Of Beach and Books V

On the way to Ocean City we would take the boulevard from Route 9 and over a white cement bridge built with money from the flush sixties. On your way to 34th Street you will pass through and over brackish marshes. Seeing the marshes really isn’t the most apt verb. What hits you here is the smell. Brackish water just smells off. It has a taint of sulfur and a whiff of decomposition. But it is heavy with moisture and oxygen. If you are a newbie to the beach world this olfactory blast as you cross over the boulevard causeway is worrisome. You think to yourself ‘is this what the whole place is going to smell like, crap?’

The trip over the marsh lasts five or six minutes top and then you are out on the barrier island. The closer you get to the beach itself the smell of the air changes. The aroma shifts to something almost pure. While you can clearly smell the salt from the froth of the water at its edge there is something that is hard to pin down. My guess has always been is that while the sand that churns in the water and the aquatic life that lives and dies in the water add a few scents that what you really sensing is something that is missing.

In the cycle of rain into the earth into the ocean I am sure that the sea water is taking pollution and impurity from the air. On a stretch of beach away from traffic and human contamination like the smell of hot dogs and fries the air is about as pure as it gets. Cleansed and renewed. When the traffic has gone for the day at that time when people are just shuffling about at the water’s edge your lungs are getting healthy highly saline infused air both refreshing and invigorating.

During the years I spent at the water’s edge there were two other smells that stood out beyond the smell of the water. These were the smell of raisin sticky buns freshly baked and of fried seafood picked up hot and to go. The raisin cinnamon rolls meant morning was undeniably upon me and the seafood meant end of a day and the end of the weekend. Who needed a clock or calendar when you had Dot’s Pastry and Campbell’s Seafood?

Dot’s was what the old man brought back after one of his early morning walks around the beach. Dad would be sneaking out to have coffee and that first prohibited cigarette of the day. (He was told to quit and they would kill him but he just couldn’t give up the habit.) Grabbing the cigarettes from his hiding place outside the apartment when he secreted them from Mom would walk for blocks and blocks along the water’s edge. On each of these early morning walks he would have a cigarette cradled in his hand. He had a terry cloth beach jacket with oversized pockets and baggy shorts. He would walk and smoke and pick up interesting shells and rinse them off and pocket them. Shells went in one pocket the packet of Chesterfield’s went in the other. After a good long walk he would turn and head back to the house. Stopping at Dot’s he would get sticky buns.

Dot’s sticky buns were densely packed with cinnamon, raisins and covered with a hard crunch amber glaze somewhere between pure honey and pure sugar. If you walked into Dots the smell would short circuit your brain with cravings for treats. The smell of fresh baking would make you shiver and twitch. Even when the old man opened the box back at the apartment, where my Mom already had coffee on in one of those old time percolators with the glass at the top where you could watch the coffee perk, the smell of the sticky buns was strong enough to walk the dead; the dead well that was me.

Trust me I would smell the sticky buns but I would try and ignore them. I would roll and shift under the sheet and the cotton bedspread that were all that you needed on most island nights. Really I would pull the pillow over my head because I did not want to get up. But that sweet warm spiced smell of the soft gooey bread, the raisins and the crunchy crust was too hard to ignore. It was more of a motivation to get up than even having to really, really take a piss was.
Coffee did not come into my life until I was in my thirties. It didn’t move me at all as a motivator for waking.

After taking a leak pulling on my shorts and a blue t-shirt that bore the inscription “Zap” I would make my way to the refrigerator. My parents would already be on their 2nd cup of Maxwell House and I would pull out a gallon of whole white milk from the Acme Market. Reaching the table I would lean over and pull a cinnamon sticky bun off the half dozen that were there in the white rectangular box. If it were a good day the buns were still warm. This was pre-microwave and there was something really special about a warm sweet roll. Cold, cold whole milk and that roll and I knew the day was started.

On the other end of the clock was Campbell’s Seafood. It was reserved for once a week as a special dinner. Again the meal was served in a white rectangular box pretty much the same as the sticky buns came in but oh the flavor was different. Inside the seafood combination was a crab cake, a piece of flounder, fries, a scallop, a clam cake and I think a shrimp. Campbell’s was real honest to God seafood. No Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks here. The take out store was a block and a half’s walk from our apartment. My parents would sit on the porch of the apartment while I was given some money and sent to Campbell’s to place the order and wait the 10 or 15 minutes until it was done.

The place wasn’t air conditioned and it was hot, but damn did it smell good. After standing in line with other people in various degrees of beachwear you ordered, paid and were given a claim check. It really was too hot to stay inside so you walked the parking lot or grabbed a seat on the porch or just found some way to occupy your time. However the whole time you were there the smell of fresh frying seafood was hanging in that salt air. I am salivating now just remembering it.

As you leaned against the telephone pole out front you kicked some grass that was popping up out of the sidewalk. You looked at the cars zooming down Asbury faster than they had any right to go on that narrow street. Asbury was the main street and heavily travelled but if someone opened their driver’s side door when someone was passing by the door would be gone.

Each person would go in once, twice three times to see if the food was done. The college girls in their white service worker uniform would check the receipts on each stack of boxes that was twinned together and then shake their head no. But eventually after you had walked the block one last time the food would be there, they’d take your receipt and off you would go back to the apartment to eat.

Flounder freshly fried is the food of the gods. It isn’t a strongly flavored fish. But it is crunchy and there are no bones to worry about the way Campbell’s made it. With ketchup and horseradish you made up an extra batch of cocktail sauce and then you dug in. It was heaven. The fries were crisp and each piece of food tasted real. Tell me how many times in a week do you sit down to a meal in a fast food place and somewhere in the back of your head think something like, “I wish this was really barbeque or chicken or whatever”. Ice tea washed seafood down, milk was not permitted. Yeah it wasn’t just the salt air smell that made the beach a place so burned in my memory.

My sense of On Caring is that its depth is such that any attempt at approaching it is almost from the start doomed to failure. It is like a chocolate torte, no matter how much you love and savor it; it must be digested in small almost wee bits. Sitting down at the table with a “mission” to devour the torte in a single sitting will waste it and wreck havoc on the entrails of anyone attempting it. Sometimes you grab a bite here and there in a non sequential place but it is still so very rich. I am reading this cover to cover right now but maybe that doesn’t work for you. Feel free to nibble in the dark when you’re hungry.

In section five the author points out that caring is never routine, never rote and never accomplished by “sheer habit”. I act in furtherance of caring, that is helping the other to grow, and then I monitor what has happened and reset in response to the results. If I know the other and myself as I should I will be able to decide whether action or watchful inaction is the best course. Sometimes I will be wrong.

Sometimes when I am deciding what is actually an act of caring I will have to balance the big and little pictures. Is what I am seeing and experiencing from the other something transient that is best ignored or is it part of something deeper that needs to be addressed? Having the ability, experience and knowledge to decide if an act must be viewed in isolation or as part of a larger fabric and to react aptly requires being in tune with the rhythms of a caring relationship.

Of Beach and Books IV (Night Ride Home)

There is a smell to the ocean that is unique. What you sense is not one smell. Each cove and bay and bit of open shoreline has its own scent. The sea grasses that hold the dune in place in North Carolina smell different than the various reeds and runners that serve the same function in New Jersey. Every beach after a storm smells different that it does during a hot dry 10 day stretch. Still the smell is very visceral, very primal. When I travel I can tell when I am about 10 miles from the beach because the air changes in a palpable way. I don’t know if everyone senses this but I can feel the shore approach.

One of the strongest memories I have of the years on the beach was of the smell and feel of the sea air at midnight. After I would close down the store, Kurly Kustard to be precise, I would get on a 10 speed bike and wheel down the wet boardwalk. It was about a twenty minute ride home.

Shutting down the store wasn’t an instantaneous process. It took a bit of time to break down the store. You had to disassemble the custard machines and drop the blades and gaskets and knobs into sanitizer. You had already blended the sanitizer if you were smart. All remaining dairy product had been drained and put away for the night in the walk-in cooler. The fountain heads had been removed from the soda fountain and the store's awning rolled up. The windows had been slid across the opening onto the boardwalk and locked into place.

After stashing the cash I would go out the back door. At the base of the back steps I would pick up my bike. If I was lucky and had a roach I would burn that mother crushing it at the very end and swallowing the roach. I was a weird fucker that way. It just seemed to me better to get all the THC in me and not to leave any evidence on the ground just in case the gendarmes were about. I would throw my chain and lock into my backpack and off I would fly.

The rules of the boardwalk prohibited me riding my bike on it at that hour. A few blocks down south of the store the cops stopped enforcing the rules. Reaching there I was free to leave the surface streets and tool down the damp and sometimes quite wet boards at whatever speed I deemed safe. On the right night I was free and I was flying.

On a late summer nights under the influence of cheap assed Mexican reefer if the moon was up the ride became a religious service with its own sacraments. My muscles would flow smoothly and the bike was just an extension of my desire to be moving. Riding wouldn’t require thinking it would just require being. On those nights as I swooshed down those blocks elevated over the ghostly illuminated white sands of the beach I would glance out at the reflection of the sun’s little brother over the water. The air was cool but comfortable as I split its molecules on my ride.

Invariably I would stop near the end of the boardwalk and just stare out at infinity.

The water was dark except where the moonlight bled across it. The air smelled of sea rocket dune grass and of damp sand. I would breathe in deeply and just listen to the waves. At that spot the beach air was somewhat sweet and soothing, breathing was like drinking some Thai lemongrass soup refreshing and cleansing. Every sense was alive from the endorphins my muscles were producing to my eyes to that sound of waves in my ears. It is almost like my life began and ended at that moment.

You got the beach and the bicycle in the paragraphs above, now it is back to On Caring

Mayeroff shifts gears just a little bit when he moves into Section II. Having identified caring as helping another to grow he lists and discusses traits of appropriate caring. When you read each of the attributes of caring they sound for the most part a great deal like a Boy Scout oath. The qualities he cites are knowing, alternating rhythms, patience, honesty, trust, humility, hope and courage. The funny thing is that while these sound simple and easily understandable the reality of each characteristic is deceptive. It is like an old bumper sticker I remember, “Live Peace”. As we used to opine about that sticker, easy to say, hard to do and life changing if you try.

Section II of the book commences with the attribute of knowing. The author begins by saying caring is neither good intentions nor warm regards. (The Buddhists say one small good deed is worth more than the greatest of good intentions.) Caring begins with knowledge. Knowledge is not a monolith or a single granite direction marker.

Knowledge in caring according to Mayeroff breaks down three ways. One way is breaks down is a requirement of knowing what the other needs and knowing what you can really provide. The next breakdown of the attribute is what you know explicitly about the other and what you know implicitly. A final delineation is being aware that knowing can be direct and indirect.

Huh, what? This is all too murky. No it isn’t. To care I must know the other’s needs. I need to know, really know who the other is, not just to have a surface knowledge about who them present themselves as. I have to take the time to understand the other’s strengths and weakness and what will move the other to real growth before I step into a task of caring.

While Mayeroff only cites it quickly in one line a critical theme of self knowledge arises on the bottom of the first page of this section. I must know what my own powers and limitations are. In almost every section of this book Mayeroff talks about being aware of what you are, being secure in who you are, realizing your limitations both as to yourself and as to your relationship with others. What he keeps saying is that you have to be at peace with yourself and know what you are trying to give the other and what growth you are trying to motivate in the other and in yourself.

I think the fact that Mayeroff accepts that we know things about who we are and what we can give to another on an implicit or gut level shows he really understands us humans. Sometimes we can put this stuff into words but other times we can simply know it without the words. I think his comment at the end about limiting caring to only things that we can put into words is arbitrary is dead on the mark. We may know more than enough to care when we know ourselves and when we are aware of the realities of the world than we could ever communicate with words, even after 3 or 4 beers.

Of Beach and Books III

It is weird how tied On Caring is to my memory of that one specific place and time, 1970s Ocean City. Each time I pick up the book I can almost feel the sand on the pages and hear the ocean and the seagulls in the background. Even some of the smells of the suntan oils and perfumes of the day come back. Please forgive my little digressions into memory as I talk about the book.

To any person who has ever met me it is not secret that I am not a clothes horse. Hell, if my shirt and tie match it is a good day. I just don’t care about that stuff. I mean clean is important to me but not style. Well I may have one red tie that I just love that has a little style to it.

When I was at the beach my focus on style was different. During those 5 or so summers I was the consummate teen beach dweller. My clothes always aimed for boardwalk chic. When I could I wore white linen trousers and Mexican wedding blouses. On my feet I had leather sandals. My hair was long but not too long. By August it had turned auburn from the sun’s beating down on it all season. (I did not use lemon juice to lighten my hair although I knew those who did.) White linen looks good on a really tanned body if I do say so myself. Those soft clothes felt good too.

The separation from my home in Pedricktown let me focus on some weird funky sense of cool. The beach was a new world filled with new people. I wasn’t cast into the mold or rules that had governed my younger years in the rural farm town. I was free to be a cosmic hippie wannabe with a weird intellectual bent. I reinvented myself and I grew as a person. I cared about who I was and I cared about the world around me.

The time spent staring at the endless sea changed me and imbued me with a sense of what is possible in life and what is not. The sea is immutable and I had to accept that, in any battle with the Atlantic I would lose. However in the world of me, change became possible and remains always possible.

Now as to section 3 of On Caring (there is a bit of overlap of my beach memoir and the gist of the section). I think the following three paraphrased sections are the key. These as I have phrased them deal with human caring and not caring about an idea. I think if you read the section you will see the distinctions Mayeroff wants you to get on that specific point (caring for a person vs. caring for an idea) but my focus is on human beings primarily. What seems to me to be the most important lines of the text are:

• The minimum component of helping another grow is to help them care for something/someone apart from themselves. This means encouraging and helping someone find something to care about.

• I grow by becoming more self determining, by choosing my own values and ideals grounded in my own experience, instead of simply conforming to the prevailing values or compulsively rejecting them.

• A person grows by becoming more honest with him or herself and becoming more aware of the natural and social order of which she or he is a part with a minimum of illusion…

Being objective and living without illusion takes focus and I think it is a daily struggle.

Of Beach and Books II

On those rare days in beach world when I did not have to work in the evening I would stay late on the strand. My family’s apartment was 1 ½ blocks from the water. As a result it was nothing to come back to the apartment mid in late afternoon to have a snack. After a quick shuffle over Central Avenue and a couple of houses down Asbury I would just lay about inside out of the sun for a few minutes with an ice tea and the daily paper. The ice tea was a little different. Mom brewed it up from a southern brand Luzianne and she would dice up an entire orange into each gallon she’d brew.

After 15 minutes max I’d grab my towel and head back to the water’s edge. The sun would be dropping in the west but the air temperature would be in the low 80s on most of those summer days. In August it could be about 98 F even into early evening but August was a world until itself.

By the time I headed back to the beach in that warm but waning late afternoon light the day trippers (or we called them shoe-bees because they brought their lunches in shoe boxes) were streaming off the beach in droves. The wire waste baskets at the edge of the beach by the last service drive before the breakwater were filled a mile high with trash. With these easy pickings the seagulls were flying and screeching picking at dead fries and leftover sandwich pieces. A quick glance both ways up and down the beach and you saw maybe 10% of the people who had been there an hour before remained. These people were deeply tanned; these were the folks renting for the full season.

Making the weird schlop/klop noise that comes from cheap beach sandals I would walk across the hot sand. If the tide was going out I would grab a spot as close to the water as I could. Reaching the water’s edge I would lay my towel down, drop my sandals, t-shirt, glasses and hat and would jump in the ocean for a few moments of body surfing. With fewer people around me on the sand I would pull out one of the harder books I had picked for the summer and dive into it. It was easier to concentrate at that hour of the day.

The life guards were still on until six. Often I would get to watch them pack up their gear and leave. Beach beefcake and pinups, there were no ugly lifeguards. The people remaining after the guards left were mostly beach walkers. These were the folks that strolled for miles up and down the beach just to walk. I was a beach walker too but I would do it late in the evening with a pack of Marlboros in my beach shirt pocket. It takes a special talent to light a cigarette on a windy beach at night.

My favorite part of the day’s end was watching the light disappear. When you are looking at the Atlantic you don’t see brilliant colors from the sunset. You have to be on the other side of the island to see that. What you see is the color of the ocean changing. It goes from bright reflective blue, almost the image of a broken mirror, to a white gray to a dark green black over about two or so hours.

It is that shift to the point where the water is reflecting the pale light of mid twilight that I loved the best. I always thought I was as close to God and I ever would be at that time. Sometimes I would just walk out into the water and let my mind go blank just experienced the warm water and warm air and a complete lack of self. It wouldn’t last long but it was an amazing moment because even to this day I can remember the peace I felt.

Reading On Caring required me to go searching for a clearer meaning of one term actualization. If that isn’t psychological jargon speak what is? Getting an explanation of a key term was essential to mentally getting access to On Caring. The term actualization is really/kind of/sort of an adaptation of a guy named Maslow’s term self actualization. Self actualization is a wonky jargon word to express a real straightforward concept. Back then sorting out the phrase sent me to the used book store to look at psychology books (but not for too long or they want me to buy). This time I cribbed and tweaked the following off the Internet.

Maslow loosely defined self-actualization as "the full use of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.” He set this out in his book Motivation and Personality. Self-actualization is not a static but it is rather an ongoing process in which one's capacities are fully, creatively, and joyfully utilized. One of the sites I looked at implied this was a direct quote from Maslow himself, "I think of the self-actualizing person not as an ordinary person with something added. An actualizing person is an ordinary person with nothing taken away. The average person is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capacities"

Self-actualizing people see life clearly. They are less emotional, more objective and less likely to allow hopes, fears, or ego to distort their observations. Self-actualizing people are dedicated to other people, to vocations and to causes. Major characteristics of self-actualizing people include creativity, spontaneity, courage, growth and hard work. This is the tie to On Caring.

Lying on the beach sand waiting for the water to change to silver I tried to grok this.

Of Beach and Books I

It was probably in 1975 or 1976 that I first reading On Caring. My memory is that I picked the book up after hearing about it in a class at Michigan State where I was at that time an undergraduate of unspecified and diffuse focus. Most likely the course in which I heard it mentioned was one in communication theory or maybe I learned of it via an odd reference made in a sociology class. The used paperback copy I picked up at the Student Book Store was very slim about ¼ of an inch thick. It consists of 30 short sections and 104 pages. The cover was sky blue.

While the first actual copy I bought was used it wasn’t highlighted with garish orange markers that were popular back then. On Caring apparently had been an assigned text in a psychology course. I grabbed it right at the end of spring term before I headed back to my summer life. I threw the little book in the top of the stuff I had crammed in my footlocker. In this one foot by one foot by three foot rectangle I carried the whole of my life back and forth with between New Jersey and Michigan. It was right on top so I could get easy access to it when I got home to the ocean. The sea and reading (and girls in bikinis) these were the most important things in my world. And I am dead serious about this the edge of the ocean will always not matter what be my home.

My summer life was spent working nights on the boardwalk, drinking excessively, smoking dope and playing cards when the shift ended until 2 or 3 a.m. and then crashing until about 9 a.m. I would them make my way from my bed to the beach (if it was a sunny day) spread out my towel. After slathering on suntan lotion (not sunscreen-I wanted a tan) I would pull my hat down and slip back into sleep. For just a little while longer I needed to be in lala land.

When I woke up I would roll over and lie on my belly and prop up on my elbows. I would then read for about 1 to 2 hours. That summer I got suntan grease on the pages of On Caring first thing. My memory is that I probably read it twice that year because I would keep going back over sections of the book. There was something calming and invigorating about the simple phrases in the book. It was kind of weird because the whole book was written in this odd third person voice. But little phrases would stick out. In the copy I had the printing seemed to bold on little sections of good words. Now I have a reprinted copy and there is nothing bolded, but those sections just seemed to jump out at me back then.

I usually reread this book about once every eighteen months. It is one of two books I do that with. The other is Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. What can I say; I am a child of those years that were the cusp of the sixties and seventies. Mayeroff had an incredible intellect. Dipping your toes in the water of this book will show you that clearly and distinctly. On Caring is written in a deceptively simple style but the concepts are not simple at all.

This will be the first in a series of posts about the beach and about On Caring. As I reread it and as I plumb my beach memories I am going to try and combine them into a series of short posts. It may not work. But hey you don’t know if you don’t try. I mean as Steve Forbert said “You cannot win if you do not play”.

A Prelude to the Coldest Silence Ever

A disagreement? Is it something more? A lapse of memory perhaps?

He says he last had a drink three years ago.

She says he last had a beer at Freddy's picnic at the lake last summer. Having said this under oath she looks imploringly for a sign. First she glances at me and then at her "husband". Even their marital status isn't clear to me from the testimony so far. There might be a glitch due to a divorce that wasn't done right.

Her “husband” shifts in his chair and she leans slightly forward and twists her head in his direction. They are both still wearing their coats because it is cold in her. No tensing of muscles can be seen but her hands open and tip slightly upward in question. She doesn't know the rules. At this point I offer the admonition that there will be no crosstalk.

In response his feet shift and the tips of his work boots form the base of a v. He tips his head toward her and smiles. He smiles because he knows I am watching him and his every move. I look carefully. Does he twitch, does he sweat, does he sigh, grunt or do his shoulders tense. I look very closely at the edges of his smile does it looked forcibly stretched? Oh yeah. If his facial muscles were contorting under any more pressure they would rip apart. Still, he smiles.

A few more questions get asked about whether he had just one beer at the picnic and does she remember what kind of beer was it? She realizing that once this door has been opened it can't be closed by saying she might be mistaken. Maybe it was a Sharp's or O’Doul’s? But it really does not matter what it or even if it was just one. She has dropped to almost a whisper now and she says they didn't stay long at Freddy's cause his wife is such a pain. She just thinks she is too good ya know?

I thank her when the questions are done and ask her to take a seat in the lobby.

His arms are crossed now and he has slumped in the chair. His feet no longer form a v. Now his crotch is the base of the v with his legs rigid and straight and his feet are sitting about two and half to three feet apart. He will not make eye contact with me for the rest of this meeting. His eyes are focused at the center of my desk where his papers lie. Lie clearly has a double meaning here. Is he going to "man up" and admit he hasn't really stopped drinking? This is a long shot.

What he does is what most men in this situation do he disparagers her. "She doesn't know what she is talking about dammit. There were a lot of people there that day. I had a diet Pepsi and it was sitting on the table next to Floyd Parnell’s beer. It wasn't mine." She made a mistake. Look at the other stuff it all says I am not drinking.

Look if I don't get my license back my job is gone. They have kept me on for this year because I promised I would be able to drive right after this hearing. Look she has fibromyalgia and if I don't work we don't have coverage. Can't you see how important this is for me? Man I really, really don't drink."

No question this is important to him, the desperation shows on his face. I really, really believe bad will come down on him if he doesn't get his ticket to operate some vehicle. But he has been down this road too many times before. I know I have seen his record. If in the face of this he couldn't even get his story straight with his "wife" how is he going to control anything, especially his personal demon of a habit of sucking down that 12 pack of beer per day. How’s he going to address his lack of control that has given him two DWIs, a pot possession charge and four days in jail for turfing the town square with is friend Gentleman Jack?

Politely I ask the last question "Is there anything else you would like me to know?" He draws his knees up and with his head bent he says "No." Most people at least thank me for giving them the time to plead their case. Odds were it wouldn’t happen this time and it didn’t.

As he has left the room I organize the papers on my desk into a neat stack and turn to my computer and keyboard. I begin to type and then I stop. Whenever one of these proceedings has ended like this I wonder what the ride home is going to be like, fire and fury or long, long, stony cold silence.

A List

When I first wake there is a bit of clarity to my thought. Such lucidity will become lost very fast in a normal day. Don’t we all wish that we could bottle that first hour or so of clear-headedness and energy up and sip from it throughout the day?
Rumbling from bed to shower I have ten or twelve things right off the top of my head that I just know I have to do, or address or respond to. If I am lucky there is a Post-it pad nearby and I jot the first three or four down. Pens lay everywhere in my house (and my office). With luck I capture maybe another two or three must dos after I dry off.

From listing these items to acting on them is another thing. My routine is to take the Post-it and fold it over so that the sticky stuff does not cause a problem. When I say a problem I mean I don’t want the not inadvertently adhering to something and then becoming lost to me for the day. Folded the note takes up residence in the top pocket of my oxford button down shirt.

On the bus on the ride in each day I usually journal so I don’t look at the list then. Staring out at the blackness of night now fading I will pull out a pen and try to not just diary but clarify my thoughts on a particular topic. A typical entry would be:

12-07-10

This is turning into a very depressing winter. It seems all the news regarding the wars and the economy is bad. Each day I get up and listen to the radio news. It seems my values, values of respect for others and cooperative behaviors are assailed as being un-American or as being nothing more that liberal pipe dreams.

And then there are the little things in my life. By 7:18 I have to be in the car for the 3-4 minute trip to the bus stop. The weather is cold and I don’t want to make the 12 minute walk. Can I get anyone moving to allow this to happen? No. Well, at least not in any reliable manner. If I miss the bus I try to catch the next one at a different stop. Today is too cold to be standing outside.

Arriving at my office my lunch goes into the refrigerator. I hit the men’s room and take a leak. Washed up I walk to my office and set my brief case down. I hit the computer and turn on some ancient church music most often Anonymous Four’s Mass for a New Millennium (that Millennium being the year 1000). I lug out my own laptop computer and set it to steal network connectivity from the Chinese restaurant across the square. When I get my breaks I like to check e-mail and blog posts. I don’t want to do this on the state’s equipment. Then I empty my coat pockets into a bowl on my desk, keys, pens, dollar bills, yesterday’s receipts and notes all come to rest. Finally I draw the note out of my shirt pocket and put the little yellow scrap on my desk. Finally wasn’t quite right I do go and hang up my coat.

When I get back to my computer I check for e-mails with the “!” mark meaning in Windows-speak urgent. If there are no crises I look at my note and mentally prioritize. If it is a good day I will get to three of these usually important things. On a not so good day maybe my focus will settle on one or maybe none. It doesn’t take long to get derailed. By the second cup of coffee the plan of holding a hearing, then make a call on the yellow list comes off the track. All it takes is someone with a tough case or a coworker with a crisis.

But that is why we keep lists right? If I don’t get it done today it will be unfolded and posted with a push pin on my cubicle wall. It will be there tomorrow.

Clear Your Mind

In deep snow everything becomes both ordinary and silent. A chance to return to reality occurs in this white hushed world. Our place of balance is always there if you think to look for it in the cold colorless stillness of a winter’s day. Right now we need very much this silence and this snow.

Day 3 (or John Prine was Right-Blow up your TV

I disabled the TV on Monday. My children had pissed me off beyond words. Grades and attitude were at an all time low. In the course of one half hour I unplugged the cable box, reset all the computer’s passwords and locked down the hand held games. The Wii is no in a box along with all of its games taped with the Dad equivalent of crime scene tape.

Clearly I should have taken these actions sooner. Since switching off the box I have made my way through another 30 pages of Swann’s Way. The kids have completed assignments that they have been dilatory about and the woodstove has been working overtime. Watching the flames flickering is a more than adequate replacement for the pixels of plenty. How long this can last I don’t know but it sure is refreshing.

Proust is very weirdly beautiful. Not having the sensory short circuiting of TV allows me to read at leisure with the cat in my lap. About the only thing missing is the wine and croissant. To experience his depiction of the appearance and existence of a cathedral’s steeple for page after page and have it remain interesting is a delight. I even had to look up a word, benignant. Kind and gracious, a good word to know this one.

Grinding Gears

Over the past several days I have been writing a short story. Most likely I will not share it here. Fiction, especially my skanky fiction doesn’t work in a blog format. However crafting the story jogged memories and memories are what make writing this thing fun.

The day was Sunday after New Year’s. Using www.onetwofiver.com I started out typing some thoughts about the snow blowing around outside my window. So often these little sights caught out of the corner of your eye take you mentally to places you haven’t been to in years. Watching these little paisley swirls of white it reminded me of bus trips I used to take between Farmington and East Lansing. Often these dusting swirls would be visible out the Americruiser’s windows as I made those weekend journeys to see my then girlfriend. Bundled up in my brother’s old 101st Airborne army coat I would hand the Greyhound driver my ticket and be off.

Most of the story was focused on the giggling bliss of new love and the way two people could see two entirely different realities despite using common words and expressing seeming agreement on about every topic under the sun. After I pounded out the 888 words that the writing exercise demands I kept thinking about the ride itself. Surely people of a certain age (that is 45 and over) remember similar bus rides. My struggle was trying to describe the experience of almost two hours spent pressed against the cold glass window trying to avoid contact with the various damaged goods that were travelling with me on that common carrier.

What you wanted to do on the local run from East Lansing to Farmington was to take yourself to a state close enough to sleep that you could hear when they called out your stop out but deep enough to be removed from clear reality. Oversleeping would end you up in Southfield or downtown Detroit going east. Overshooting the right stop was problematic. Southfield was barren and Detroit was funky. However if you stayed awake you had to talk to the poor crazies who were on the bus there because their family didn’t want to ride in the same car with them and thus they were shipping them off to Aunt Mae’s on the hound.

If you are thinking I am being too harsh on this point I offer the following. One time I had a guy talk to me about his invisible 6 foot tall stuffed dog for the whole hour and 45 minutes of the ride. Said invisible dog was plush and colored brown and while like a beagle. It was sitting in the empty seat across the aisle from us. Geesh. No, it was not named Harvey.

You really wanted to go far enough down into sleep that you did not have to talk to or smell the other passengers. There was a certain odor on those buses that remains in my mind unto this day. If you sat too far back you got a whiff of the blue sanitized water of the lavatory every time the bus lurched from lane to lane.

Most of time Michigan’s skies remain gray. Without direct sun it was easy to wad that old army coat up against the window and drift off. It you trained yourself well, and you could train yourself if you did this trip on a routine basis as I did, the vibrations and shaking the bus would make downshifting for an exit would wake you enough to assess where you were and how much time was left before your stop. If your stop was just a few minutes away you might even go to the back three rows of the bus to have a cigarette and wake up. Man that was ages ago wasn’t it. If it was a little warmer you could get the group W bench guys in the back to crack the window a little and share the sacred herbs. My girlfriend’s parents were a little intense and taking the edge off helped.

The trip was an exercise in Zen awareness. I am sure that as I tweak this part of the story more details will come back. Like one of my favorite site’s on the run was a drug store it Williamston or Fowlerville. It was called Fate’s Pharmacy. How cool and absolutely spooky story perfect is that?

A New Year

The bus ride in this morning was quiet. The bus was full with many people returning to their jobs the holidays having come to an end. No one seemed grumpy but nobody seemed pleased either. The talk offered by our new governor this past weekend was of sacrifice. Sacrifice if you have not heard the word in the context of government employment means employees taking a reduction in salary and health care. Nothing specific has been placed on the table yet so we simply wait silently for the appearance of the axe.

After the warming spell this weekend there is very little snow on the ground. This is a bit unusual for such an early date in January. While a winter in Michigan may ebb and flow early January is usually well covered in white. As the bus rolled along today the route was merely frosted. The neon signs showing a cannabis leaf inside a glowing red cross reflected on the pavement, the squares outlined in white.

I have been going back over Milton Mayeroff’s writing lately. I have been trying to rework what he said into an even more common parlance to aid my own understanding. I know there is danger in such action. I am not as smart as Mayeroff and I may be missing his nuanced meaning. Still rendering his thoughts in a form that is accessible to my mind is of some benefit because I have to think of what he really meant. Here is the section I have tried to parse most recently:

My life is understandable and knowable if I live my life in place in the current moment. When I keep myself aware of what things are relevant to my life and what I need for the purposes of my life I move toward real growth. These “things” are not abstractions. If I am not in place day to day my mind will easily become confused and the world I live in will cease to make sense. Awareness is an ongoing process and requires that I care for both myself and for those who have relevance in my life.

Snow Fell White Last Night

It is hard to be a parent when I am an imperfect person. So many attributes that seem necessary to be a good parent are absent in me. I am slothful, I am impatient, I have a temper and I am inconsistent. Oh I could go on and rattle off a hundred other failings that are probably causing my children to grow up warped. About the only thing I have going for me is that I do feel love for them.

Snow fell last night, not much just a dusting. Over the past several days the temperature has been unseasonably warm and all but the dirtiest and most densely piled snow has melted away. Looking out on the street scene nature has on the night of the 1st day of the year given use a clean crisp skin for the world.

While I made no real resolutions the snowfall is reinforcing something I feel everyday before my children get up. With each new day there is hope that I will push back my failings and provide them with a real parent's care and wisdom. Today, tomorrow and a hundred other tomorrows I will try and be the best parent I can be for them.