Schematics

So I went into the basement the other night, back a long stretch of weeks ago, before my father died, and started rooting around in the tall metal stack of junk amps I have there, most of them found at the side of the road and hauled home in my trunk.  I dug for a while and exhumed this really lovely Kenwood amp, the same kind I used through college, but this one was my Dad’s and had been shorted it out at the speaker wires.  My dad really never understood how anything mechanical worked.  His wiring mistake had killed the power supply section.  It was powerful its prime (dual mono power amplifiers), rugged and mechanical all the way through (no computerized functions and twitchy delicacies like that).  It was amazingly heavy, an anvil of an amp, and I rescued it from his house years ago when he moved into assisted living.  When I got home to New York I just threw it into the basement.  Too nice to toss, too damaged to use, too expensive to repair.  So one day, given that I had tons of papers to grade, recommendations to write, emails to send and bills to pay,  pulling the amp out of the basement and plugging it up — just to test it, purely out of curiosity, won’t take but a minute — seemed like a sensible choice. 

           

I’ve been messing around listening to old music lately, mostly because of Pandora.com.  I can aim my musical compass at one band or guitarist or song, letting the invisible algorithms shuffle songs all day long.  My wife and I set it to play on autopilot while we were preparing for Thanksgiving.  Cleaning the kitchen was done to a flock of songs in a Tommy Bolin vibe; the living room was vacuumed to Walter Trout and The Black Keys; the dining room got Bach and those guys.  We argued intensely through a Neko Case playlist and made up to Peter Green.  You cover a lot of ground that way.  Sarah Vowell says in her book on the Puritans that the Indians of the time – the ones the Puritans exterminated, of course – were in the habit of calling any excellent thing “Manitou,” the name of their Higher Power.  Any form of excellence would count: A great mountain lion (they were everywhere back then), a storm, a true speech, surprising immunity to smallpox – all Manitou.  I think of it as saying “There is spirit moving in there.”  So that’s what I heard while we were prepping for Thanksgiving – a lot of songs with the spirit moving in them.  It doesn’t seem a bad way to think of a Higher Power’s manifestations, as well-wrought tones, not stentorian voices.  As displays of power and grace in motion, not diplomas or assertions.  It was fall and the hillside behind our house was still senescent  and the light was weightless and fair, coming in now at quite an angle, the cusp of the season, the place between two worlds.

Tracing my mind over old songs is strange because they were first embossed in my mind when I was between 14 and 30.  I bet the same is true for most of us.  I heard somewhere that some species of birds learn songs not from their DNA, but learn them from their own species – which means birdsongs would change slowly over time.  Would we even recognize the call of a medieval North American meadowlark, singing to the oblivious mammoths and saber-toothed tigers?  What a delight to even contemplate the tenor of that ancient accent.  We are desperate to know the lyrics of our own species, that I’m sure of.  I remember ritualistically, intently, writing all the words to Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” on the side of a yellow forklift at some low-paying high-ceilinged warehouse when I was eighteen and working in Chicago.  I suspect these tribal songs perform a biological role, locking us in to a people and a history, marking us as members of a particular village or tribe. It’s a watermark on your heart that you can still see if you hold it up to the light just right.  Although the songs I know best were in fact distributed by mega-corporations trying to get rich, it doesn’t matter.  It’s still my history and it’s still the moment of history that shaped me. I’ve tried to be cool and avoid looking like I value things that might mark me as an nostalgic fuddy-duddy, but I don’t care about that any more.  I can listen to most old songs much better than I can listen to, say, the Black Eyed Peas. (I have no idea how one would actually sit down and listen to that music.  I think it is meant to play in the background while you aerobicize with weights or dance with drunk girls. Neither of these occasions presented itself recently at my house, so I have to admit to speaking without experience).  Traffic’s Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, I can understand.  I know how to pay attention to the pacing and the suffering, their amateurishness and wonder. 

So I carried the heavy, dark, glinting, arcane, stainless-steel amp upstairs.  I flicked it on, waited impatiently, and turned it off.  Dead as a doornail.  But then it occurred to me.  Though the power amp part was dead, I really liked the front section of this machine, the part called the "pre-amp" that that controls the volume and tone, the expensive feel in the massive volume control, so I looked around online and found a post from someone who was thinking like me.  He said that he was able to open up a similar amp and cut the right wires, solder in a connection, and pipe the signal to an external power amp.  This is just the degree of Macgyvering and hacking that so appeals to me.  Nifty bypass. When I find a piece of furniture on the side of the road, it becomes mine only when I can take it apart and rebuild it, repairing it with paint, compression clamps, solder, glue or solvent.  If I just carry it indoors and set it down, what’s the point?  Unless it involves me in some way, why bother?  How can you care about something if you don’t have a history with it?

Finding the schematics for the Kenwood wasn’t easy.  People want to sell that sort of electrical information to you, not give it away for free, so I searched until I found a discussion list where I caught wind of a Russian website that might still carry the info.  I went to Russia from my living room, got a password, and started searching for my particular amplifier’s info.  During my time following down clues on the computer, sitting there as I do for many hours a day at work, watching the screen, I was thinking about a conversation about music I had with a friend a few years ago (you can tell that by now this minor project of just “plugging up the amp” has become a side project).  This guy—a good singer, very knowledgeable about bands, songs, artists, dates, instruments—he and I were listening to some Wal-Mart-quality blues guitar – no one memorable.  The guitarist would make some runs in one key, then make some runs in another with all the grace of someone setting a table – fork here, knife there, all correct – but there was no development, no call and response, no storyline to the music.  The tone was generic, the statement was muddy even if the notes were clear and I complained about this to my friend – the guitarist was hitting the correct notes, but not really saying anything.  If he were a writer, we’d say he had no “voice.”

But my friend, he had no idea what I was talking about.  He doubted all this “development” or “storyline” stuff.  He had no concept of the blues “completing” a statement or coming back to reiterate a point. It was all just a package of notes, just sound, a notch above noise.  He reminded me of my college kids who read a poem and think the figurative language is just padding to the poem’s Real Point.  The guitar, to my friend, was padding, a bridge back to the singer.   So I’m thinking about this, amazed that this guy didn’t get it, and wondering what he did hear when he listened to guitar music.  And I’m thinking of the guitarists who can haunt, celebrate and testify with their guitar, vindicate with their guitar, quote Scripture with it.  They can carry on a conversation and yet assert the Noble Truth that human suffering is undeniable and demands to be confronted.  What is and what should never be – that is what Mr. Page laments as eloquently as Mr. Plant.  What Dicky Betts and Walter Trout understand. 

So I got the schematics. They were in English, not Russian, but it hardly mattered.  They were still a maze.  They had the same abstract relation to the actual amplifier wiring as subway maps have to the subway tunnels, but without labels, colors, or people sitting around to give me advice about taking getting off at the next stop.  The schematic diagram was simplified, and, of course, two dimensional.  The actual wires dove into and under printed circuit boards, thorough obscure knobs and switches.  They emerged unpredictably as a snake popping out of a woodpile.  But after a while it started to make some sense.  I sought and found the three wires, right, left and ground, that passed through a gap between the front and back of the amp, between the controls and the power, three thin threads that carried the decisions about tone, volume, balance and such to the primitive cerebellum of the machine, the power amp section.  They were thin as nerves, and I was thrilled to find them.  I could almost touch the solution.  As I closed in, I noticed how well made this whole thing was inside – neat and thought through. The source selector was on a long rod that ended in a delightful device in which a ball bearing rolled inside a ring under a taut metal tongue; to make the right connection, the bearing would snap into a little indent in the inside of the ring, held there by the tongue.  The ball bearing was a perfect conducting surface – it was metal, it rolled, so it wouldn’t get gummed up, and it would be impossible to break.  Very cool.  Some Japanese guy thought of that while in the shower one day and probably burst from the shower shouting “Eureka” and running naked through the streets of Fukuoka.  I would have done the same, I’m pretty sure, but might try shouting “Manitou" because an eloquent jig like that definitely reveals a spirit moving through it.

So on Craigslist (another apostrophe dies) I found this old Onkyo power amp to take over for my Kenwood’s power amp, a huge monster with giant VU meters that glow yellow while the huge capacitors are filling and then changes to green when everything’s ready.  Powerful, yeah, but it’s those old-school meters that I wanted, big as a billboard and expensive.  I called the guy, talked him down, figured it was hot, and before I went over to buy it, I decided to give the Kenwood one last chance.  With a pair of little bookshelf speakers, I plugged the amp in and turned it on.  Nothing. 

As for my dad’s death, there are rivers of words and plains of silence to explain that, but in the end, I can’t really.  This is what it felt like, though: "nothing you can say."  I feel silly for even mentioning it since I’m not exactly the first child to lose a parent and because the event was, any way you look at it, a tiny bit more tragic for my father than for me.  But somewhere in this narrative he died, and it might well have been here, while I was standing in the room, in an empty house, listening closely.  Waiting patiently, playing with my childhood toys.

For at least a minute, nothing.  But deep into the second minute, deep inside the steel box, a loud “ping” sounded. After fiddling with it, the room was filled with music.  There is no way this can be, but it works [now some weeks later, it still works.]  It works!  Wonderful!  I suspect it always worked — I was just never patient enough to wait for it.  In my rushing, forcing myself through the last few years of raising kids and watching my parents decline, buying houses and falling in love and climbing the ladder at work, I assumed the amp was broken because at no point could I stand still like that, in an empty house, listening.  So I unplug it all, find some stainless steel polish, Q-tips and a steel wool pad.  I clean it meticulously.  It shines like a wet rock.  Ok, I know it might be slightly wishful thinking, but right now I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the detail and separation are great.  Here is what I think: the past sounds better through this amp than any other.  I think: it’s a machine for reverence.  Against the backdrop of dark chords I quietly sing:

Far away across the field /

The tolling of the iron bell 
/

Calls the faithful to their knees /

To hear the softly 
spoken 
              magic 
                           spells.

My memories are getting watery.  I think I recall long ago sitting in the basement room of my parents’ house listening to that song in the middle of a winter night, my back to the sliding glass doors, thinking about the future and the past.  I seem to remember the pattern on the couch, the taste of the cigarette, the way the light played on the wall across from me.  As a young man everything was the future, and the future was opaque. It was like driving into fog on an unfamiliar road, and you’re late, and you’re not very sure you even want to be there. And then one day, after enough people die and you start to see the mortal rhythm, after you sense a time signature emerge from the noise, you see that the latest wave of musicians — those generations at their song — have grown old and failed to prove themselves immortal.  And you’re surprised!  —which itself seems strange to you, since you saw this coming, even then, even now as you are standing there in an empty house in one season or another, waiting for some sort of resolution, for your life to fall into place and start making sense.  And do you at that solitary moment sense the way ahead coming clear, more clear maybe than you want it to be?  Do you know when you pass over that moment?  When you hear the spirit moving through it? Is that where the belief starts, when you start to suspect that learning to play the blues, learning to bend your oh-so-suffering heart to the living day seems not so much a cheap cliché as a schematic for living rigorously?  And with joy?  

Gratitude

didn’t appear with angels,

though they’d be nice, all that hubbub

and buzz and the onerous nod from above.

It’s more like the flump at the top

when the stair runs out of steps

before you do, or the basketball

you threw in desperation

that hits the rim for three

bounces, then finds its way

through the simple middle.

Or it appears this morning,

unfolding myself from a dark bed

like a letter to the day

and knowing what to do,

happy to carry a thermos of coffee

to the car and stand under the vague sky,

stars letting in light like bullet holes

over new snow, over
the car that starts while the heater

does its good work.  A straw of dark
steam rises from my chimney 
and the ashy light falls down on us
( & x 1000 sleeping houses), 

all my brothers and sisters and me.

Honeymoon Sharks

Honeymoon Sharks

I learned to swim in Iowa, a skill that’s about as useful there as knowing how to skin a platypus.  There are no lakes in Iowa, or if there are, everyone assiduously avoids talking about them.  I suspect that’s because you can’t plow or plant a lake, and as we all know, Iowa is crops. Lakes are anomalies and appear on their maps as large blank wet useless blotches.  I’m not sure they are even named. Just: blotch, as if someone set a wet coffee cup on your new oak table.  Lakes are a faux pas in all that rich cropland.  A true Iowan's attitude is: Yes, it happened.  Now what, really, is there for a person to say about it?

I was wrong about all that, about the problem with lakes.  The main reason we eschew lakes, I came to realize on summer evening in 1975, walking out of the theater, clutching a strangled box of popcorn with both terrified hands, is that in water, as the movie Jaws had just amply proved, is where large, really large, really really large hungry animals can and routinely do swim up from the unnamable dark grainy depths to eat people.  I can still feel on my skin the shift of temperature a swimmer must realize as cooler water is pulled up behind some great carnivore. I can picture the glimpse of the line of fin or tooth just under the rippling surface.  I can enter the realization that you are going to die in stereo -- both by being pulled under the surface gripped by the creature’s enormous teeth until you drown as well as being simultaneously torn limb from limb in water so deep there is not even enough light to see your own blood.  This is all scary, but the final words in your head would be “Gee, I could have lived if I had only stayed on land.”  But you chose instead to sit there, bobbing up and down like a cork or a worm on a hook, your little legs dangling down and kicking feebly.  No matter what horror you feel, there is no way can you climb on top of the waves, no way to outswim this cylinder of muscle that is squeezing its way through the water to your defenseless thigh.  You’re screwed.  Rather than learning to drive a tractor, you chose swimming lessons.  Great choice, white boy.

           

For me, this image slowly hardened into one small lesson: don’t swim in the ocean.  Lakes, streams, and even bathtubs were suspect, but swimming in the ocean was just asking for it.  I never looked at this very hard.  The choice between violent wet death and a long dry life seemed pretty stark and simple.  Furthermore, if you make it a rule never to swim in the ocean and you live in Iowa, there’s not much to lose.  As I grew older, though, I found that not all the things that scared the bejeesus out of me were geographically sequestered.  Getting married, for instance, made me pale with anxiety for about a decade. Raising kids, and, later, getting divorced took a long time to accept as part of my path.  I drew it out as long as I could, with agonizing slowness.  I never was one to plunge into something new.  It took me thirty years to quit partying, which is the pace of a glacier, especially given the amount of evidence I had to work with that it was time to stop.  But the biggest challenge, even bigger than eating sushi for the first time or dancing in public, was getting remarried.  I had met a woman I couldn’t ignore, one who was a lot less cautious than I was, and a lot less interested in figuring it all out than I am, and I found that delightful.  After eight years of courtship, we had moved in together, mixed our books together (a shockingly intimate gesture, it turns out), and even gotten married. 

I am standing on the lip of a ship with my huge black foot fins bouncing inches above the cold Pacific ocean. I’m wearing a wetsuit that makes me look like a seal and my face is crammed into an scratched and translucent snorkel mask.  Below me the water is broken into loose triangles, like pieces of pie, and we’re surging up and down.  I’m the next-to-last passenger on the boat but for my new wife, and I think how ironic and irresistible a story it would be if we were eaten by a great white shark on our honeymoon.  I reflect back on our wedding presents, some still unwrapped, our thank-you cards just begun, her wedding dress still hung up in our closet.  Everyone would say what a great wedding it was and someone would give all my vinyl records to my brother, who would cry a little and probably play Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” really really loud in his own little cathartic ritual.  Everyone would be so sad.  But before I can really complete this fantasy, a guy pops out of the water and yells to the first mate SHARK!

I take a small step back from the edge. 

Soon, the boat is full of parents and kids, honeymooners and tourists, all talking but also scanning the water, looking for the thin line of a fin or tooth just under the water, or breaking through the water, or a dark shadow travelling under the boat, perhaps nudging it just a little, enough to make the bell in the crow’s nest ring once or twice.  We all know the narrative.  We all saw the movie, and some of us had expected this all along.

To his credit, the first made suited up and jumped into the suspect water.  I waved goodbye and wondered who would get his vinyl records.  I was also proud of him, doing his job like that.  When he finally emerged, he was ecstatic.  “It’s a Thresher Shark,” he exclaimed.  “You never see them! It’s got to be four feet long! I haven’t seen one in years!” At some level, I shared his excitement.  It had been a long time since I had seen a Thresher Shark – my whole life, in fact.  But at another level, I thought he was being careful to leave out some important information.  “Tell me,” I said to him quietly, when he returned alive to the deck.  I leaned in so as not to embarrass him or cause him to lie if he didn’t want to share this information with the others onboard, “Have you ever heard of anyone, anywhere, ever being hurt by one of these sharks?”  He paused just a second and said “Nope.” I looked back at my wife, and at the one other guy in the water who seemed as scared as I was, but kept trying to convince his wife to jump in as a way to conceal his own nervousness.  “That’s good enough for me,” I said.  And I jumped.

           

It’s hard to breathe.  The mask blocks your nose. The snorkel is full of water and when you come to the surface you have to blow all that water out, not inhale, it’s unnatural, you desperately want to look down to see the shark coming up at you but you also want to look up to see where the heck the boat is.  You’re a lot further away than you expected.  There is a forest of kelp here, leaves sliding across your goggles.  Breathe.  Breathe – you can hear your breath in the tube.  Words "esophagus" and "trachea" come to mind, as do works such as "blood," "calm," "swim," and "air."  The splash behind you is your wife -- you hope -- and when you whirl around you see she’s having trouble with the mask, can’t make it work, doesn’t breathe right.  You bob alongside of her and wait for her to figure it out, your four legs dangling down, mindful that you are ignoring everything below you, and you wait to feel the rush of cold water that you’re sure precedes the inevitable attack. Her hair is tangled up in the fittings.  You wait.

It’s still tangled up and she tells you to go on, but you wait more and you can see that she is grateful.  When it’s worked out, you both turn your faces to the depths and immediately lose track of each other, watching instead the desultory schools of bright yellow fish that wander like strange goldfinches in the undulating clumps of kelp.  The yellow fish give way to blue ones, bright as flowers or jewels, and they seem neither afraid nor inattentive.  I realize, suddenly, that I’m in a forest, at the very top, and the water is clear all the way down, 30, 40, 60 feet to giant rocks that have rolled out of the hills from the nearby cliffsides and ended up here eons ago, now covered with green and yellow plants I can’t name and have never seen before. The school of blue fish slip silently and frictionlessly along the bottom.  I see green mottled fish that look like the mottled green clouds before a storm -- “maculate,” I think they call it.  The fear of the shark has faded.  I’m in an ancient forest of water-trees, staring down at the wild animals, and they don’t care.  I’m starting to regret, just a little bit and in the abstract, not seeing the shark.  Maybe just a glimpse of it as it shot out of this area toward deeper water.  Or the manta rays they say scuttle along the bottom of these waters or even, maybe, just saying, a whale, for there are supposed to be whales all over around here, and I’d like to see one, just for a moment, lying on its side, sliding by, making me feel how light and insubstantial my body is in the water, how unprotected all these animals are, and because of that, how beautiful.  

What I do for a living and why I do it

Today was the my college's first day for Tuesday/Thursday classes, and I went in excited after the summer, full of more ideas for our first day than you could shake a stick at. I am one of the few people I know who can honestly say he has "good work." I know what I want to do, I know what the challenges are, I know what not to waste my time on, and I know what a good risk feels like. But what puzzles me is something simple: how is it that my understanding of what I do and others' understand is so very different? Or to put it in another way, what sorts of assumptions do my students and peers have about what I do that don't match up to my own experience? Even more simply: why do people have such odd ideas about this job?

First of all, I should come clean and admit that I'm a writing teacher. I might be called a "comp" teacher when I teach comp, a "tech" teacher when I teach technical writing, or a "creative writing" teacher when I teach that. For each role there are some subtle differences in the picture. The creative writing teacher might be expected to elicit people expressing their inner selves, a sort of Dr. Phil with a degree in English. A tech writer might be expected to teach one rigorous and methodical quiver of invariant forms for gaining Success in the Workplace, the holy grail. And on. Each role has its own costume and clichés.

But as a writing teacher, the biggest umbrella, I think of myself as a rhetorician.

What's that? Since "rhetoric" usually means showy style, the opposite of substance, I should take a minute to defend the choice of the word "rhetoric." It doesn't mean bullshitting people, nor does it mean tricking them, being self-serving, or being insincere. Plato comes out and condemns rhetoric for these things (and implies them) in such dialogues as the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and The Seventh Letter, and he was not exactly a fuzzy thinker, so there is a lot of momentum to this assumption. Today it is almost impossible to use the word "rhetoric" without it carrying a pejorative spin, as in "Johnny told the truth, but Billy just used rhetoric." Like the words "liberal" or "intellectual," it's difficult to say what you mean when you use these words.

But the tradition and the potential for useful meaning is such that I think "rhetoric" is a word worth using. For me, rhetoric, straight from Plato on down, implies a love/hate affair with our own power to use language. It's a frightening thing when you think about it to realize that we as humans live in a world that is more made up of the words that people use together, oral and written, than the physical world itself. We live in a world of signs, surrounded by human sounds and sights. If someone says something particularly nasty to you, probably that will be as real as (or more so) than the sting of a bee. It's in skillful language that the Hitlers and the Ghandis galvanize great change in huge populations. Skillful use of language is volatile. These folks are powerful. Rhetoric -- and here I'm thinking of it as "the ability to get others to take you seriously" -- is dangerous.

It's also natural. We can't avoid our attempts to get others to take us seriously. My kids were literally born with the skills and desire to get their mother and me to take them seriously. Still are! When they are young, rhetoric is all about making sure the self is fed, clothed, and loved. Without getting to far afield, it seems to me that rhetoric is also about giving love, too, as that seems to be a fundamental human need (not just a nice thing to do).

So if rhetoric begins as persuading people to take you seriously, that has two big implications. First, it seems pretty selfish. Getting humans to do what you want (using that unique system, human language) is an interesting, challenging, endlessly engaging activity, but it has little to do with their well being. It's all about maintaining and increasing your individual capital. In this, rhetoric is power, like muscle power or military power, to get what you want (though of course you can get what you want by cooperating with others, too, the motive is the same). What do we do about this rhetorical selfishness? Is there room to look at motives and ethics with rhetoric, or is it all manipulation? Is teaching kids "rhetorical" skills the most crass sort of education?

Secondly, if rhetoric is about getting people to take you seriously, what sorts of things do you want to get people to consider? That is, how do you know what you want (even when you want it for others) is a good thing? How do you choose your battles? How do you choose your words?

These are not new questions. Plato asked most of them, and there are entire continents of interesting stuff done in the 20th century that revived these questions [need bibliographical link to starting places here]. What this implies for me is that 1) rhetoric can be deliberately developed through education. 2) In fact, education IS rhetorical in several senses, and it is rhetoric that brings up these questions about ethics, motive, and judgment 2) writing is where the rubber meets the road in questions about expression, learning, developing a concept, etc.

Old Month, New Place

September: Wrong to call it timid,
I remind myself, shambling
into work.  More of an alertness
reflected in the bright black eye
of starlings.  Flocks massive and light
in the sumac at the edge of the lawn.
Or Tibetan prayer flags attentive
to the smallest change in breath
coming now out of the door
labeled north.  I can see
the whole valley as the leaves
give up.  Morning is dark. The heart
crumples and expands
like a paper bag.
It wakes in a dark room, 
my September body,
with light trickling in
the windows of my eyes.

HEAT

Got it going, the 100,000 BTU furnace.  Something primal there. Saying HEAT to the cold, saying NOT HERE to the phlegmatic winter. Watched them set the tank full of propane with their small crane.  A beluga whale full of liquid gas explosive. It is smaller than I thought, and I am actually rather fond of it, sitting like a good dog next to the storage shed. I could take a picture, but there are so many dumb details of the actual reality that a photograph would distract you with: errant blackberry branches, bits of wood, irrelevent tufts of grass, shanks of broken pipe. If I were to paint the scene of tank-and-shed I would clean it up by running it through my consciousness, and that would organize the scene, simplify it. Maybe attention is like an ore, needing to be refined and tempered. It takes a long time to learn to do that, and then it gets called something voodoo like art or skill or expertise or taste or wisdom. Observing simply and simply observing is an accomplishment. 

All this is to say that I know I’m a bit strange in my enthusiasms. Rather German, perhaps. The register boots are new and when you look down the grates you can see light—reflecting back from the shiny new tin. The boots are in turn connected to new big pipes, also shiny, running in parallel between the joists. They are connected to square heat runs from which the runs sprout. The whole thing is sort of like a very shiny beetle with pipe-like appendages extended everywhere. The entire assembly links up to the furnace, of course, and it’s a very good furnace. When it’s on, you can barely hear it, and it sucks new air through a 4 inch straw from outside and vents through an identical pipe.  It’s amazingly efficient at putting heat into the air, leaving none to slop around, so the exhaust can run through PVC pipe (!) to the outside. The blower ramps up very slowly and then, at eight minutes, kicks in to high power, all very quiet, though the force is so strong it actually blew one of unscrewed register grates off the wall upstairs to clatter into the hallway and scare the kids.

I enjoyed that very much.

So we have heat now, very fancy, state of the art, but down in the basement we also have an old inefficient wood-burning stove that will, if you keep it stoked, heat the entire house and it smells good – though consuming literally tons of wood and creating piles of ash. I’m going to use it this winter. I look forward to overcast days down in my newly created high-ceilinged basement, six-foot florescent lights and 1,000,000 lumens falling from between the free joists, banks of screws, bolts, caps, pipes, boards, nails, screws, springs, washers, and tools all on one wall, books on the other, a chair, a table saw, a big-ass vice bolted to a sturdy workbench, fire in the woodstove, and all around me the silent and odorless backup of propane heat, thrumming through the pipes over my head, running heat to my family above me while I work on interesting solutions to interesting problems written in wood and wire (and paper). Re-threading, leveling, connecting. Breaking things down and making things coherent. There is a certain joy in that, leaning against all that is insubstantial. 

Wheel inside a Wheel

This morning I parked my car in the lot and got out into a light rain. Nothing surprising. The sky was low and the asphalt was riddled with dots. In contrast to the car’s coffee and exhaust, the parking lot, near a stand of trees, was fresh and sharp, wet and cold. Fall in the air and the same sort of feeling that drives the geese to array themselves and travel hit me as it does every year. Must be the slant of light, the cold, the smell of autumnal weeds fizzing at the margins of fields and yards, the colors: raspberry and yellowpurplecrimson, the sort of colors that make me think of dyed wool and medieval celebrations (not sure where that last one comes from). Doesn’t matter. At my age there is a certain resonance to fall that gets deeper every year. The urge to travel, to find horizons, to build fences and fires. Maybe I can blame it all on my pituitary gland. Circadian rhythm. The earth is a drum.

And as I get out of the car I’m thinking vaguely of Yeats’ political theory about the gyres, two intersecting spirals that represent the apposition and opposition of everything, that explain history and my place in it. I think it’s cool Yeats found an image, a figure, an emblem to crystallize his feelings about growing older in troubled times and the poet’s role in that turmoil. Such a literate mind at work, it invents an ideogram.

My ideogram is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel. These appear in clocks and car transmissions as far as I know. There is a complicated mathematics to the synchronized wheels, as any kid using a Spirograph can sense, but my feeling as I get older is that there are many, many wheels, maybe an infinite number, that all spiral, spin, and revolve. At times, a master wheel – in this case, the seasons – pulls the contraption around to a particular notch and the inner and outer wheels turn madly on their frictionless pivots in response, compensating and adjusting. So the wheels today are being 50, fall, the beginning of the day, the end of rain, the opening up of a new part of my heart work in my new house, the death of my acquaintance Matty, the end of the book, and the like.

This entire system can be ported to language, where rhymes (slant, rich, and full) stand for the various synchronicities that the wheels carry. Where characters and their motives are the distances between stars. Where genres are the toothy wheels. (Caution: Extreme number crunching needed to communicate between these two systems. See the formula at the right).

Regardless of the system, today I felt in the balance. I remember learning to ride a bike and realizing that it’s not in the hands and head, it’s in the butt. You drive with your ass. It’s correcting on the fly, not pointing, stiff, white, and vector-like, at the end of the driveway. It’s pointing and cycling, spinning and wobbling. Balance is dynamic. Look again at the formula above. It’s obvious.

Sometimes in poems there is attempt to talk about the plentitude of accepting what’s around us. I remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lyric “Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice / But to carry on” or the poems of Stevens, and I found it again recently in a poem from a friend of mine, Brian Fay:

The sun shines over the bare branches of trees
unconcerned with autumn, unafraid of the cold winter,
focused only on buds, blossoms,
and cool green leaves in all this sunlight.

So for me, this morning, there was a moment when the constellations aligned. When my age was exactly the time of year, of day, of the decade, of my waking hours.

Locking the car, I hefted my books and walked inside.

White Geese

In the beginning, just the barn. The barn and the old house, left there by the absent owners, a broken and fascinating thing, an artifact lit by bare bulbs over a floor my father forbids us to walk across. You might fall through. Falling through a floor is absurd. Behind the kitchen sink, outside the window there, a high pile of cans and weeds, broken glass and blue-bottle flies, tall nettles, wild hemp and ragweed grown over my head, a forest during the day, stalks thick as my arm.

They never spoke. Or I don’t remember them speaking. My father rented a dumpster and worked hard in the way parents do, invisibly, on the periphery of a child’s awareness. My mother stayed home, I think. I spent most of my time in the field of the new farm, tracking down a litter of rabbits who died one by one in my bedroom later. I would also walk down to the fence where the bull used to kill people. Or that's what they say. Down the way a ways was a thin vein of water and I followed the creek, oblivious to the mosquitoes, hoping to get ticks I could pull out of my scalp when I got home.

It was weeks we drove out to work around the abandoned farm, pulling up nettles and bed springs, rotted clothing and chicken bones, plows and gears and cardoors, milk jugs and tin pans burnt thru. Manure three feet deep in the barbed square paddock where they cows had been kept and ignored until they starved was fuel for the weeds that grew madly there, their enthusiasm and joy arching over the kid paths we created. My parents kept working silently on the cinderblocks and broken chairs, and we kept getting warned about exploring the dilapidated house until one night my father drove off with a red tin can of gas in the trunk of his Dodge Dart and that evening the whole farmhouse—the bare lightbulbs, the pornography stuffed in the walls, the swaybacked floors, the whole flimsy tinderbox of it all went up in a scorch of fumes and fire and light and burned for three days even after the tornados and rain came. He said teenagers in a white car did it, and I believe him. The heat made the air ripple hard, it radiated too hot to stare at even through the carwindows and you had to turn your head as if seeing something shameful.

My parents separated and then got back together and she said her nose broke from tripping on a toy or a chair. And we went back to the farm to continue working, my mom more gone this time but me left with new pants striped all the way to the ends of the bell-bottoms but they are the wrong size but they fit. We are ported to Bible camp where we learn how to believe and about true faith. We learn about Muslims and Jesus and memorize daily verses for a prize at the end -- a framed picture of Jesus -- and I find thrilled smile and there may be a picture of skinny me somewhere smiling with long hair and striped jeans with Jesus looking sidewise at me over my head in a box in some little Iowa church in Altoona or Napier or Nevada or Boone, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to find it, I hear the whole town was sucked up in a tornado, the windbreak poplars and the buildings and mobile homes and the spare junk we leave lying around.

That tornado stepped around our farm. The barn stood empty, that is what we were told by the former owners. There are many more days of cutting and hauling, trees to cut up. Not till long after dad he bought the place do we finally fight down the debris and underbrush and my dad he is at the barn door, exploring, and opens the door and inside he is horrified, he sees a dozen white geese penned up for weeks no water no food burst out of the half door screaming for water this is what I saw and clamor down to the creek there this is what I remember and drink and flutter and crash about I saw this they have been there all along weeks now this is true, we ignored them, our derogation, terrible to contemplate and I feel inside what it means to be captive and the barn is empty finally, the door hanging open and blackness inside and the geese escaping down the creekbed, white bodies smudging the creekbed and for years the dreams that burst out late at night in the summer that the white geese are penned and waiting for me, still there, and I should do something but it’s too late, should have rescued them, should have opened the door to something I did not yet know how to name.

Powerlines / Endicott / rhetoric

Powerlines

The powerlines up above the place where I'm staying in Endicott, NY is one of those torn up places that give off an odd mix of sense of desperation and possibility. You know the sort of place: wheel ruts dug deep in the clay from stuck jeeps, small pools of tepid water, green bursts of opportunistic weeds surging up in the margins. It's the sort of place that makes you want to toss your beer bottles against rocks or the horizon. The sort of place that attracts teenagers and pigeons. It’s a broken place where anything can happen. And it’s hard for the cops to get to.

I always appreciated such places for their moon-like beauty. My S.O. said she once went up to these same powerlines and punched a guy in the face when he dared her. Then he dared her again and she hit him again. I guess he hadn't worked out the nuances of flirting quite yet. She's not a teenager now, so that must have been...a long time ago. But the powerlines haven’t changed much, she says. I suspect it’s one of those permanently scarred places that will always elicit a sense of poverty so powerfully that it almost makes you giddy. It elicits blunt force trauma. I imagine my S.O. and this guy taunting each other near the fence at the top that surrounding the buzzing electrical exchange station. It hogs the best view, but you can stand with your back to it and look down on the whole city to see the distant, symmetrically carved hillsides that slope down to the rivers like the keels of capsized boats.

This must have been an invigorating place a hundred years ago. Imagine overlooking the confluence of the Chenango and the Susquehanna rivers and the long undulating wooded valley they muscle through. The possiblity! The exotic distances brought close! The fecundity of 10,000 trees!

It's still beautiful here though it's a rust-belt city that’s been exploited for jobs, polluted, and ditched. We have a brownfield down the hill from here where IBM dumped trichlorethylene for years, creating a carcinogenic plume under the city. The New York Times says the case is now to the Supreme Court, but regardless of what happens there, people aren't going to move. Where do you go? Hawaii?

It's sort of numbing to see how the place has been torn up and how people have been treated. We’ve lost a sense of possibility here, of futurity. It's hard to imagine this place supporting people (much less indigenous creatures and forests) in the future. My dad says that Michigan, where he grew up, used to be a vast woodland; now it's mostly an interstate with some nice ranch-style houses. Oh, and there's Flint and Detroit, making the pollution of Endicott and Love Canal look like nothing. Yikes. Now that GM is bankrupt and they've closed the plants in MI (highest unemployment in the nation, the web tells me), I suspect powerlines all across that state will be teeming with teens.

It's hard to overestimate the weight of the American Dream when it breeches and capsizes on a city. Cortland, where I teach, has been waterboarded for years as various industries left or died (Smith Corona and Corning Glass chief among them). Here we have the abdication of IBM, Endicott-Johnson shoes, and many others. The effect is not only on specific companies and the network of tangential organizations connected to those companies (restaurants, parts suppliers, public works projects, schools and on and on), but it's felt in the heart as well. When we lose communities and neighborhoods, it's vastly alienating. It tends to strip those who remain of any sense of shared enterprise. Thus there's no speed bump that slows your thinking as you sit in your car contemplating the erection of yet another Walmart in the last green lot left. It doesn't matter anymore. The fact that what seems like a good idea today will be a tax-barren empty shell in 20 years literally isn’t conceivable.

As the economy dies down, daily life is eventually lit only by the blue flickering of our own individual desires, which sometimes can be stoked enough to illuminate our immediate family, sometimes not even that. When you're only worried about surviving day to day, you can’t notice ugliness of culture, architecture or food. When you're in it for yourself, you lose your senses. We become inured to the needs of others and the inner lives of other people. People and events that stand outside our lifetime fade like photographs and atrophy. Family disappears from our stories. We lose a sense of our grandkids and great grandparents. Reviving receding phantoms is a hard sell for a culture that has trouble meeting the demands even a short book represents to the imagination, for a culture that can’t picture what hundreds of gallons of trichlorethylene does for generations of kids in your hometown.

Sometimes I think we're spiders. We're in a web, a net of relations that ties us together in various forms of cooperation, even in the midst of competition. What's easy to forget when things are going "well" (that is, when we can ignore the fact that everything changes), we can also ignore that we depend on each other. The irony of a working system is that the very systemicity that gives it identity tends to fade from view, the way a novel or movie can lose its material immediacy when we're caught up in it. It's ironic when that happens, but it's also unreal. Problems bring us back to our fundamental interrelation (Kenneth Burke talks about this irony in the context of war).

So I'm up at the powerlines that day, stone cold sober but not bitter. Looking at the city I see a lot of desperation. I told a friend once that driving into Cortland (also in central New York) and seeing the thick opaque plastic over the house windows gives me a feeling like I just took a big hit off a cigarette. The depressing rush. The wave in the pit of the stomach.

So we tend in teaching to be too territorial. We are so busy building careers and speciality knowledge that it's hard to think big, to solve real-world problems. This is hardly a new complaint, but it's newly acute for me.

The discipline of rhetoric, though, is a pretty strong solvent, and hard to keep walled up in the academy. It was never meant to be an academic discipline, anyway--it kept failing to meet the standards of rigor and rarity that astronomy or geometry might. Rhetoric is cross-disciplinary, as is a student’s experience. We don’t have enough models for using rhetoric is high school or across disciplines, though I was thrilled to read Steven Johnson's new book and hear him discuss ecology as a cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary science, using insights from physics to farming, a practical and somewhat transgressive move discussed also by Jim Zebroski ("Rewriting Composition as a Postmodern Discipline: Transforming the Research/Teaching Dichotomy." Ronald and Roskelly. 168-182). What are the problems that we face, and how can students pull from their education to address the problems of their lives? I'm the first to say that in some ways we adults know more than kids do about what might be a valuable resource, so I'd argue that Shakespeare, as "useless" as it seems, is in fact useful for solving problems of understanding character and developing a sense of the beautiful and eloquent--ditto physics. But we each have a responsibility (literally response-ability) to find our own topics and audiences.

To look down from the powerlines and see, with "open eyes and open hands" the city one lives in can be terrifying. I'd rather get hit in the face (twice!) than flirt with the idea. But kids know what hurts and deserve a sense of interconnection and promise. They deserve a chance to tell their stories. Schools can give this to them much better than they do. I'd like to see schools provide kids with a chance to ask the hard questions about the difference between what is and what should be, and not lavish too much respect on the tidy divisions between disciplines ("content areas"). I'd like to see schools as places where kids and adults work together to make shared sense of shared problems--which automatically implies a rhetorical, problem-posing, and community oriented learning. It implies a different way to think about the center or coherence of a school in its practice.

One of the models we can use for this is both ecological studies and composition studies. Why not invite (and support!) teachers--who tend to be disposed to interdisciplinary study already--in the practice and inquire into these questions? Here is a really radical question: why not have them work together across levels, districts, and subject areas? Now that would be powerful.

--David

revised 7/16/10

50th birthday

Tomorrow I turn 50, a milestone. Or fifty of them, stretching back to when Eisenhower was president and the Beatles were unknown. Penicillin was rare and the birth control pill was approved by the FDA. The interstates were just being built. Hawaii had been a state for only five months. John F. Kennedy was just elected and took the reins. The US sent the first troops to Vietnam.

One of my first memories was looking at the far away mountains in Texas from the steps of graduate student housing. My parents would tell me elaborate stories about how lovely it was there and the bridge and road that took you there. I remember watching TV when JFK was assassinated. My dad got work in Iowa. I remember the many space shots and the moon landing. I lived through Vietnam, Woodstock, Kent State, and the drug culture. I started driving (usually with my parents) when I was 13 and on my own all the time in a 1967 VW Beetle by the time I was 16 (12-volt engine finally, but still the funky tubular bumpers and no head restraints). "Women's Lib" was a big deal. I remember The Whole Earth Catalogue I poured over at the house of a neighbor in Iowa, a bearded man who lived with two women. I worked "walking beans" for weeds, detasseling corn and wandering through the fields, exploring. I was always exploring. I hated school, wore a headband to class in the early '70s at my deeply rusticated school, and felt strangely out of place. I read all the time, was sick a lot, was very interested in science (I cut my teeth on bio textbooks), read more, loved waterbirds, and beat up on my brother mercilessly. There weren't a lot of people around. We didn't have a color TV until I was maybe 14 or so. My dad would come home with stacks of punched cards that he used for his dissertation research; there were no personal computers. The first new car he bought was a 1967 Dodge Dart, no carpets, no radio, bench seats. I wonder if it had seatbelts.

We moved to Tennessee in the 1970s, and I felt a little out of place. Worked in a bar there, had a pretty girlfriend, never studied. Took root in English studies, though, esp. poetry and literary theory. Got into grad school in Syracuse, got married, had two wonderful boys, got my Ph.D. at S.U., and found work at nearby Cortland. Took over my dad's finances as he got older and my sister and I found him a place to live in Little Rock. Got divorced, bought a house, met my soulmate, met a son that a high-school girlfriend had by me and gave up for adoption. Trying to sell my house in Syracuse and am looking to buy with here here in Tully.  [footnote: found a house as discussed in other posts].

Nathan is 29. Joe is 15. Eli is 13. My girlfriend's kids are Drew (14) and Jackson (9). I'm blessed in every way: I have a job, enough money, an apartment, a car; my parents are alive and they love me. So do my friends and family. I even have a dog who loves me. I know how to write, I'm in a 12-step program that has changed my life and will do so for the rest of it, and I'm healthy as a horse. A fifty-year-old horse, maybe, but I can still gallop, rear and buck.

That's it. Some of the best things have been the kids and Jacqueline. Good friends. A good education. Music. I'm 49 tonight and I want to learn how not to take things personally, to let things go, to let other people take up more of the load, to be in the moment. All work I have to do, good work. I don't want for anything material, and I'm not bitter or resentful, frightened or obsessed. It's been a good ride. Though "sometimes all the light's on me / Other times, I can barely see," I'm grateful. Not Dead. So far, this has been one of the most interesting periods of history, both lacking in some fundamental securities and oversewn with too many insulations against danger. The environmental exploitation I see discourages me sometimes. But it's always on the edge. I've been lucky.

The Notebooks

So forgive the set up: a summer evening with distant thunder, cool wet breeze sloshing in the windows, trees filing up the sky like a tattered scrim, and me at my computer.  Almost too romantic to be endured.  If there were a few fireflies (or better, a moon or the tracers of distant fireworks) the metaphor of my passion would be stapled to the genre FOREVER.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with.  And in the little garret of my head the writer there has six worn notebooks open, each lit by the flickering light of one single, solitary, solemnizing candle.  Around him the yellow pages glow dim as various phases of the moon, and at his back stained-glass windows are squared out and high up in the castle:

The notebook for “business.”  In it is a description of the young hairy woman and a scratch-and-sniff spot with $1800 in new bills.  Along the side are lists of objects found for cheap by the side of the road.

The notebook devoted to “sex and women.”  In it he has a long digression on the admixture of excitement and loss that he feels when he wakes before his lover does.  It is parsed out in the style of John Donne.

The notebook in which he writes about his children, how impatient his has been and how he drove his motorcycle (horse-powered, of course, to keep with our pre-post-modern writer-in-the-garret metaphor) over to his sons’ house and left there on the stoop two cans of their favorite soda because he felt like there was nothing else he could do (and the mourning dove cooed a haunting cry, cry, cry!)

The notebook where he writes about writing, teaching, and learning.  He writes in this one with his left hand because suffering makes you honest (or so he says in the notebook, though it’s pretty much illegible and might just be talking about his desires).

The notebook where he writes the themes of his reading: how his joke about “printing a test page” made him think how academics spend time perfecting the printing of their ideas, not living them; how Dave Hickey makes him very uncomfortable because he admires and covets that mind and stance; how Benjamin Franklin has been worming his way into many conversations in the months; how his newly purchased book talks about how the humanities change when they go digital, an idea he never considered before;

The notebook where he talks about the English department his colleagues.  This notebook is torn and mud-scuffed, and he throws it against the wall repeatedly before picking it up to scribble a line or two;

Then a wind comes up and snuffs out the candle with its long, invisible fingers.  The man sits there for a moment, watching the lightning, then strikes a match and lights

The notebooks.

David

Burning It

You say “It’s not what we pictured”
(autumn hills in lugubrious flame)
So I say steal all the pictures,
I say smash their cheap glass
break frames & cheap flowers,
the graceful cheap bamboo fronds,
the cheap birds winging over cheap forests,
the soundtrack paintings, all the filler fields of wheat,
the fungible bulk colors signed by machine,
pre-recorded guitar solos over drum machines
clicking with the intelligence of a roach,
the stiff, formal hug of our personal ambitions.

Take them to the parking lot of that cheap hotel,
the one where we made love with an eclipse
outside our window then froze all night.
Make a pile of our garbage can plans,
pour turpentine into them, diesel and alcohol
until it soaks deep. Climb up on the dump.
See how the cold air trembles with excitement?
Scratch the last match fast against the sandpaper.
I love you. Now drop it.

DIY

He’s looking in The Family Handyman
for the device, the perfect jig
to hang a week, letting it dry and twist, curl up and air out.
The hanger must be clever and strong,
an ingenious clevis, toggle bolt or cotter pin

to handle days loose as layers of cardboard tied
with silk scarf, as an aquarium of marbles,
as scalloped waves fastened with irridium glue and salt,
a week composed of Plato’s Phaedrus, an iffy power steering pump,
the smell of distant burning and a new MAC OS, shorn cornfields,
crumpled student sentences and junk mail.

The miracle hanger is not in the table
of contents, the index, nothing online,
nothing under the cushions, no tips
in the junk drawer. It was here, though.
The apartment is studded with bent nails.
A dizzy auger left holes in the bed and walls
before it sucked blood from the dog
and left in your new car.

The Hat: A Christmas Story

Warning: it's not pretty, there's obscenity, and what I'm shooting for is not to sneer at the holidays, but to play with some realistic fiction. You were warned.

<|> |<|>|<|>

The Hat

Though it rained all night and melted most of the snow, grey-white ice lay in the shadows between houses. Detritus of the winter emerged: a blue-and-white child’s glove, flattened cigarette packs, bits of black plastic. The couple was walking their dog now that the rain had stopped. Christmas lights burned in the windows. The woman wore a long blue wool coat and immaculate hiking boots. She walked with her arms crossed and her bare hands tucked under the woolen arms of her coat. She held the blue leash in her right hand and their new dog darted back and forth on the bare sidewalk. Her husband walked beside her. They didn’t speak. He wore a large furry Russian hat and smoked a cigar. The smoke billowed up behind them as they walked, grew thin and disappeared.

“Fucking dog,” the husband growled when the animal lunged in front of his feet. When it squatted in someone’s yard a moment later, the sudden stop jerked the woman’s leash arm open, making her twist stiffly. She made mewling sounds to coax the dog to hurry while they waited. It strained and trembled, then bounded onto the sidewalk. “Goddamn fucking dog” the husband said. The woman jerked hard at the leash but the dog pulled away at the end of his collar anyway, choking and scrabbling.

A man had come out on his upstairs porch to smoke a cigarette now that the rain had stopped. His house had a giant candy cane cutout hammered into the front lawn. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted down to the couple. “You want me to clean that up?” he said. The dog started barking at the man. The couple kept walking without speaking. “Hey!” the man said. He was barefoot and leaned on the banister with both hands. “You gonna leave that shit there for me to clean up?” The tiny dog lunged into the collar and in so doing its blue leash tangled around the legs of the husband, forcing him to stumble. The dog yelped and ran from him, forcing the woman to spin on one heel. Blue smoke from the cigar filled the air.

The husband grabbed the collar and neatly flipped the dog over. He held it to the ground by the throat with his left hand and made a fist with the right. His gloved hand hit the dog in the belly, the chest, the face. He stood over the animal and twisted his body to put all his weight into it. The dog yelped and struggled and the skin on its face was cut against its teeth. The husband’s fluffy hat fell to the wet sidewalk and rolled against his wife’s boots. Blood spattered on the husband’s coat and when he stopped, the knuckles of his glove had been cut open. “What are you doing?” cried the man on the porch. He stood up, cigarette still between his fingers. “What the hell are you doing?” he said. “It’s not the fucking dog’s fault, you asshole,” he said, his voice thin and trembling. “It’s not the fucking dog’s fault” he repeated. The husband and the wife stood still for a moment. The dog huddled at the extreme end of his leash, mouth open, panting. The woman bent to pick up the husband’s beautiful hat.

“Where do you get off being so vulgar?” said the woman to the man on the porch. “Just who do you think you are?”

Haiku October '09

Writing in Coffeehouses

A room with a view

Music no one listens to

Words I do not share.

The Teacher

Jacqueline's small hands

explain a huge story

to her computer.

Nulla Dies Sine Linea

Today's frantic grab

for the rip cord, miss, miss:

such a lovely fall.

Finding Eli's Favorite Hat

Between the buxom

hay bales, E's hat, lost in play:

when did he grow up?

After Rain

Parking lot puddles

plain, flat, cold limestone, simple

reflect tree, cloud, mind.

Moving to Tully, NY

August 29, 2009

Hi,

Writing you from this cheapo chair, bought from a Goodwill store in rural New York and still smelling like a clean, dry grandmother’s house, is a pleasure. The chair is in our living room, a large, old boiler-heated room in beige. You can’t tell from inside the room whether we’re in Syracuse or Binghamton or Cortland, but when I look out the window it’s pretty obvious we’re in Tully, NY.[1] This town has about 867 people, but we’re not even inside the city limits. We live in a cornfield. The house looks like it was set down here somewhat accidentally, as if an outtake from the Wizard of Oz. You can see Jacqueline’s kids’ school from the upstairs windows (Drew’s 13 and will be going to the middle school; at 9, Jackson will be going to Tully Elementary). There is a large flat grocery distribution plant a few cornfields over, several crucifixes from the churches emerging like periscopes from the corn—and lots and lots of green.

The fields are striated, now that we’re in the last inch of August; the farmers have peeled back alternating swaths of alfalfa. The combines are coming for the corn, and the whole scene reminds me of that sort of magical painting style of rural scenes by that Iowan painter Grant Wood. We’re in a valley about five miles wide with hills on either side that rise away to the east and west. Everything slips north and south between these ridges: the river, the railroad, the interstate, the minor highways. Cut east and west, though, and it gets weird. And interesting. You go through several geographical anomalies caused by the glaciers. This region is where they stopped, dropped their gravel, dug deep plunge pools, and created a series of hills that look exactly like ships turned upside down, their keels exactly the same arc.

We’re already started to explore these places. My Joe and Eli will be down here from Syracuse for as often as I can get them (they are not moving), and every other weekend; Drew and Jackson Deal are 24/7. The six of us have vague plans to travel to Tinker Falls with the dog (always the dog), go hang-gliding off the Morgan Hills cliff, ski at the several local downhill slopes, and canoe down the Tioughnioga River. Some of these seem more likely than others, but they are all possible.

Everything is possible. Getting your hair cut here, going to the doctor or dentist, eating at a family-owned diner, going to the bank, the library, the used bookstore. You can’t go to the local bars—there are none. There is a good meeting on Wednesday nights, however. At school I have a gym and a pool, and work is now only 15 minutes away—for the first time in ten years, my commute is shorter. Jacqueline has uncomplainingly stretched her commute out to 50 miles each way. In fact, there has been very little complaining in this whole venture. Leaving schools, families, neighbors, close friends, houses and all that has been a difficult. GF (GirlFriend) and I grew up in our respective towns and have ligatures there. I’ve been in Syracuse since 1983—and now that seems long ago. They play music from that era on the oldies stations now! It’s not fair! So this is a season of exhilaration and extremes. The mental soundtrack is tearing a worn sheet into dishrags. That making-by-ripping—that’s what it feels like lately. Not bad, just bit changes, lots of bits.

Even making a new life is possible. Buying a house in Tully is possible. Getting married is possible. Fall is possible. Writing is possible. The line between what’s possible and what’s inevitable is blurry. We are going to practice steering by bright rural stars.

Oh, and I didn’t mention the train, which runs next to the house and scares the hell out of me daily. It’s only mournful and soothing from a distance, through the rain, when you’re holding a steel guitar. Up close it is very much like God’s own two-note soundtrack for the Apocalypse.

---

[1] David Franke and Jacqueline Deal. Formerly of 361 Rt. 11 South, Apartment 1. Tully, NY, but now in our new house at 793 Tully Farms Road, a very cool place if I say so myself!