will be spared the role of grieving mother for several more years, but her turn will come at the foot of the cross.

It feels strange that we can take so much joy out of what brought her so much grief, sorrow, and pain. But her life is a testament to that truth—that sorrow precedes joy, and that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

hairy situation

If hair were currency, how would you spend yours? Would you grow it long and flowing, or keep it close-shorn?

Money wouldn't grow on trees, it would grow on heads.

Hats would be more popular, and wallets less. And hair thieves armed with razors and scissors would be rampant in locker rooms. Hair nets would be a must-have fashion accessory, especially while you were travelling overseas. Better yet, a turban.

Every month there would be a stick-up at the salon. Of course, the hairdressers would be more like bankers, and you'd likely keep a safety deposit box there. You'd still want the latest look, but you'd keep the extra hair put away someplace safe.

You could sign a contract for extensions that you promised to pay back with natural growth--plus interest of course.

The wealthiest men would have voluminous beards, flaunting their wealth and their good fortune, while those impoverished baby-faced boys would look on longingly, rubbing their hands over bare cheeks, or weak stubble, and wishing for a better lot in life.

And the women? Why wax away prosperity in the name of vanity? Men would be after those with the bushiest eyebrows and perhaps a faint little mustache, too. Hairlessness would be undesirable in either gender. It's not a lot, but maybe it's worth more. But we'd all be walking that line between beauty and wealth; fortune and fashion.

You'd still wish on eyelashes the way you wish on pennies, and strands of hair stuck to your couch cushions would replace the spare change buried in the crevices.

And what about pet owners? Owning a cat might be as lucrative as owning a cow or your own chickens--maybe more so. You'd brush your cat when you needed a little extra spending money, or shave it when you needed a lot. And you'd never let the thing outdoors again.

If hair were currency, you'd have a period of your life where your earning power was high and then it would taper off, leaving you to depend on your hairier relatives. You'd watch your hairline even more grimly, worrying about the future, hoping you've set aside enough to last you through your twilight years.

Let's put it this way, if your bank balance were your hair, would you be bald? Would you already owe next month's growth on things you bought last Saturday? Would you just have enough to scrape by, admiring your polished scalp every time a bill came due, wondering what you can do to grow it faster?

Maybe fish oil, I heard that helps.

Your hair grows at a regular rate so you could learn to budget. See how far you could stretch an inch, or how far you could fudge it.

It's really too bad hair can't be spent like money, but in at least some respects, maybe it would be better to treat money more like hair -- be grateful for what you have, and be careful what you do with it.

passing in hallways

We do a lot of passing in hallways around here--
a lot of glancing up, sideways, lowering the eyes,
timing their upward tic for the most accurate moment
while passing, smiling and uttering the shortest of "hi"s.

How much do you really have to say to each other anyway?
Strangers inhabiting the same space for the requisite forty hours.
You know names, vague details about a life outside, a family,
or sometimes only where their desk is.

You can't just stop in the hallway and strike up a conversation--
it's too late for that, and besides, you both have things to do,
so you smile, nod, utter a name, sometimes not fully vocalized,
when your voice was unprepared and you just croak instead,

sometimes just a sound that resembles hey or hi, sometimes
just a smile with closed lips and eyes that catch each other
maybe a dozen times a week, with furtive, carefully timed flashes
while passing in hallways, and you say only nothing,
because what else is there to say?

are you there?

"Are you still there? I can't hear you. If you are there, please press any key."
"Are you still there? I still can't hear you. If you are there, please press any key."
The computerized caller had hit a snag, receiving a response from my computerized answerer, and the resulting voicemail at first annoyed me that yet another computer had been calling. It seems every time I answer the phone, it is a computer reminding me about my prescription, or about my library books, or about my health coverage.
And if it's not a computer voice urging me to speak to it like a normal person or at least press a button, it's the nearly-as-robotic recording of a person. Even when they are animated about changes to the auto insurance laws or about the cruise tickets I've got coming to me, I hang up in disgust that the commercials are starting to come through on my private phone now. There are days that I would just as soon be rid of the thing if the only calls I'm going to get are commercials and computers.
Then there are the real people on a live call that only sound like recordings. They're sitting in some giant dark room far below weak, pale flourescent beams, watching their computer screen as it dials, dials, dials, bringing far away voices into their headsets, voices interrupted during dinner, during a show, while driving, at the office, or just pulled away from the newspaper or magazine they were reading moments before.
I did that job. I got so many answering machines--mostly recorded computer voices, the same two or three machines seemed to answer phones all over the country. I'd click a button on my screen to call back and then turn to read another few paragraphs of my textbook while my computer dialed the next number. I did my best to sound human and engaging on the phone, but I've gotten so many calls from someone rattling their script in the 7th hour of their 8 hour shift, the third or fourth shift of the same script, the same call, the same opening over and over and over, hundreds of times a day. Do something mechanical long enough and it's hard not to become a machine. That's what we're programmed for.
I learned that the human voice has a frequency range of about 13,000 hertz and that the telephone can only transmit about 6,000 hertz of that range, which explains why everyone's voices sound altered over the phone. The upper and lower threshholds of our voices are dropped out, preserving the core range, squeezing it down and pressing it through the wires, beams, and various tiny computerized components to be spit out as a close facsimile on the other side. It's pretty incredible even with its shortcomings, that a thin artificial diaphragm can so closely replicate the sound of a deep sigh or a genuine burst of laughter. But that very compression is one of the things that can trick you into thinking
I can still hear the eerie computer's voice asking if I am there. I wonder how many times a day the computer on the other end begs someone's voicemail to press any key - any key. Perhaps the next advance in communication technology will be a computerized answering service programmed to answer the phone as if it were us, a computer that knows enough about our buying habits and preferences to respond to surveys, and sophisticated enough to convert important reminders about due dates and appointments into calendar notifications. Then those high-powered business people won't say "I'll have my people call your people," they'll say more truthfully, "I'll have my machine call your machine."
Whenever that technology comes along, all it will do will be to replace a strange computer with a familiar one. It will just be one more technological buffer between people, building yet another wall and making it even harder to interface with another actual human being. Meanwhile, the commercial people will find more and more invasive ways to get through, no matter how sophisticated our defenses, no matter how isolated we make ourselves, until, every time October rolls around, you'll be curled up in the dark basement of your soundproof chamber pressing your hands against your skull trying to keep the campaigns from beaming telepathically into your consciousness: "if you are there, please think any number."

air pocket

air pocket in the toothpaste tube
pops out a little extra gel onto
upturned bristles. I look down
the neck into a black cavity
like nothing I've seen
before. Like if you chopped
my head off, drained me out,
scooped out the bones. Yeah,
it would look like that.
Of course, I've never really looked
into the neck of the toothpaste
before -- not so deliberately.
It's one of those inevitabilities,
something you picked up a long
time ago and only have to think
about once every few months
when its thoroughly flattened,
exhausted. Even then there's that
tiny bit of paste left in the neck,
a barrier to the emptiness behind.

What is a hole made of? It's made
of nothing. Absence has no substance,
so can a hole exist?

I don't know how the tube gets filled
some assembly line churns them out
robotic arms and everything. Even
without a human in sight, there is room
for imperfection, for a pocket of air,
for a hole.

leviathan

a picture of stillness

scattered cars parked placidly

under amber lights, the owners

wandering lit hallways or sitting

at security desks on the night

shift in the shadow shrouded

building hunched on the lot's

edge. Shrubberies have stopped

stirring, birds not yet stirred to

chirp on the dawn.

                              A hulking black

shape lumbers in, white eyes flashing,

sweeping the blacktop, a behemoth

disregarding the careful ordered

lines, rumbling through the quiet

to the gated dumpsters. A servile

leviathan hungrily roaming pre-dawn

streets, noisily devouring refuse

without a shade of subtlety

or recognition.

whate'er thou art

Whate'er thou art, act well thy part.
An Italian lawyer in Cagliari told me much the same thing, using a bit more colorful language. "Qualsiasi cosa sia, sii uno con palle!"
He and I were going on exchanges, something I don't have many memories of doing with members. I don't recall where we were headed or any other details, just driving down the road that led by the church, via Peretti. During the day, you could stand in front of the church by the fig tree from which I had my first taste of that unusual fruit and look across via Peretti to see the hilltop Castello di San Michele. You could even see it from inside the church, where once President Pacini had asked me, gesturing out the open window of the classroom where he was interviewing me, if I could picture a temple in place of where that twelfth-century castle stood. But at the time of this advice, we were driving along in the dark and all I saw were street lights, traffic signals, and illuminated patches of roads and sidewalks, blurring by beyond the windshield.
I don't even remember the name of that man I was riding with. Fratello something. But I remember those words and they sting me sometimes when I'm feeling like I am not being whatever it is I'm supposed to be con palle.

I watched a YouTube video in which someone animated excerpts from a radio interview with the late David Foster Wallace. "The whole thing about perfectionism is that--perfectionism is very dangerous because, of course, if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything, because doing anything results -- it's actually very tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is."
The quote hit home hard enough that I typed it out, making allowances for Wallace's wandering way of getting to the point, and printed it on a strip of paper. He goes on to share his experience as a young tennis player. He says he played it "enough to feel like it was really beautiful." He apparently got quite good, but he never went pro, because, as he puts it, "you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point." When asked why he passed up on a potential career in tennis, he elaborated on his view of people who play seriously. "People who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean, you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10 to 12 hours a day. The difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything."
Wallace clearly illustrates what he sees as the ideal tennis player--a pro tennis-player who has chosen a path and devoted oneself to it performs that way. The goal is to win championships and get sponsors and be very, very good, which requires certain actions. To be a tennis player con palle (forgive the pun), there is a clear-cut path.

The anecdote takes me back to my own college days, where I confronted my own limitations in another field: that of music. I was getting good on the saxophone. My instructor, who held a PhD in woodwind studies, told me I had what it took to be a music major if I had chosen that route, that of all his non-major students, I showed the most potential. After auditioning for the top jazz band one semester, he told me that I was good enough to be first alto, but that he had chosen another player for that seat simply because he was a music major and needed the experience of leading the section.
I would say I had played enough to see the saxophone and jazz music as something really beautiful, and yet I had reached a point where I either needed to make the decision to commit to it entirely, monastically, or not to. I either needed to become a saxophone player con palle, following the footsteps of greats like John Coltrane who could practice a single pentatonic scale in a small, windowless room for hours on end, or not. I opted to not go down that road, not willing to make that sacrifice to something that would provide negligible career opportunities.
My playing has declined measurably as a result; it had to. Though I made the choice deliberately, it is a fork in the road that I reflect on frequently, wishing I knew where that other branching path would have led me, because the path I have taken has been meandering for a long while now, and I have not yet discovered what it is I am.

Everything comes in two versions: the ideal version and the real version. I think the ideal is what we--all of us in tacit complicity--agree that a thing should be, what we wish it was. Though I may have my own personal ideal concept of what a tennis player is, it is based largely on what everyone else agrees a tennis player should be. And it's not just tennis players or jazz musicians, it's every role. Saul Bellow's Augie March pointed out that everyone constructs their own version of reality, and that most things that don't align with their version of reality tend to get filtered out in an effort to preserve the reality that they have constructed. Discord and difficulty ensue when one is forced to measure up those differences.
My versions come in conflict with the real versions every day. For example, an ideal father and husband is a provider - not just a barely satisfactory one, but one that secures the necessities with plenty to spare. He's Cliff Huxtable, or some other by-gone TV dad, one with a steady, satisfying, rewarding, challenging job and lots of leisure time. Maybe he's not a doctor, but he's at least somebody's boss, especially his own, because being somebody's subordinate is a shortcoming. Because being a man con palle brings with it the necessity to be top of the heap in some way, even though that heap is all on the same team.
Wherever this wandering path of mine is leading, that ideal outcome seems like the least likely of destinations. Like wandering a downhill path through wood and expecting to end up on top of a mountain. It seems unattainable from my current vantage point. What's worse, I'm not positive I can say I am doing "my best" under current circumstances, cowed by fear and uncertainty as I am. The best I can say is that I am doing something, which is not the same as acting well my part. I'll have to abide by another popular maxim that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until we are able to do it better. That one at least offers some encouragement.

I think all of this is what John Mayer is singing about when he says he is bigger than his body gives him credit for. There is so much packed inside, so many unrealistic expectations, false hopes, grand fantasies crowded in this meaty glove of a body, it feels like it must spill over somewhere, hover around me like a cloud of flies. Visions of myself being something con palle--it doesn't matter what, because all of them feel like they are simultaneously within me and just beyond me. Each vision is a spark kindled in my aspiring center and then set floating out of reach, out of sight. But that bursting feeling remains, the pressure of that great furnace, strictly internal, that urge to do something, to be something. To grapple those weaknesses into submission and achieve some work of noble note..
Something inside me feels a sense of nascent greatness, nurtured and probably blown out of proportion by inordinate levels of praise from teachers, grandparents, and too many inspirational quotes defying me to be anything less than great. But all those expectations get to be burdensome when things don't shape up in quite the way they are painted. And every single person who succeeds at something I mean to do or hope to do but haven't yet adds a brick to that load.

One consolation is that this struggle is anything but unique. John Mayer, Alfred Lord Tennyson, David Foster Wallace, that Italian brother in Cagliari, the anonymous author of that proverb, must all have experienced and slogged through the same confusing quagmire. Every individual probably experiences multiple levels of dissatisfaction, discouragement, and disappointment - it seems universal, part of the human experience. Their examples suggest that these feelings can become fuel.
I see now that the tendency is to get overly hung up on the first part of that phrase - what is it I am supposed to be anyway? But I'm beginning to think it is the second part that I should focus on. Previously I've seen that first clause as restrictive, as step one--first discover who you are. But there is a good chance that the author meant exactly the opposite: it doesn't matter what or who you are in the least, so long as you act well your part. That part may be hazy and undefined, it may not have a clear label complete with instructions and expectations, but you can't let that prevent you from performing. And not in a false way, but in the most sincere way you can. Put aside the fantasies and ideals, the pie-in-the-sky, paralyzing what-ifs and if-onlys, and deal in a real and admirable way with the daily realities and necessities.
If I can master that, then maybe that is how I will realize the first part - maybe that is the only way to finally define and declare what thou art.

the very trees obey us

"Wherefore, we search the prophets, and we have many revelations and the spirit of prophecy; and having all these witnesses we obtain a hope, and our faith becometh unshaken, insomuch that we truly can command in the name of Jesus and the very trees obey us, or the mountains, or the waves of the sea."
(Jacob 4:6)

Jacob is a fascinating individual in the Book of Mormon. Younger brother to Nephi, born in the wilderness, he grew up watching the widening gap between his eldest brothers. Reading his book also shows a poetic tendency in his writing, such as the verse above.
Before tonight's adult session of stake conference, that last line has always struck me as the borderline supernatural miracle like Jesus walking on water or producing food out of nowhere. It brought visions of Tolkien-esque animate trees. We recently read Prince Caspian, in which Narnian trees wade through the Earth like water rather than on the surface.
I pictured mountains grinding across the landscape or waves parting to admit hosts of believers to cross on dry ground--the truly spectacular manifestations that stretch the limits of imagination and belief.
But tonight a congregation member commenting on Jacob's degree of faith and commitment, reminded everyone in passing about how Jacob had crossed the sea. That simple phrase struck a chord with me and made me think:
Trees provided the timbers of Nephi's ship. Mountains provided ore to make tools and other hardware. Waves provided passage to a promised land. All three were made subject to the will of Nephi and his family; all served a purpose in their journey.
The verse says they could "command in the name of Jesus," and the elements would obey. That doesn't necessarily mean that these otherwise inanimate objects need to spring to life to fulfill that command. Perhaps their obedience--their service--looked much less remarkable.
I'm not saying that the other kind of display is impossible. I love Elder Talmage's writing in Articles of Faith:

"No earnest thinker, no sincere investigator supposes that he has yet learned of all the forces existing in and operating upon matter; indeed, the observed phenomena of nature, yet wholly inexplicable to him, far outnumber those for which he has devised even a partial explanation. There are powers and forces at the command of God, compared with which electricity is as the pack-horse to the locomotive, the foot messenger to the telegraph, the raft of logs to the ocean steamer... These mighty agencies, and the mightier ones still to man unknown, and many, perhaps, to the present condition of the human mind unknowable, do not constitute the Holy Ghost, but are the agencies ordained to serve His purposes" (p. 146).

I believe in the possibility for the supernatural manifestations implied by Elder Talmage and by the verse above; however I think it is much more difficult and much more important to acknowledge the miracles that look mundane, but which are made possible and realized by the type of unshaken faith Jacob describes.

men at work

Took a short walk this afternoon as a sort of reward for staying focused at work as well as an effort to avoid future visits to the chiropractor. Since working a desk job I've had at least two visits, during which he explained to me that the long hours of sitting cause the vertebrae in my spine to settle into one another, eventually pinching a nerve which causes the muscles to spasm and tighten up in an effort to protect the damaged area. The first time this happened I found myself crawling around my in-laws' house because standing up straight was simply not an option.
My office building is a rarity in this underdeveloped area, surrounded by wide expanses of field put to various uses. Across the street is a weedy field populated with horses that I can see running or grazing at various points of the day from the office windows. Behind and around our office a farmer usually grows corn. This year looks more like hay. Other fields seem to be empty but for wild brush and weeds; someone's real estate that they are waiting to develop when the price is right. Each field is surrounded by uniform wire fences, many of them broken in spots.
In place of sidewalks, most of the roads are lined with gravelly shoulders, dotted with weeds, rocks, and assorted litter. Standout items on my walk today were a hubcap, a rusted bolt, a fine-tipped ball-point pen that I almost stooped to pick up, a used condom, and a dark backpack almost entirely hidden by a bush; I idly wondered if the backpack had been dropped there as part of a drug exchange.
Towards the end of the road, a new office building is being built. Looking from the office across the horse pasture and the trees and roofs of a few residences I can see the cranes working, and occasionally I can catch glimpses of the burnt-yellow machinery creeping through the dirt of the construction site. From the road, I saw steel beams forming the earliest skeleton of the building to come. All office buildings look the same at this stage of development, deep-red I-beams teeming with men in orange vests and neon helmets. I watch these men lowering harnesses, taking measurements, guiding the crane's dangling loads, casually mingling with the giant behemoths that will, in a matter of months, turn this chain-link surrounded wasteland into a new commercial space filled with sedentary office workers like me taking great pains to avoid the chiropractor.
I don't know anything about the men's individual duties, even less about the whole construction process, but I reflect with something close to envy that they don't have to take afternoon walks to keep their vertebrae from compressing. A second later it occurs to me that these men must be a great deal more prone to back injury because of their overly-strenuous jobs than I am from mine. Long hours of heavy lifting, bending, twisting, with scarcely a moment to sit down takes its toll on a body in a very different way. The thought takes most of the envy away with it and leaves me shaking my head at the irony. Each of us picks our own poison.
As I turn back to the office, I see a grey-haired man in a button-up shirt and khaki slacks walkng up the road behind me. I recognize our company's in-house legal counsel and wave my greeting to him. He smiles back and says, "Oh, hi. I felt like coming out to get some air and some sun. I was falling asleep there in my office and just had to get out."
He passes me by, walking along the fence-line of the construction site, throwing glances over at the progress the machines are making, probably envious that those helmeted men aren't on the verge of nodding off up there on the beams of the structure they are wrestling with for their livelihood.

RESERVED PARKING

I remember when they put up the sign. We had been brainstorming some new, free, weekly incentives we could offer to our phone reps; the sign had been Lena's baby, and she had stuck to it as her favorite one. Within days, Jason from maintenance went out and pounded a stake into the grass in front of the nearest parking spot to the door and mounted the pole topped with a horizontal rectangle: "RESERVED PARKING".
Though it drew a lot of questions from the people that worked upstairs, it didn't catch with the reps. It proved a pitiful incentive, mainly because the lot was so small--only 30 spaces or so--and they all got in before it was very full anyway. On top of that, two of our already small team couldn't even use it: there was our epileptic rep who didn't drive, and an older rep who had a handicapped permit and could have her pick of the handicapped stalls, which were closer to the door anyway. Still we held the weekly drawings and doled the spot out to unimpressed employees as if it were some kind of grand prize. Even in the face of their indifference, Lena persisted in her enthusiasm for it.
I left the company for two years, and then came back. In my absence, somehow the spot's purpose changed. Maybe because the team had shrunk still smaller. Or maybe because Lena finally sensed that it had no effect on her reps' behavior. Regardless of the motive, upon my return everyone knew the spot as Marlisse's--Lena's boss. Since Marlisse only comes in three days a week, Lena and another manager take turns parking in it on the off days. It seems so pointless, given the size of the lot, yet everyone in the company abides by the words on that sign--that parking is reserved, and it is not reserved for you.
Ridiculous as it sounds, I hate that spot. I hate that sign. I hate its tightly-kerned black letters shouting in all caps from the off-white base. I hate that it's anchored in the grass instead of lined up uniformly with the Handicapped signs on the sidewalk. I hate the smug superiority it betrays in those three ladies who share it. I have fantasized of stealing the sign under cover of darkness, picturing myself in the role of vigilante returning democracy to the parking lot, but there's no way I would follow through on that. There are cameras on the side of the building that would likely catch me in the act.
Such a small piece of property shouldn't bring such bitterness. Those of us with the sense to see the sign's senselessness should just content ourselves with snickering about those who are fooling themselves into believing the spot constitutes some elite privilege. But it can be hard to brush off someone else's condescension. I could care less about the parking, but I hate thinking of them thinking me to be beneath them.
Instead of playing the desperado, I display my distaste for the sign and its politics by parking as far away from the building as I can. I prefer to park facing north, partly to keep the sun off my windshield, and partly to point purposefully away from the sign.
Even this week when all three of them are overseas, the spot stays empty, the sign shielding it from encroachment by the unworthy. Any one of us could park in that spot without consequence; in a way, parking there could be my best gesture of defiance towards the spot's absentee regulars. But instead, I keep my distance, locking eyes with my fellow co-workers in the parking lot as we walk in, wordlessly communicating our commitment to considering one another equals.

smoke stain

smoke stained sky
heralds a battle
raging. somewhere west
soot-and-sweat faced
men grapple nature's
elemental fury, unembodied
enemy, purposeless,
insatiable destruction.
shovels, boots, masks,
hoses, trucks, maps,
lines, brush, heat,
ash, flame, smoke
spilling into blue
valley sky, troubling
tranquil white shapes,
filtering even the sun
into narrow, hard-colored
beams casting sharp
shadows, violent echoes
of the dark cataclysm
beyond the mountains.

fist bump

Shirtless in the kiddy pool,
we conversed, covering
books, movies, stuff we were
writing, anything but my
discomfort at being discovered
so uncovered, unexpectedly
by someone I only see
at church. And he's in much better shape, too.

We stood shoulder to shoulder
(mine are hairy and scarred, his smooth
but mercifully not any more muscular)
glancing only occasionally at
one another, watching instead
our boys splash around, mine
with a sagging swimsuit, unconcerned
about his crack hanging out
no matter how many times he performs
that little hitch I tell him to practice.

Just as the conversation dried up
his son was grabbing at his hand
tugging him away from imminent
awkward silence. I lean down,
offer my knuckles in parting to the six-year-old,
and I'm taken aback for some reason,
when I straighten and see my friend's fist
held out to me in the same gesture, as if to say
it's cool. you're cool. we're cool.

moving like trees

You look out from the second floor window;
all the trees are moving,
bobbing, waving, looking more like
underwater plants behind glass at an aquarium
dancing in invisible currents of that thick medium
they thrive in and breathe like air, undulating,
moving like trees
letting the wind through their leaves
as another storm rolls in

rekindling

That distinctive intro blasts
from the ballroom doors, strings hopping
over syncopated electric bass, rock drums
in a simple progression, echoing off convention
center walls and wildly colored hotel carpets
to lodge in my chest with that tender ache, nostalgia.

I always hated dances. Avoided them usually, sweated
through them when I had a date to put my arms
around, hand on the bare skin between shoulder blades
in that shuffling teenage sea of angst, fear (loneliness),
naivete, insecurity, and desire.

Through the doors I glimpse the ladies, forty-somethings,
decked out, gabbing loudly and trotting out decades-old
dances, drawing open that window to feel again
what once they felt so electrically that it has been forever
burned into their being.

They will never be old. We
will never be old. The melody of youth
will remain etched in our essence, reminding us
of that intense rawness that fades, but not beyond
occasional temporary rekindling.

grinchiness

The first thing my speakers blasted out at me as I backed out of the driveway this morning was the punk cover of Sweet Caroline by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, a reminder of my efforts to entertain and impress the 14-to-16-year-old scouts I had driven home from our bowling trip the night before. I must have been about that same age when I first heard Doug Bosted playing the band's punk versions of familiar Broadway songs in the church parking lot. Fitting as it had felt last night, I only tolerated the raucousness a few minutes before reaching down and switching my stereo from CD to my more mature radio selection, specifically NPR.
If I hadn't left later than usual for work, this would have held me, but it was after 9 and Diane Rehm only had a few seconds of airplay before I decided I wasn't going to put up with her. On the freeway on-ramp I switched stations again. Number 2 was an independent radio station characterized by their commitment to local and independent musicians. Their selections were often hit or miss for me and this morning was a real miss.
The next station promised a bland contemporary hit that I couldn't stomach; the station after that apparently had changed its programming from oldies to heavy metal in the year since I had resorted to tuning to it for a feel-good fix. I hit the final station preset on my radio, an FM newsradio show just breaking for commercial. After catching myself involuntarily singing along to the Nate Wade Subaru commercial, I broke off mid-jingle and exclaimed "NOISE!", simultaneously powering the radio off a mile and a half from work.
The first exclamation of "noise" immediately triggered memories of Mt Crumpet's irascible inhabitant, and, in his honor, I carried through the remainder of his grumble, "Noise, noise, NOISE!" Though he's not the good guy, I felt a kinship to that character in that moment. Driving generally puts me on the side of Ebeneezer Scrooge, that musical misanthropist that sang "I hate people" in one of my favorite film adaptations of Dickens' Christmas Carol. But this morning's irritation had less to do with the other drivers as with the entire Who village inhabiting my car's stereo radio and broadcasting uninterrupted clamor up through the speakers at me.
The Grinch's aggravation apparently arose from a single day's disturbance, but it is year round on this mountaintop. I have access to a stream of noise so incessant that it would drive the Grinch out of his skull in seconds. Worse still, there's no heart-enlarging epiphany awaiting one willing to endure the drivel; it's much more likely to achieve the opposite.
Lucky for me, there's also a power button.

...or not to shave

You don't grow a beard all at once. It takes time.
For some, it might be a long-term commitment to a single decision they made; it's been that way for me in the past, where I've had a beginning and end date and carefully monitored the progress all along.
But more common for me are the beards that grow not out of one decision to purposefully cultivate my facial hair, but out of initial laziness, and a daily lack of commitment to a clean shaved look. This kind usually never spawns a firm commitment or decision. Each day a question mark surfaces in the mirror - to shave or not to shave? The beard survives as long as my will to shave wanes.
You may argue that the decision to clean up neck and cheeks every few days when things get too scruffy constitutes commitment, but I experience it more as a bare minimum effort to remain presentable. Even as the razor hums over my exposed neck, chin tilted high, the option to continue up along the jaw-line and chin often presents itself, but is typically overruled by apathy and procrastination. No, not today, I tell myself, just let it be.
One day, my whim will blow the other way and the beard will be the victim. But it's no loss. Something so carelessly acquired is as carelessly destroyed. Though the shave is a much more abrupt change to the mutable landscape of my face, it is no more deliberate or well-reasoned. Sometimes "because I felt like it" really is the only reason a person has to give. The weeks of not shaving are not the accomplishment of dedication or work - but almost the exact opposite.
The beard grows under either circumstance. If I stop shaving, the end result will eventually be the same whether I chose to be bearded or took a shaving vacation. Sometimes you make a decision, and sometimes decisions make themselves if you stall on them long enough. Unlike my beard, you can't always count on the end result being the same.

puzzled

two-thousand pieces, but who
counts them? Each a puzzle
unto itself, a question of interlocking
limbs and sockets. Each a question
of dependencies, neighbors, rows and columns.
Colors, shadows, lines, printed hints of a great
whole each piece should fit into. Each fits,
must fit, must have a place, but sometimes
the ground is mistaken for the sky,
until the right pieces find their places.
Till then, these will rattle around the box,
passed over again and again as fingers
comb through, dig in, ferret out,
select, inspect, reject.
Start again.
                  The patience of the piece
rivals the patience of the puzzler, trying
one by one, head to hole, around the
edges of what is already known.

Spider Dreams

Two nights in a row, I dream of spiders.

Sunday morning I wake after dreaming about opening the pantry and confronting a horrible fat-legged mass the size of a starfish hanging on the wall above the flour and sugar. The only thing spider-like about it is the way it wriggles to the corner below the shelf as I stare and then slowly close the pantry door. The dream me learns that the species is not indigenous to North America and thinks it must all be a prank. The real me wakes up and shuffles to the pantry, the scene of a recent unsettling moth infestation, to make sure all is well.

That night it is a black spider, smaller but still palm-sized, suspended by a single thread above the fireplace in the living room. An ambiguous character scrawled in red on its abdomen only confuses the question of its toxicity. Returning with my wife, the tips of its legs are red as well. One of us swats at it, misses, it drops, we don't know where. It's gone. Dead? Probably not. It ends sometime in the dark of morning and I roll back to sleep, perhaps dreaming of other things that I won't remember as clearly as that light outlining that ominous shape slowly rotating its red-marked body in the living room air.

I wake calmly from both dreams, no sweats, no thrashing or sitting up abruptly, no gasping for breath, not even feelings of panic or alarm. Only a milder, more sinister sense of unease and a quiet lingering fear that all is not right.

The real-life spider in the shower this morning whose webs cross from the ceiling to the shampoo bottle and around the corners of the windowsill is real and causes more panic than its dream-siblings. It is also vanquished more easily, squished on the shampoo lid and rinsed down the drain. The nearly-invisible threads remain.

Results to my Google search about spider dreams offer a variety of options: a controlling female figure, hostility towards a spouse, feeling like an outsider, misfortune, manipulation, deadly force, or feeling trapped. Bingo.

Friday, the email from the Vice President of Marketing brought a real disappointment: they were going with an external candidate over me. The primary reason? They believed I had all the competence the job required, but they didn't think I would be happy doing it. They liked me too much to give me a job that they expected to make me miserable over the next three to five years. As a result, I'm dodging awkward office encounters with old team members while trying to overcome injured pride and dashed hopes. That's the outsider part.

The VP says "You are one of the most talented writers I have ever worked with. You can succeed at anything it is you want to do." She's not the first--people have been telling me that my whole life. But what do you do when you don't know what it is you want to do?

Check that. What do you do when those things you want to do don't seem to pan out? What happens when the things you want to do turn out to be unrealistic? What happens when everything that feels rewarding, valuable, and beautiful turns out to not be sustainable as a lifestyle? Or worse, what happens when everything you thought you wanted becomes uniformly unappealing for one reason or another? What happens is you find something that will do; you pick up something that works and you are afraid to let go of it. Some days you hate it; some days it is not bad; and some days you experience victories. You find good in what you have in spite of the bad bits. After a while, you start wishing for something better, something different, but what? What will you find that you can do for the next thirty years without feeling discontented at some point or without compromising some of the things that you want? Afraid that nothing will pan out, nothing will be as good as it seems, and nothing will ever be good enough, you don't do anything.

What happens is you start dreaming about spiders.

Not my son

Arrested in my workday by blue eyes staring earnestly up at me, as if to say
"I'm not your son anymore."
Those eyes are right, that straight line mouth almost smiling tells a grim truth:
That is not my son.
He was my son; my hand knew the curve of that head, the soft of those cheeks, gripped the impossibly
Tiny bones of that hand when crossing streets, but only for a time.
That boy was left behind by a mere two years and now I only see that face
pressed between sheets of glass, static, but holding in its stillness
all the vivacious energy that nearly pushed him out of the narrow frame,
propelling his legs up that grassy hill
to where he stands now, only slightly older but much taller, leaner.
Coming years hold a thousand unspoken goodbyes as each night
I kiss my child to bed and wake to find standing over me a new boy.

Connecting

In high school, my best friend moved to Las Vegas. We kept in touch for the rest of our high school years primarily through writing letters. Long letters where we played with type faces and colors and reveled in the glories of late 90's word processors. Who knows what I wrote about, probably just what I was up to those days, what I had read, who I had hung out with, what movies I had seen, and the like. It didn't matter, we were just keeping in touch.

I think we both had email accounts, though I don't clearly remember when I took that step, nor what my first email address actually was (my oldest email account now only dates back as far as 2004, when I returned from two years' missionary service in Italy). If I could somehow recover that high school email inbox, I would find the skeletons of those impossibly long forwarded email surveys, jokes still in circulation on new platforms, and other indications that my friends and I were riding the wave of this exciting channel of communication in the typical fashion for people in our generation.

I further connected with my friends via ICQ, with its colorful flowers and status indicators, all while playing freecell and listening to stolen MP3's on winamp. The freecell and the music were really just to keep my hands busy and to shut out other distractions while sending and receiving chats from my friends. I even vaguely remember having my own domain on angelfire, though the content and time frame of that site are even more lost to me than the origins of my email. After all, this was my internet infancy.

I graduated high school and went to college 10 hours away in eastern Idaho. Email became not just a secondary source of contact with my friends who stayed in Washington, but my primary one. To send and receive email, I would walk across the small courtyard of my apartment complex to the computer room, which boasted 4 internet-connected dinosaurs. My brother and I had brought my family's outdated HP with us for word processing (and freecell of course), but I don't believe there was a single internet connection in our apartment. This would have been the fall of 2000.

I also remember banking by phone during this time in my life, checking my balance via an 800 number I dialed on the corded phone in our apartment kitchen, while my easy mac cooked in the microwave.

At the end of 2001 I left the country, and for two years I emailed my family and a few friends, wrote a few snail mail letters, and called home about 3 times. I also used a film camera--not because digital cameras were not around, but because they were so expensive that it would have been difficult to replace one in case of loss. In retrospect, I'm glad I have the film negatives of my time in Italy as the miniscule digital images that I would have brought home with me would hardly have translated into quality prints.

When I got home in 2003, I got a laptop for Christmas, a now clunky Dell Inspiron 1500, which probably weighed at least 20 pounds. It had a 30 GB hard drive, which sounded impressively expansive, considering during my high school years, my Dad had allotted each of us kids with a 100 MB ZIP disk  for storing our personal files. I went back to school and could now email from my apartment, or even from the wireless network available on campus.

Email and Windows Instant Messenger were my main modes of online communication. I still have the chat archives in which the blossoming friendship with my future wife has been preserved. My children may eventually cherish those archives the way many regard bundles of dusty love letters written by their grandparents. We married in 2005 and continued emailing our families and friends updates about our married lives.

In April of 2007, we had our first son. I emailed a couple of pictures of him to my closest friends and old roommates.

Five months later, we "joined the bandwagon" and started our own family blog. It made sense: why send emails to everyone when you could create one update and invite everyone to catch up that way? Notice the shift from what were primarily personal modes of communication to a more public, one-size-fits-all-audiences genre. Traci did most of the posting in the early days, but I contributed, and I directed my friends there to "keep in touch," or at least, to keep tabs.

Maybe the problem with blogging was (is) that it was (is) so one way. You put a post up there and your audience engages with it very passively. There is the option to comment, but what a hassle, especially when you have to prove you are not a robot. You really have to want to leave a comment, and there is next to no obligation to do so. Eventually, instead of sending a targeted email to a friend, you are posting a story and pictures on a wall that you don't know if anyone is even looking at anymore.

I caved to the mounting pressure in early 2009 and felt like something of a latecomer to Facebook. Traci joined before me. Our second child had just been born. The joy of reconnecting! Finding old friends from multiple eras of my life--high school, mission, college--whose email addresses had been lost to me, or which I had never bothered to collect. Where blogging felt like a painted wall facing a void, this felt more like a room with a circle of chairs.

One key lesson I learned about using facebook: you have to interact with people to have people interact with you. The temptation to just be a fly on the wall, endlessly scrolling, never clicking or commenting, results in an empty notifications bar. So you have to like things, you have to leave comments, and you have to add your own updates.

Three years later, as Facebook's algorithms determine more and more of what and who I connect with, as advertisements continue to creep in, it all gets to feeling so hollow. It love to see pictures, to read status updates, to follow life events, to know what friends are thinking and doing, to read and share interesting articles, but it still feels empty.

It starts feeling like we are talking to the empty air, casting a status update or a picture out into the middle of the room and waiting for someone to grab onto it. You've got to have good enough bait to get a bite in their news feed, that endless list of hooks and lures. I start to discover that having someone on your friends list is not the same as having a real friend. Genuine human connection comes from one-on-one contact, which most modern social platforms discourage because they are too archaic, too reminiscent of the email or letter-writing days.

Maybe, no matter the medium, we've only been talking about ourselves the whole time, but something changes when you have an audience of just one person.

Blogs are fading out, but I keep posting there. Facebook growing obnoxious, and I am reluctant to try newer forms, which experience leads me to expect to be less and less authentic. I'm getting to feel like writing letters again, but how many relationships do I even have that could bear such a burden?