Category: Family

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‘Land Logic’

When I turned 18, one of the birthday presents I got was a book-length poem called “The Donner Party.” I sold the book during a no-income period in my mid-20s, but as soon as I had some cash I went back to the used-book store that had taken it off my hands. It was still on the shelves, along with another book I’d sold, a picture biography of Yeats. I bought them back, though I was unable to find a third book I’d parted with–“Twenty Years A-Growing,” by Maurice O’Sullivan, which my Uncle Dick had given me. I found a copy of that eventually, but not mine. I still look for it.

Back to “The Donner Party,” which is right here beside me. It’s a retelling of a story of which everyone knows the shorthand version: pioneers, wagons, mountains, snow, death, cannibals. The book’s by a California poet named George Keithley, who taught (maybe still teaches) up at Chico State. The poetry is mostly blank-verse. It feels plain and authentic and sounds like it was transcribed by firelight.

Here’s one passage that has always stayed with me from a chapter called “Land Logic.” It takes place after the party’s disastrous crossing of Utah, with all of Nevada to cross before the ascent of the Sierra Nevada and hoped-for arrival in California’s Sacramento Valley

We wanted only to rest, at this juncture.
Seeing the snows, no one wished to look back
on our bad luck or talk of it anymore.

Reflection only led us to deplore
the sudden end of summer and lament
the time we wasted in this trap. Whole days

spent unloading. Stupid disputes. Delays
caused by the cattle roaming or Hastings’ wrong
advice … We were warned that to survive

we must lay up grass and water for a dry drive
of two days. Which means at worst we might
travel a day and a night—where we instead

wandered a week in the desert and left dead
a third of our herd of cattle. Add a third
of the wagons abandoned, still it doesn’t explain

all the destruction done. We could never regain
the time taken, or our goods or livestock left
on the salt. But this was not the only cost.

There is a land logic which we lost …
A sense of the likelihood of new terrain
to sustain us. The same logic that lives

in our blood, telling us that bottomland gives
promise for planting. Or for example
the simple certainty that we would find

spring water among rocks when the sun reclined
on green slopes gleaming like good pasture.
But we hurried out only to discover

a prickly patch of greasewood growing over
the dry soil, white with alkali…
Nothing in nature was what it might seem!

The promise of finding forage by a stream
proved false as well—both banks were bare
although the current there cut swift and deep.

We lost the last advantage which could keep
our company from harm. It was this sense
of the land that had departed in a dream
while we went on like souls that are still asleep.

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Digital Existence, Bane of

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I’m still using an iBook G4 laptop I bought six years ago. I’ll knock on wood and note also that it’s not as impressive as it seems. I had a hard drive die when the computer was in its third year, and I’m running on a refurbished one that Apple installed “free”–I had bought the long-term service plan. Although I got a functional computer out of the deal, I hadn’t backed up the big library of pictures on the original drive. That included a bunch of nice shots from a trip down to Southern Illinois my dad and I took in 2004.

Being a bottom-of-the-line machine from ancient times, the iBook doesn’t have a huge hard drive. It’s got about 25 gigabytes of total storage. I now back things up on a 200-gigabyte drive I bought after the Mac died. But here’s the thing about the pictures I download: I always want to sort through them and post some online and maybe someday do something ambitious such as actually make photo albums for relatives or friends. So I tend to keep them on the laptop than dump them on to the external drive (from which I have to transfer them to edit them). Of course, those projects, big and small, tend to get put off. So my laptop drive still gets eaten up, and I have accumulated a big pile of pictures I think about but do nothing with. Such as the ones here.

They’re nearly a year old. I took them during a drive Kate, my dad, and my brother John made to Lake Pymatuning, on the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line during our visit to Lake Erie last August. More specifically, these are pictures of carp that congregate at a spillway between the eastern and western sections of the lake. Why do they congregate there. Because the nice people who stop to see the sights throw them food; a nearby concession stand sells loaves of bread for tourists to throw, slice by slice, into the roiling mass of eager fish. I have about 20 pictures of the scene I took and another couple of dozen from my brother. I would say we documented the scene well. The question remains, do the carp go on to a less hellish-looking existence after the people leave for the day

Maybe now, having posted this, I can store the pictures on some other drive and move on to the next scene from last summer’s travels. After that, I might get to the pile of images still left to sort through from our 2008 trip to Japan. It could happen.

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Changes of Venue

Flew to Chicago yesterday for a quick springtime check-in with the family. It was good flying weather, at least at 39,000 feet, and I was surprised on our descent across southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois how green it is already. The trees have already leafed out, and the forests are rolling canopies of translucent green.

At one point on the flight yesterday, I started thinking about the last time I was here, and the time before that, and the time before that–all the ping-ponging I’ve done on family visits, work trips, and other adventures. I’ve often thought about trying to remember and write down every airplane trip I’ve taken, just to get a sense of how often and how far I’ve gone. That thought came to me again on the flight yesterday while I was standing at the rear of the plane, stretching my legs. I thought I’d go back to my seat, pull out a notebook, and write down all those flights. I’d do it and have it done with. But when I went and sat down, I discovered I didn’t have a pen, and I went back to the book I’m reading.

Today, I started to try to list all the flights, 37 years’ worth, starting with the first time I flew, with my friends Gerry and Dan, on the beginning leg of our trip to Ireland. I still remember the exhilaration of leaving the runway and how the first banking turn felt like a roller-coaster ride; I actually whooped as we took off.

So that’s Flight Number One. And Flight Number Two was memorable because the airline we’d taken to Ireland, TWA, had gone on strike and we had to get back to Chicago on Aer Lingus a couple days before Christmas. Gerry and I (Dan had returned home earlier) were determined to surprise everyone at home, so we took trains from O’Hare to the south suburbs. Then we did what we’d been doing for a good three months: put on our backpacks and started walking the two or three miles to our homes. It was snowy and dark, and a half-mile before I got home, my brother John and his then-girlfriend drove past me on their way to the nearby drive-in theater. They rolled past, then stopped, then turned around and drove me to the house. That’s a whole other story.

Listing all the flights? You can see the problem already. Remembering one reveals a little thread of memory. When you tug on it, a whole skein of other memories follows. In the summer of 1982, a trip to Chicago involved a 17-inning Cubs game called because of darkness–that’s worth a whole chapter in the travelogue. In the summer of 1988, John and I wound up at the Antietam battlefield with my son Eamon and could barely tear ourselves away though I had a family engagement awaiting me in New Jersey.

And of course, when you start listing flights, you start remembering the trips that included an overland leg: like the time I started hitch-hiking from Chicago to Berkeley on the day after Christmas and somehow made it in just over 48 hours (no mystery: a guy headed to Oakland stopped for me near the Continental Divide in Grants, New Mexico and delivered me to the front door of my friends’ house).

I think the reason that list has never been undertaken before is that there’s no end to it once you start.

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Red Car

On the way back home from a short bike ride yesterday, I passed the home of a family friend. Someone who has had a major influence on our lives in a number of ways–through great personal generosity, mostly–but not someone I'd say we are very close to.

This person has a red car to which he has always seemed attached. It's a little European sports job, something of a classic. I think the car has been refurbished–new paint, new interior, maybe new engine and power train–at least twice since this person became an acquaintance in the mid-1980s. More than anything, I think his attachment to the car bespeaks a critical love of fine things. He shows the same appreciation for books, for art, for music, for furniture, for food and drink, for baseball. And for people, too, though his critical appraisal can be uncomfortable. I have on occasion felt I didn't quite measure up to standards, and I know of plenty of refined people whom this person has sent away muttering about what a curmudgeon he is, except they weren't saying "curmudgeon."

Passing this person's home yesterday, I noticed the red car, parked as usual at the front curb. I noticed, too, that a couple of women were stopped on the sidewalk, reading a piece of paper taped to one of the car windows. I thought I saw a for-sale sign on the back. I didn't stop myself, but the scene made an impression. I know this person has had some health problems, and I thought maybe they had decided to let the car go. Not a decision he would make lightly. I thought I'd mention this at home later, but it slipped my mind.

But later Sunday, we chanced to drive past the house again. I said, "Hey, it looks like there's a for-sale sign on the red car." I slowed to a stop, and we looked at the car and this person's home, which was dark. Well, it turned out that my driving partner had news. She'd heard earlier in the day that this person is very ill. Very ill.

I can't presume to know what this person or his family are thinking. And I don't want to eulogize: it's a sunny day, and life is as good, as difficult, and as provocative as ever, with plenty to feed and sate the critical eye. But from afar–from a distance respectful but not too respectful–I'd like to say thanks, thanks so much, for all you've done for us and for the parts of your life that you have shared.

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Ghost

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A week before Christmas, while I was visiting family in Chicago and environs, I drove out to the south suburbs to see two old friends, Jane and Mort. They were teachers at my high school, Crete-Monee. Mort taught English and writing, and we formed a lasting bond over that. I became friends with Jane when she married Mort. We’ve stayed in close enough touch that I still try to drop in once in a while, and I’ve never forgotten their phone number. For the afternoon and evening I was at their house in Crete last month, we talked up a storm, lit the last of the Hanukkah candles, and ate pizza. By the time I left to drive back to the North Side, a weak, intermittent snow was falling. I gassed up in University Park, which I still think of as Park Forest South or even Wood Hill, then drove west on Exchange and north on Monee Road toward our old house.

I parked first down near the bridge over Thorn Creek, at the intersection with Monee and Stuenkel roads. That’s the picture above. I remember that corner during a heavy pre-Christmas snowstorm one night when I was 16 or so. I think school had let out for the holiday earlier that day, and then it started to snow. One of our friends from the road was coming back from college in Iowa. We roamed the neighborhood–it consisted of a couple short stretches of rural roads–and marveled at how heavy the snow was and how quickly it was piling up. We wound up beneath the lamp on the corner, talking, watching the snow come down through the light, talking some more. Maybe there was some snowball mischief involved.

After I took the picture, I got in the car and started to drive toward Park Forest. But I thought, no, I wanted to go up our old road and see if there was anything to be seen up there.

Oak Hill Drive was a quarter-mile long lane, arrow straight through stands of oak and maple and up a little rise, barely wide enough for two cars. It was gravel when we moved onto the road in 1966, and there was always a swampy, potholed stretch about a third of the way up that seemed immune to all efforts to fix it. Walking up there in the dark, it seemed almost inevitable you’d stumble into one of the muddy ruts. The road was eventually tarred and chipped, then paved at some point.

I drove up to the end, where the road ends in a cul de sac and where our old driveway follows a fence line into the trees. I parked in the turn-around–aware the whole time of what we had always thought when we saw a car come to a stop out there and douse its lights: “Someone’s up to no good.” But I parked anyway, got out of the car, and walked back down the road.

It was then I had a strange sense of not quite belonging, of being in a place I knew intimately and not at all.

About 20 of the two dozen homes along the road, each built on a lot of about an acre, were there when I grew up. I remember each house, who lived there, and whether we were on good terms. The Sullivans. The Flemings. The Euchners. The Phillipses. The Pattersons. The Janowiaks. The O’Donnells, Everharts, Ihles, Keetons, and Hartmanns. A parent committed suicide in one house. Another was home to a family that lost both a mother and a brother to untimely deaths. And without looking too hard, one might find equally dark and disturbing stories up and down the road.

Looking across one section of open yards, I saw a light in the back room of a house I knew well–the home of my best friend growing up out there. That lamp looked like it might have been the same one that was shining there on my last visit, about 30 years ago. It might be. My friend’s parents are still there. But all of those other people I remember are long since gone.

I got down to the bottom of the road, then turned around and started back up. A car turned into the road and passed me. I wondered what the driver was thinking. Probably some variation on, “What’s somebody doing out here in the snow this late at night?” I realized my imagined answer to such a question–“I grew up out here”–wouldn’t explain much. What most people would see was a middle-aged guy walking in a dark, cold place the week before Christmas.

I watched the car turn into a driveway, then listened to the loud crunch of gravel under the tires. It occurred to me the driver might not have seen me at all. Maybe I’d been invisible. A ghost visiting his memories.

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Ghost

stuenkel121809.jpg

A week before Christmas, while I was visiting family in Chicago and environs, I drove out to the south suburbs to see two old friends, Jane and Mort. They were teachers at my high school, Crete-Monee. Mort taught English and writing, and we formed a lasting bond over that. I became friends with Jane when she married Mort. We’ve stayed in close enough touch that I still try to drop in once in a while, and I’ve never forgotten their phone number. For the afternoon and evening I was at their house in Crete last month, we talked up a storm, lit the last of the Hanukkah candles, and ate pizza. By the time I left to drive back to the North Side, a weak, intermittent snow was falling. I gassed up in University Park, which I still think of as Park Forest South or even Wood Hill, then drove west on Exchange and north on Monee Road toward our old house.

I parked first down near the bridge over Thorn Creek, at the intersection with Monee and Stuenkel roads. That’s the picture above. I remember that corner during a heavy pre-Christmas snowstorm one night when I was 16 or so. I think school had let out for the holiday earlier that day, and then it started to snow. One of our friends from the road was coming back from college in Iowa. We roamed the neighborhood–it consisted of a couple short stretches of rural roads–and marveled at how heavy the snow was and how quickly it was piling up. We wound up beneath the lamp on the corner, talking, watching the snow come down through the light, talking some more. Maybe there was some snowball mischief involved.

After I took the picture, I got in the car and started to drive toward Park Forest. But I thought, no, I wanted to go up our old road and see if there was anything to be seen up there.

Oak Hill Drive was a quarter-mile long lane, arrow straight through stands of oak and maple and up a little rise, barely wide enough for two cars. It was gravel when we moved onto the road in 1966, and there was always a swampy, potholed stretch about a third of the way up that seemed immune to all efforts to fix it. Walking up there in the dark, it seemed almost inevitable you’d stumble into one of the muddy ruts. The road was eventually tarred and chipped, then paved at some point.

I drove up to the end, where the road ends in a cul de sac and where our old driveway follows a fence line into the trees. I parked in the turn-around–aware the whole time of what we had always thought when we saw a car come to a stop out there and douse its lights: “Someone’s up to no good.” But I parked anyway, got out of the car, and walked back down the road.

It was then I had a strange sense of not quite belonging, of being in a place I knew intimately and not at all.

About 20 of the two dozen homes along the road, each built on a lot of about an acre, were there when I grew up. I remember each house, who lived there, and whether we were on good terms. The Sullivans. The Flemings. The Euchners. The Phillipses. The Pattersons. The Janowiaks. The O’Donnells, Everharts, Ihles, Keetons, and Hartmanns. A parent committed suicide in one house. Another was home to a family that lost both a mother and a brother to untimely deaths. And without looking too hard, one might find equally dark and disturbing stories up and down the road.

Looking across one section of open yards, I saw a light in the back room of a house I knew well–the home of my best friend growing up out there. That lamp looked like it might have been the same one that was shining there on my last visit, about 30 years ago. It might be. My friend’s parents are still there. But all of those other people I remember are long since gone.

I got down to the bottom of the road, then turned around and started back up. A car turned into the road and passed me. I wondered what the driver was thinking. Probably some variation on, “What’s somebody doing out here in the snow this late at night?” I realized my imagined answer to such a question–“I grew up out here”–wouldn’t explain much. What most people would see was a middle-aged guy walking in a dark, cold place the week before Christmas.

I watched the car turn into a driveway, then listened to the loud crunch of gravel under the tires. It occurred to me the driver might not have seen me at all. Maybe I’d been invisible. A ghost visiting his memories.

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‘Always on Christmas Night …’

luminaria122409a.jpgThe closing lines of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” My favorite part of one of my favorite poems. Merry Christmas, wherever you are on this Christmas night.

… Always on Christmas night there was music.
An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang
‘Cherry Ripe,’ and another uncle sang ‘Drake’s Drum.’
It was very warm in the little house.
Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip
wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death,
and then another in which she said her heart
was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody
laughed again; and then I went to bed.

“Looking out my bedroom window, out into
the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow,
I could see the lights in the windows
of all the other houses on our hill and hear
the music rising from them up the long, steadily
falling night. I turned the gas down, I got
into bed. I said some words to the close and
holy darkness, and then I slept.”

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News of the Holiday World

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I've never been much for big parties. I think it comes from the questionable idea that somehow I need to have something to say to whoever is there–to justify my presence, to prove that I'm a real bon vivant, to show I'm clever–even before the first glass of wine takes hold. Exceptions are made, though: I'll go when there are some good friends around, or when there's some compelling draw. An example: In my first years at The San Francisco Examiner, William Randolph Hearst's first purchase, which occasionally published under the legend "The Monarch of the Dailies," the paper put on a fabulously generous holiday fete. The paper would rent out the Convent of the Sacred Heart–the old Daniel Flood mansion in Pacific Heights–and spare no expense for food, drink, or entertainment. It was so nice, everyone dressed up. Even me. Alas, the party vanished as the paper entered the era of reduced circumstances in the early '90s.

Last Friday, my office held its holiday party. Actually, a few employees put it on for the rest of us. A colleague who lives a few blocks away makes his place available, and the staff does a pot luck. In its own way, its every bit as generous and enjoyable as the Hearst extravaganza ever was. I didn't make it this year, though. Stuff came up, as we like to say. Instead, I found myself over at Lanesplitter, the North Oakland pizza and beer place where our son Thom works. I spent the time marveling as I usually do at how hard everyone's working and how much business comes in the door even as the hour gets late. Eventually, we said goodbye and headed for home.

On the way to the car, I passed Smokey's Tangle, the little audience-participation art gallery on the next block. There's always something fun going on in the storefront window. This time, there was a sign inviting passers-by to come in and have their picture taken with Santa. The place was closed, though I could see the proprietors inside. They must have heard me laughing at the window display, because they came to the door and invited me in. "You want to have your picture taken with Santa?" they asked. I was all for it. So I went to the back room where "Santina" was hanging out, waiting for visitors. You can judge the result. I have to say I don't look entirely persuaded about the good cheer impending this holiday season or the quality of the new year. I guess we'll just wait and see.

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Air Blog: The Prequel

In the morning, I’m up and off to Chicago for the week. Family visit–not work. Packing consists of counting, and I try to make sure the number of shirts, socks and underwear-things I bring matches the number of days I expect to be away, with maybe an extra pair of everything in case I’m in a rodeo or a tackle football game. The hardest part, simply because I’ve lived in a two-season climate for so long where winter gear is totally optional: remembering to bring gloves and a hat. That is all. Tomorrow, SFO to ORD.

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Freeway Moon

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Last night, Kate called me at work to say I ought to get out and see the moon rising. I agreed. I walked out of the office and up a steep stretch of Mariposa Street to a spot with an open view to the east across U.S. 101. There was a rising moon and lots of traffic. My camera’s just limping along these days, but this is actually a pretty good impression of the scene.