April 2008 Archives
Ten minutes on April 29, 2008
The everyday cyborg, revisited.
It arrived, finally. It had been two years. Good years, no doubt, years of growth, learning, mutual evolution. But the time had come.
I learned a lot from, and with, my little matte gray dual 800/1900 CSMA 1X – EVDO Motorola. Blue tooth, picture storage, speed dialing, iTap texting. Good times, good times. Yes we had our moments. Day one, when I held you for the first time and my thumb rested too firmly on your poorly located – very poorly located – speaker phone button. For a day we talked like that, and it wasn’t happy making. The lack of a manual made communication often difficult, doubly ironic in a prosthetic designed for communication. And there was the issue of your antenna, which bent in my pocket and often presented in a limp, nonmanly way. I felt embarrassed for us, if you must know.
But think of it. How often did I hold you? Open you? Could it be in the several thousands? More? And aside from each specific call, to my mother, to Margann, to the meat department at Shopper’s Corner, to Verizon 411 connect (possibly the lamest directory ever ever made, though I can’t speak of other galaxies…) there was the whole aura of you, the sense that you and I made a cyborg We that was always already connected to a network, a set of networks, friends and family, cohousing companeros, colleagues, institutions. Even when we weren’t talking, we were open to the universe, to the next call from Ramon (“Don’t you KNOW who I AM?? I’m the JUGGERNAUT”) or Will (after the Red Sox won the World Series: “Yeah but what about next year?”) or Peter (“I’m at Todd’s and I’m coming up to Soda Springs to ski with you guys Todd and I stayed up he opened a bottle of wine and we had a great meal at name restaurant in Sacramento and then he opened another bottle…”). We were, because we were connected. Connectio ergo sum.
Your tiny digital eye always had lint in it. You – we - took mostly crappy pictures, frankly. Your screen was a permanent record of my fingerprints. At the end, you looked like a Crusader or a knight errant, your armor-colored plastic scratched and cut and beaten in the wars against the keys in my pocket, and the ground. Like Chaucer’s Knight, you wore your service humbly, without fancy coverings.
Once in a great while I would be walking to the car with Bailey, and even dog-tired I’d still have the tingle. What is it? What…is…not…right? And it would be my prosthetic, or its lack, the phantom limb calling, and I’d turn around (screw it we’ll be late to the drop off) and reconnect with you, and thus with my Contacts everywhere. And once in a great great while I would drive off. Alone. Disarmed. Disconnected. It never felt natural to not have you with me, on me. It was like leaving a part of myself home. My hand for a handset!
Of course, it was never just me and you, Us. We were simply a cyborg node in a huge network, literally and figuratively. Verizon, the company, and Motorola, that name from a past of tiny black and white TV’s (my favorite old Motorola ad, from 1950, is a picture of a Leave it to Beaver family watching Howdy Doody, and another picture of Dad helping Junior with his homework, with tons of text, the text reading “Motorola, leader in television, shows how TV can mean better behavior at home and better marks in school!”), cell towers and the whole techno-scientific nine yards. The world became a map of Where We Could Connect and Where We Could Not, and increasingly the latter shrank, except when the call was Very Important. That turn on Silicon Valley Drive; that bend in Highway 17; the dead spot in our build-out at cohousing, so that Kathy Mentor had to stand in the tub in the corner to talk…places where We ceased, not to exist exactly, but ceased to have power, were literally disconnected from things. Unreal.
Well I was going to write about my new phone but this turned into a paen of sorts to my first serious phone (oh yes I had a previous one, puppy love really, another hand-me-down handset, shaped more like a spatula and with an even more pronounced erectile dysfunction of the antenna). So I’ll stop now, and tell the story of my new prosthetic later.
Trust me. It’s very cool, very Transformer, and barring tragedy or loss, we’ve made a pact, in front of witnesses, to be together for two years.
As my old trusty Motorola used to say when you opened it up:
Dig it.
Ps great bunny Motorola movie at
http://ventilate.ca/news_updates/smith_01.html
The everyday cyborg, revisited.
It arrived, finally. It had been two years. Good years, no doubt, years of growth, learning, mutual evolution. But the time had come.
I learned a lot from, and with, my little matte gray dual 800/1900 CSMA 1X – EVDO Motorola. Blue tooth, picture storage, speed dialing, iTap texting. Good times, good times. Yes we had our moments. Day one, when I held you for the first time and my thumb rested too firmly on your poorly located – very poorly located – speaker phone button. For a day we talked like that, and it wasn’t happy making. The lack of a manual made communication often difficult, doubly ironic in a prosthetic designed for communication. And there was the issue of your antenna, which bent in my pocket and often presented in a limp, nonmanly way. I felt embarrassed for us, if you must know.
But think of it. How often did I hold you? Open you? Could it be in the several thousands? More? And aside from each specific call, to my mother, to Margann, to the meat department at Shopper’s Corner, to Verizon 411 connect (possibly the lamest directory ever ever made, though I can’t speak of other galaxies…) there was the whole aura of you, the sense that you and I made a cyborg We that was always already connected to a network, a set of networks, friends and family, cohousing companeros, colleagues, institutions. Even when we weren’t talking, we were open to the universe, to the next call from Ramon (“Don’t you KNOW who I AM?? I’m the JUGGERNAUT”) or Will (after the Red Sox won the World Series: “Yeah but what about next year?”) or Peter (“I’m at Todd’s and I’m coming up to Soda Springs to ski with you guys Todd and I stayed up he opened a bottle of wine and we had a great meal at name restaurant in Sacramento and then he opened another bottle…”). We were, because we were connected. Connectio ergo sum.
Your tiny digital eye always had lint in it. You – we - took mostly crappy pictures, frankly. Your screen was a permanent record of my fingerprints. At the end, you looked like a Crusader or a knight errant, your armor-colored plastic scratched and cut and beaten in the wars against the keys in my pocket, and the ground. Like Chaucer’s Knight, you wore your service humbly, without fancy coverings.
Once in a great while I would be walking to the car with Bailey, and even dog-tired I’d still have the tingle. What is it? What…is…not…right? And it would be my prosthetic, or its lack, the phantom limb calling, and I’d turn around (screw it we’ll be late to the drop off) and reconnect with you, and thus with my Contacts everywhere. And once in a great great while I would drive off. Alone. Disarmed. Disconnected. It never felt natural to not have you with me, on me. It was like leaving a part of myself home. My hand for a handset!
Of course, it was never just me and you, Us. We were simply a cyborg node in a huge network, literally and figuratively. Verizon, the company, and Motorola, that name from a past of tiny black and white TV’s (my favorite old Motorola ad, from 1950, is a picture of a Leave it to Beaver family watching Howdy Doody, and another picture of Dad helping Junior with his homework, with tons of text, the text reading “Motorola, leader in television, shows how TV can mean better behavior at home and better marks in school!”), cell towers and the whole techno-scientific nine yards. The world became a map of Where We Could Connect and Where We Could Not, and increasingly the latter shrank, except when the call was Very Important. That turn on Silicon Valley Drive; that bend in Highway 17; the dead spot in our build-out at cohousing, so that Kathy Mentor had to stand in the tub in the corner to talk…places where We ceased, not to exist exactly, but ceased to have power, were literally disconnected from things. Unreal.
Well I was going to write about my new phone but this turned into a paen of sorts to my first serious phone (oh yes I had a previous one, puppy love really, another hand-me-down handset, shaped more like a spatula and with an even more pronounced erectile dysfunction of the antenna). So I’ll stop now, and tell the story of my new prosthetic later.
Trust me. It’s very cool, very Transformer, and barring tragedy or loss, we’ve made a pact, in front of witnesses, to be together for two years.
As my old trusty Motorola used to say when you opened it up:
Dig it.
Ps great bunny Motorola movie at
http://ventilate.ca/news_updates/smith_01.html
Ten minutes on April 25, 2008
Tuesday night I slept for maybe one hour; crazy energy, moon or perhaps I’m the character that feels the coming events wash over the chest like a prophecy. On Wednesday night I taught a unit called War Story, and felt a little the lack of sleep from the previous night, and yet felt an energy in my body, a little magical, a little electrical, and I sort of surfed that energy and did an ok, maybe more than ok job of teaching. We shared stories about the war that students had brought in, and I took the students on a photo essay journey, gave them some stories of Iraqi widows and of the famous Marlboro Soldier, and a blog called A Family in Baghdad: Reality tour, a journey of Iraqs and Americans and Europeans to Syria and Jordan to see what it is like there for Iraqi refugees (it is, hardly surprising, horrifying and degrading). Some of the students cried; some listened very very carefully. Stories, not reasons, not politics exactly, arguments; instead, this story, and then another and another and another, until it is hard to have one view of this war, and until it is hard to not feel the horror of it.
I liked the idea of my students feeling productive, and feeling, not blue, but some other color! Red? Deep green? Feeling as if the thing they are about to write – War story, their research topics, reflections on the class as a final Reflective Essay – is making them somehow stronger, clearer, they feel they are pulling together in writing things they actually believe and have learned to know.
I myself am feeling at peace just now, profoundly so, so that I am humbled by the world and all, by the music I am listening to, by our ability to do the simplest things, reach across and hand water to someone who is thirsty, reach across and lend energy and words and wordless expressions, so that simple becomes complex and words fail and we are left in the space beyond them, before them, and what is it like there?
I have often imagined a white room in North Africa or somewhere, a table, an old typewriter, a face looking back at me, a woman’s face, she is in a white towel, funny detail, and her face is turned to the door, the photograph has caught an expression on her face, in a space beyond words, before them, in between, emotion and peace caught in perfect equipoise. She is a woman from an album cover I found in the record collection I inherited when my mother’s cousin Jimmy died after surviving his stint in the Vietnam War. And she somehow made it into my imaginary, waiting for me to come home, or not waiting anymore, instead that moment when she turns and I’m home, home, home.
I love that this has never happened and may never happen – me, Africa, someone writing at a table, this particular version of domesticity and mystery at the edge of things – and yet has been happening somewhere in me since I first saw that photograph. Art holds several emotions at once for us, for the times when we can’t hold them ourselves and so become too simple, too uniform, mono-cropping our emotional fields. And we hold out to artists a fantastic promise, a promise that our collective responses are worth their craft, their own epic mythic journeys into relentless meaning, past the shipwrecks of so many failed stories and lives.
Some journey for ten years. Some for fifty. Getting back to simple stunning emotions they lost along the way, to complex reworkings of those emotions into a new self, new identity, a work always in progress and yet with something to show. And always journeying outside of ourselves, looking for the thing that will complete the puzzle, the greener grass, the cure, the gift from the old woman at the door that will let us overcome the obstacles, find our way.
Home, home, home.
Tuesday night I slept for maybe one hour; crazy energy, moon or perhaps I’m the character that feels the coming events wash over the chest like a prophecy. On Wednesday night I taught a unit called War Story, and felt a little the lack of sleep from the previous night, and yet felt an energy in my body, a little magical, a little electrical, and I sort of surfed that energy and did an ok, maybe more than ok job of teaching. We shared stories about the war that students had brought in, and I took the students on a photo essay journey, gave them some stories of Iraqi widows and of the famous Marlboro Soldier, and a blog called A Family in Baghdad: Reality tour, a journey of Iraqs and Americans and Europeans to Syria and Jordan to see what it is like there for Iraqi refugees (it is, hardly surprising, horrifying and degrading). Some of the students cried; some listened very very carefully. Stories, not reasons, not politics exactly, arguments; instead, this story, and then another and another and another, until it is hard to have one view of this war, and until it is hard to not feel the horror of it.
I liked the idea of my students feeling productive, and feeling, not blue, but some other color! Red? Deep green? Feeling as if the thing they are about to write – War story, their research topics, reflections on the class as a final Reflective Essay – is making them somehow stronger, clearer, they feel they are pulling together in writing things they actually believe and have learned to know.
I myself am feeling at peace just now, profoundly so, so that I am humbled by the world and all, by the music I am listening to, by our ability to do the simplest things, reach across and hand water to someone who is thirsty, reach across and lend energy and words and wordless expressions, so that simple becomes complex and words fail and we are left in the space beyond them, before them, and what is it like there?
I have often imagined a white room in North Africa or somewhere, a table, an old typewriter, a face looking back at me, a woman’s face, she is in a white towel, funny detail, and her face is turned to the door, the photograph has caught an expression on her face, in a space beyond words, before them, in between, emotion and peace caught in perfect equipoise. She is a woman from an album cover I found in the record collection I inherited when my mother’s cousin Jimmy died after surviving his stint in the Vietnam War. And she somehow made it into my imaginary, waiting for me to come home, or not waiting anymore, instead that moment when she turns and I’m home, home, home.
I love that this has never happened and may never happen – me, Africa, someone writing at a table, this particular version of domesticity and mystery at the edge of things – and yet has been happening somewhere in me since I first saw that photograph. Art holds several emotions at once for us, for the times when we can’t hold them ourselves and so become too simple, too uniform, mono-cropping our emotional fields. And we hold out to artists a fantastic promise, a promise that our collective responses are worth their craft, their own epic mythic journeys into relentless meaning, past the shipwrecks of so many failed stories and lives.
Some journey for ten years. Some for fifty. Getting back to simple stunning emotions they lost along the way, to complex reworkings of those emotions into a new self, new identity, a work always in progress and yet with something to show. And always journeying outside of ourselves, looking for the thing that will complete the puzzle, the greener grass, the cure, the gift from the old woman at the door that will let us overcome the obstacles, find our way.
Home, home, home.
Ten minutes on April 24, 2008
I woke up to birds singing and thought of Keats, and how in La Belle Dame Sans Merci the knight-errant has come under the spell of the lady without mercy and he is in a place where no birds sing.
'O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
And I looked out my window at the massive oak tree just outside the three big windows so that I feel often as if I’m living in the tree-house of my dreams (well not my 8 year old dreams – the one with the rope swing and lemonade and a bag of potato chips; more like the upscale tree-house of the dreams of someone who is married to someone who likes ginormous beds and beautifully made cherry furniture that weighs about the same amount as a large tree-house made of wood).
Then I lay in bed lazing, thinking large and small thoughts, and possible some medium sized, medium deep thoughts. I vaguely thought about the Beats, Kerouac and Ginsburg, and Burroughs, and how my students had responded to Howl (as I played the audio it occurred to me that this poem gives a very up close and personal account of sexual activity enough so that fluids appear to fly from certain stanzas); I thought about Keats, and the line “truth is beauty, beauty truth” and played with it until I tired of paradoxes; and because I am a slut for reading, I read the entire People magazine for this month which Margann had thoughtfully left on her nightstand. I saw Madonna’s guns, that is, the ones on her arms from the gym; I read about a brave Appalachian woman who is fighting the practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at coal; I read about Billy Ray Cyrus, and his man to man talk with his daughter’s paparazzi; I read about the final report on Princess Dia and Dodie’s death; I saw four bikinis on four Hollywood stars, and read about which stars use which kinds of skin care products and hair products and which ultra new lines of fashion; I kept reading, and wondered whether Rob Lowe is right, and he is being blackmailed by his former employee and whether it is affecting his children, or whether he indeed exposed himself to said employee. All of these things were a parade of words and images, the bread and circuses of our time, and the birds continued to sing, as if beauty were truth, and beauty care products were true care products, if you follow me.
Then it was time to take a shower and get Bailey to eat breakfast (mister sleep in late; no school today in service for teachers) and chat with him about various and sundry things. One moment he will tell me something medium deep, an observation about life or a friend or the world; the next he assures me that on the day school is over he is going to go to Safeway and buy cocoa puffs and lucky charms and several other chocolate covered sugar bomb type cereals and mix them all together and eat them.
I walked Cliff and we strolled down the path behind cohousing and it was chill in the shade blissful in the sun and the eucs gave off their usual incense and Cliff saw something and hauled ass right over a cliff and disappeared like a cartoon dog. And I read The Pale Blue Eye about a murder at West Point in 1830, featuring an early detectice named Landor who gets help from a strange cadet named Edgar Allan Poe. The writing is clever and often elegant, and I loved reading under the trees in a glade with birdsong and bee sounds and Cliff moaning with pleasure at the prospect of freedom and thousands of things to pee on.
Back home I saw Erica and we talked about health stuff and the new book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and the painbody and I told her about the Keats and how in the modern world we’ve made all sorts of places where no birds sing and they are to the soul like withered sedge. But in cohousing, thanks to people who were not me, we wove a staggering amount of trees and shrubs and flowers and herbs in and around our domiciles, and left enough of the arroyo free, so that birds come and sing and the soul sings back sometimes, like today. And she said Tolle said that we think this is my life as if you own it but life is, it continues and surrounds. And we looked up, and saw all the living things surrounding us and surrounding the houses, and whatever this might mean in his books, at the moment it felt right.
Bailey showed me his garden – the one he’s made on Neopets – and inside I laughed at the comparison to the one just outside his window. But I did think the prismatic sea fern was pretty cool. I told him to finish up his neopet world and read, and he did.
Then it was off to drink espresso at Café Bene, and play disc golf with Crystal, and come home and make lunch for Bailey and me, and take him to soccer practice, and walk Cliff, and call Kevin to say we couldn’t make our coho dinner together as scheduled since it was his wife’s 50th birthday party. Then I drove aimlessly toward coffee since I needed some for home and got a pound and had that talk with the barista where you initially build respect by saying right things about coffee and then go on to trading cognoscenti insights and musings and got them to pull me a double espresso with a glass of ice on the side and waited just the amount of time to let the espresso cool just enough to make a cold cold but strong-ass Americano. Then I took it outside and hopped in the car and put Kelsey’s CD to me, A Little Love, in the slot and sipped the pretty much perfect iced coffee and tooled down the road. And I remembered earlier, when I dropped Crystal off from golf, and before on the way to Bene, I drove slowly downtown and marveled at the this is my town feel of the town today, the strange dude on the beach cruiser with the big smile and black saddle bags with shiny studs on them, the kids walking to or from school laughing, people on their way somewhere but not too fast, taking in the day as I take them in, everywhere people acting as if all of this were not terribly threatened, as if this were all simply reality. I drove even slower, let bikes cross in front of me, and thought of how before World War 2, yes here had been horrifying things in the world, but are we the first generation to live with the idea that our own tools and inventions and sheer numbers may doom the lifeworld we see before us? I let myself slough that off – it is part of what Erica and I had been talking about, the notion that there is a pain body that creates a cycle of pain and anxiety, drawing these things to itself. So yes I know about the depletion of the soil and the acidification of the ocean and the rest, but for the nonce I let a bucolic worldview and sensibility drop over me like a breeze or a veil or a filter, and the trees joined hands over Walnut Street as they always do, and men struggled to join huge blue pipes on Bay Street which would no doubt go underground. I somehow remembered watching Captain Kangaroo as a young rabbit, and the Captain read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and somehow industrialism was smaller and people watched in admiration as it made things easier for them.
And then Bailey and I drove to Jamba Juice with Bruno and the boys ordered from the secret menu and I talked about carrot juice and wheatgrass circa 1979 with the juice barista (see a theme here O readers?) and we drove to the park near Bruno’s house and Cliff got to run and Bailey got to play basketball and jump on Bruno’s trampoline and we played 2 on 1 and I hit the winning three pointer the arc of the ball perfect high and sweet and it made that sound shhh when it hit the cords nothing but net.
Then we came home to cohousing and Julia came over and then I saw Will and told him to grab a disc and come throw with me. The central green was hopping. Derek and Mark H were kicking the soccer ball at the disc golf basket (harder to get a ball into the chains believe me!) while Will and I threw disc and Owen and Bailey came out and did tipping Bailey was SICK and INSANE tipping two between his legs from the inside edge and then they got half-dead footballs and played the “we can hit the frisbee out of the air with the balls try and get it past us” game while Calum and Finn and Reese had a water balloon fight and then Bailey and Owen played how far can we throw and catch the water balloon without breaking it and then Ian came out and Tim and they kicked the soccer ball too and Margann came home and I helped her carry stuff and Beth called dinner and Blythe called dinner and finally it was too too dark one last throw and we all deserted the green for the now-lit boxes our houses to food and entertainments friends and the eternal weaving of connection.
Mike’s steam shovel is named Mary Anne. Do you remember what happens to them?
I woke up to birds singing and thought of Keats, and how in La Belle Dame Sans Merci the knight-errant has come under the spell of the lady without mercy and he is in a place where no birds sing.
'O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
And I looked out my window at the massive oak tree just outside the three big windows so that I feel often as if I’m living in the tree-house of my dreams (well not my 8 year old dreams – the one with the rope swing and lemonade and a bag of potato chips; more like the upscale tree-house of the dreams of someone who is married to someone who likes ginormous beds and beautifully made cherry furniture that weighs about the same amount as a large tree-house made of wood).
Then I lay in bed lazing, thinking large and small thoughts, and possible some medium sized, medium deep thoughts. I vaguely thought about the Beats, Kerouac and Ginsburg, and Burroughs, and how my students had responded to Howl (as I played the audio it occurred to me that this poem gives a very up close and personal account of sexual activity enough so that fluids appear to fly from certain stanzas); I thought about Keats, and the line “truth is beauty, beauty truth” and played with it until I tired of paradoxes; and because I am a slut for reading, I read the entire People magazine for this month which Margann had thoughtfully left on her nightstand. I saw Madonna’s guns, that is, the ones on her arms from the gym; I read about a brave Appalachian woman who is fighting the practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at coal; I read about Billy Ray Cyrus, and his man to man talk with his daughter’s paparazzi; I read about the final report on Princess Dia and Dodie’s death; I saw four bikinis on four Hollywood stars, and read about which stars use which kinds of skin care products and hair products and which ultra new lines of fashion; I kept reading, and wondered whether Rob Lowe is right, and he is being blackmailed by his former employee and whether it is affecting his children, or whether he indeed exposed himself to said employee. All of these things were a parade of words and images, the bread and circuses of our time, and the birds continued to sing, as if beauty were truth, and beauty care products were true care products, if you follow me.
Then it was time to take a shower and get Bailey to eat breakfast (mister sleep in late; no school today in service for teachers) and chat with him about various and sundry things. One moment he will tell me something medium deep, an observation about life or a friend or the world; the next he assures me that on the day school is over he is going to go to Safeway and buy cocoa puffs and lucky charms and several other chocolate covered sugar bomb type cereals and mix them all together and eat them.
I walked Cliff and we strolled down the path behind cohousing and it was chill in the shade blissful in the sun and the eucs gave off their usual incense and Cliff saw something and hauled ass right over a cliff and disappeared like a cartoon dog. And I read The Pale Blue Eye about a murder at West Point in 1830, featuring an early detectice named Landor who gets help from a strange cadet named Edgar Allan Poe. The writing is clever and often elegant, and I loved reading under the trees in a glade with birdsong and bee sounds and Cliff moaning with pleasure at the prospect of freedom and thousands of things to pee on.
Back home I saw Erica and we talked about health stuff and the new book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and the painbody and I told her about the Keats and how in the modern world we’ve made all sorts of places where no birds sing and they are to the soul like withered sedge. But in cohousing, thanks to people who were not me, we wove a staggering amount of trees and shrubs and flowers and herbs in and around our domiciles, and left enough of the arroyo free, so that birds come and sing and the soul sings back sometimes, like today. And she said Tolle said that we think this is my life as if you own it but life is, it continues and surrounds. And we looked up, and saw all the living things surrounding us and surrounding the houses, and whatever this might mean in his books, at the moment it felt right.
Bailey showed me his garden – the one he’s made on Neopets – and inside I laughed at the comparison to the one just outside his window. But I did think the prismatic sea fern was pretty cool. I told him to finish up his neopet world and read, and he did.
Then it was off to drink espresso at Café Bene, and play disc golf with Crystal, and come home and make lunch for Bailey and me, and take him to soccer practice, and walk Cliff, and call Kevin to say we couldn’t make our coho dinner together as scheduled since it was his wife’s 50th birthday party. Then I drove aimlessly toward coffee since I needed some for home and got a pound and had that talk with the barista where you initially build respect by saying right things about coffee and then go on to trading cognoscenti insights and musings and got them to pull me a double espresso with a glass of ice on the side and waited just the amount of time to let the espresso cool just enough to make a cold cold but strong-ass Americano. Then I took it outside and hopped in the car and put Kelsey’s CD to me, A Little Love, in the slot and sipped the pretty much perfect iced coffee and tooled down the road. And I remembered earlier, when I dropped Crystal off from golf, and before on the way to Bene, I drove slowly downtown and marveled at the this is my town feel of the town today, the strange dude on the beach cruiser with the big smile and black saddle bags with shiny studs on them, the kids walking to or from school laughing, people on their way somewhere but not too fast, taking in the day as I take them in, everywhere people acting as if all of this were not terribly threatened, as if this were all simply reality. I drove even slower, let bikes cross in front of me, and thought of how before World War 2, yes here had been horrifying things in the world, but are we the first generation to live with the idea that our own tools and inventions and sheer numbers may doom the lifeworld we see before us? I let myself slough that off – it is part of what Erica and I had been talking about, the notion that there is a pain body that creates a cycle of pain and anxiety, drawing these things to itself. So yes I know about the depletion of the soil and the acidification of the ocean and the rest, but for the nonce I let a bucolic worldview and sensibility drop over me like a breeze or a veil or a filter, and the trees joined hands over Walnut Street as they always do, and men struggled to join huge blue pipes on Bay Street which would no doubt go underground. I somehow remembered watching Captain Kangaroo as a young rabbit, and the Captain read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and somehow industrialism was smaller and people watched in admiration as it made things easier for them.
And then Bailey and I drove to Jamba Juice with Bruno and the boys ordered from the secret menu and I talked about carrot juice and wheatgrass circa 1979 with the juice barista (see a theme here O readers?) and we drove to the park near Bruno’s house and Cliff got to run and Bailey got to play basketball and jump on Bruno’s trampoline and we played 2 on 1 and I hit the winning three pointer the arc of the ball perfect high and sweet and it made that sound shhh when it hit the cords nothing but net.
Then we came home to cohousing and Julia came over and then I saw Will and told him to grab a disc and come throw with me. The central green was hopping. Derek and Mark H were kicking the soccer ball at the disc golf basket (harder to get a ball into the chains believe me!) while Will and I threw disc and Owen and Bailey came out and did tipping Bailey was SICK and INSANE tipping two between his legs from the inside edge and then they got half-dead footballs and played the “we can hit the frisbee out of the air with the balls try and get it past us” game while Calum and Finn and Reese had a water balloon fight and then Bailey and Owen played how far can we throw and catch the water balloon without breaking it and then Ian came out and Tim and they kicked the soccer ball too and Margann came home and I helped her carry stuff and Beth called dinner and Blythe called dinner and finally it was too too dark one last throw and we all deserted the green for the now-lit boxes our houses to food and entertainments friends and the eternal weaving of connection.
Mike’s steam shovel is named Mary Anne. Do you remember what happens to them?
Ten minutes on April 13, 2008
I am stiff stiff stiff from running throwing catching smacking Frisbees and I am falling in love with this piece of chocolate cake. It is rich, sweet, with a winning personality; I love it but I also consume it, bite by bite. I honor its sacrifice; I leave part of it for tomorrow, to consume the rest of its chocolatey soul.
We played from about 530 to 8 from hothot sun on green field overlooking the Monterey Bay far above the lines of cars leaving the lines of people in front of the rides at the Boardwalk in front of the bars on Cedar and on Pacific. So many cars leaving, and we are above it all in Frisbee heaven, with a white arch bravely describing the space of desire, the goal, the thing we are all running around for, interacting for, making rules for. Then it cooled and more people came and we were all baked by heat and then painted green by the grass and each time we caught or threw a goal it was to or from someone on our side. And that’s a good feeling to have, above and beyond the notion of not being in the Horrible No Good Traffic Leaving Santa Cruz on Sunday.
Bailey and Owen went to comp soccer tryouts because I really wanted them to go to check it out and Owen was hot and uninspired but stuck it out and Bailey was as well and got drilled by an errant kick during a drill he was running a play and someone kicked a ball from the sideline and it drilled him bloody mouth the sting of a ball on the side of your face your cheek. I watched it happen and thought about when you are a kid and something like that happens you are 12 and I remembered the male code of pain deal with it if you can without a scene I remember liking that I could take some pains the slam to the floor in basketball and getting up the kicks and slide tackles in soccer getting up baseball hits you in the arm golf disc hits you all the times you get hurt and you gauge damage and feel what you feel and come back up playing. I was proud of him and also connected I knew what that felt like in my 53 year old body because I was once a 12 year old body. Getting back up, bouncing back, continuing. Words to live by, my friends!
So both Bailey and I were beat up after his homework we went upstairs and his room got cleaned bed got made with fresh new sheets sometimes it is the smallest thing this ritual bedchanging clothes out for tomorrow the blankets one softer than soft and lightlight brown over it the yellow blue bright squares blanket the Paul Klee blanket innocence and system and simplicity just right for a Sunday night of wriggling in as your dad reads a story about a fillyjonk who always expected disaster…
And you realize the day had its disasters certainly not only a drilled head swollen face bloody lip but the knee with twin slices cut from a tough tackle in front of the goalmouth on a much bigger kid…and your job isn’t just to Read but to maybe stop and get really cold water and then another really cold water glass and tell stories about your brothers and in general to Raise Morale and focus not on the school day Looming Ahead, but the lovely, quiet, safe, connected, easy moment that is Here Now, and should be loved for its present beauties, like a slice of chocolate cake, something to be in love with.
I am stiff stiff stiff from running throwing catching smacking Frisbees and I am falling in love with this piece of chocolate cake. It is rich, sweet, with a winning personality; I love it but I also consume it, bite by bite. I honor its sacrifice; I leave part of it for tomorrow, to consume the rest of its chocolatey soul.
We played from about 530 to 8 from hothot sun on green field overlooking the Monterey Bay far above the lines of cars leaving the lines of people in front of the rides at the Boardwalk in front of the bars on Cedar and on Pacific. So many cars leaving, and we are above it all in Frisbee heaven, with a white arch bravely describing the space of desire, the goal, the thing we are all running around for, interacting for, making rules for. Then it cooled and more people came and we were all baked by heat and then painted green by the grass and each time we caught or threw a goal it was to or from someone on our side. And that’s a good feeling to have, above and beyond the notion of not being in the Horrible No Good Traffic Leaving Santa Cruz on Sunday.
Bailey and Owen went to comp soccer tryouts because I really wanted them to go to check it out and Owen was hot and uninspired but stuck it out and Bailey was as well and got drilled by an errant kick during a drill he was running a play and someone kicked a ball from the sideline and it drilled him bloody mouth the sting of a ball on the side of your face your cheek. I watched it happen and thought about when you are a kid and something like that happens you are 12 and I remembered the male code of pain deal with it if you can without a scene I remember liking that I could take some pains the slam to the floor in basketball and getting up the kicks and slide tackles in soccer getting up baseball hits you in the arm golf disc hits you all the times you get hurt and you gauge damage and feel what you feel and come back up playing. I was proud of him and also connected I knew what that felt like in my 53 year old body because I was once a 12 year old body. Getting back up, bouncing back, continuing. Words to live by, my friends!
So both Bailey and I were beat up after his homework we went upstairs and his room got cleaned bed got made with fresh new sheets sometimes it is the smallest thing this ritual bedchanging clothes out for tomorrow the blankets one softer than soft and lightlight brown over it the yellow blue bright squares blanket the Paul Klee blanket innocence and system and simplicity just right for a Sunday night of wriggling in as your dad reads a story about a fillyjonk who always expected disaster…
And you realize the day had its disasters certainly not only a drilled head swollen face bloody lip but the knee with twin slices cut from a tough tackle in front of the goalmouth on a much bigger kid…and your job isn’t just to Read but to maybe stop and get really cold water and then another really cold water glass and tell stories about your brothers and in general to Raise Morale and focus not on the school day Looming Ahead, but the lovely, quiet, safe, connected, easy moment that is Here Now, and should be loved for its present beauties, like a slice of chocolate cake, something to be in love with.
Ten minutes on April 12, 2008
I can feel them. I can hear them. They are coming nearer, quietly, slowly. The feeling is one of being slowly surrounded, very slowly, excruciatingly slowly. If you turn your head quickly, nothing seems to be moving. But if you close your eyes, you can sense them, more all the time, moving toward you. Not cornering you, because they have occupied the corners as well. Encircling you. Did I mention there are more all the time?
Hold that thought.
Today Owen came over to find Bailey, and they loosed Cliff on me in bed where I was reading Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs. They were anxious to go upstairs and enter the bizarre world of neopets, which is itself a kind of training program for online shopping. “Here is your neopet garden” will become “Here is your attractive guest room with duvet and matching lighting.” I told Bailey that in order to do that he had to eat breakfast, bring his laundry to the laundry room, and over the course of the weekend fold and put clothes away. Not balled up in large Clothing Balls like you can do with Wonder Bread. Not randomly stuffed in drawers so that school mornings are times for playing Find the F&^%$ School Uniform in the Nonuniform Haystack. And Owen laughed and said his way was to leave all his clothes on the floor and wear them as needed. Like being in a nice cotton nest. And Bailey nodded, as if to say yes, this is my own way as well. We are brothers. A tribe.
After they left I thought of my brother Will. He was Billy then, and when at a certain point our room became Our Room and our mother didn’t come in as much to straighten, complain, fold, reorganize, and Keep Order. I myself don’t remember my clothing strategy; I think I had some clothes hung up and others thrown into a neatish Clothing Ball in the closet, out of sight. But in the course of time Billy learned that if you took the clothes out of the dryer and dumped them on your bed, and then slipped under them at night, you could sleep very comfortably, the weight a kind of hand comforting you all night. (I could be making up this last part; in fact it is sheer speculation. Will/Billy if you are reading this, please confirm or correct). In the morning you picked through the mountain for that day’s clothing – no uniform required.
And then I looked at my own room. I do the laundry and then bring it into my room and put it in piles to sort later, and later becomes the Jamaican later, the child’s later, the bureaucratic later, which is much later or maybe never. And once in a while Margann and I organize things and separate them and fold them and put them away, and we feel virtuous, much like your average 12 year old boy. See? I can do it!
Then I thought about the room next to Bailey’s now stuffed with the stuff that was downstairs when Margann had all the midwives over, and needd a clean downstairs. So that room, with its mountain of ski clothes, extra beds, skis, camping stuff, goodwill clothes that are in stasis, all held up by a jury rigged system of dikes and strategically placed boxes, now has a foothills of stuff from Darcy’s house, bags of papers that were on the dining room table, dishes that never made it to the sink. And in the way of tectonics, like Point Reyes, like Pinnacles, which took only ten million years to slide on up to Northern California from the South, the whole mass is moving toward the door.
Upstairs is my office, where books and papers have surrounded the desk and are slowly advancing on it; if desks felt fear of being suffocated, you could smell its fear. Supporting the paper armies are random items of clothing which never quite made it downstairs to closets, a giant hockey game, disc golf gear, ultimate gear, tape recorders, three computers from the early Jurassic period, boxes from three moves ago, and all of my brother Peter’s detritus from his experiment at having a desk in such an environment, an experiment doomed to failure.
My minutes are up. I could go on. And before you judge, lest you be judged, consider. Late at night: can you hear it, the sound of material possessions on the march?
I can feel them. I can hear them. They are coming nearer, quietly, slowly. The feeling is one of being slowly surrounded, very slowly, excruciatingly slowly. If you turn your head quickly, nothing seems to be moving. But if you close your eyes, you can sense them, more all the time, moving toward you. Not cornering you, because they have occupied the corners as well. Encircling you. Did I mention there are more all the time?
Hold that thought.
Today Owen came over to find Bailey, and they loosed Cliff on me in bed where I was reading Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs. They were anxious to go upstairs and enter the bizarre world of neopets, which is itself a kind of training program for online shopping. “Here is your neopet garden” will become “Here is your attractive guest room with duvet and matching lighting.” I told Bailey that in order to do that he had to eat breakfast, bring his laundry to the laundry room, and over the course of the weekend fold and put clothes away. Not balled up in large Clothing Balls like you can do with Wonder Bread. Not randomly stuffed in drawers so that school mornings are times for playing Find the F&^%$ School Uniform in the Nonuniform Haystack. And Owen laughed and said his way was to leave all his clothes on the floor and wear them as needed. Like being in a nice cotton nest. And Bailey nodded, as if to say yes, this is my own way as well. We are brothers. A tribe.
After they left I thought of my brother Will. He was Billy then, and when at a certain point our room became Our Room and our mother didn’t come in as much to straighten, complain, fold, reorganize, and Keep Order. I myself don’t remember my clothing strategy; I think I had some clothes hung up and others thrown into a neatish Clothing Ball in the closet, out of sight. But in the course of time Billy learned that if you took the clothes out of the dryer and dumped them on your bed, and then slipped under them at night, you could sleep very comfortably, the weight a kind of hand comforting you all night. (I could be making up this last part; in fact it is sheer speculation. Will/Billy if you are reading this, please confirm or correct). In the morning you picked through the mountain for that day’s clothing – no uniform required.
And then I looked at my own room. I do the laundry and then bring it into my room and put it in piles to sort later, and later becomes the Jamaican later, the child’s later, the bureaucratic later, which is much later or maybe never. And once in a while Margann and I organize things and separate them and fold them and put them away, and we feel virtuous, much like your average 12 year old boy. See? I can do it!
Then I thought about the room next to Bailey’s now stuffed with the stuff that was downstairs when Margann had all the midwives over, and needd a clean downstairs. So that room, with its mountain of ski clothes, extra beds, skis, camping stuff, goodwill clothes that are in stasis, all held up by a jury rigged system of dikes and strategically placed boxes, now has a foothills of stuff from Darcy’s house, bags of papers that were on the dining room table, dishes that never made it to the sink. And in the way of tectonics, like Point Reyes, like Pinnacles, which took only ten million years to slide on up to Northern California from the South, the whole mass is moving toward the door.
Upstairs is my office, where books and papers have surrounded the desk and are slowly advancing on it; if desks felt fear of being suffocated, you could smell its fear. Supporting the paper armies are random items of clothing which never quite made it downstairs to closets, a giant hockey game, disc golf gear, ultimate gear, tape recorders, three computers from the early Jurassic period, boxes from three moves ago, and all of my brother Peter’s detritus from his experiment at having a desk in such an environment, an experiment doomed to failure.
My minutes are up. I could go on. And before you judge, lest you be judged, consider. Late at night: can you hear it, the sound of material possessions on the march?
Ten minutes on April 10, 2008
A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
Jane Austen
The novels of Jane Austen are full of men and women speaking to each other, sparring with each other using words as foils. Often it seems the characters have the wit and aplomb of the 18th Century, and the sensibility of the early 19th, a sensibility that includes the notion of affection, the notion that if one is a woman, and smart, and independent, then one wants in a man those same qualities, and (if they only knew it, in her novels and elsewhere) men need and desire the same.
I have been trying to write about last Friday for a week, but everything conspired to come between fingers and keyboard, until tonight. Bailey and Cliff and I read some Moomin stories, me reading aloud and Bay reading over my shoulder, and Cliff gnawing the big blue blanket bunched at the foot of the bed, his ear cocked as if hanging on every word. When I went upstairs, Margann was in the middle of “Becoming Jane,” the film with Anne Hathaway about Jane Austen’s life. The film is based on the more or less accurate portrayal of Jane’s one proposal of marriage, from a very sincere, very wealthy, very dim booby, a nice booby but a booby nonetheless. There is also a dashing love interest, so that the film about Jane seems more like a Bronte novel than an Austen, but never mind. He is dashing, and very clever, and pushes her as an equal, and is usually delighted and a little taken aback when she pushed back, and we feel that Jane deserves this, if only in the afterlife that film offers.
Last Friday I drove to Seaside, deposited five children at their school, and drove up the coast to Moss Landing, to the little café set opposite the huge industrial-iconic smokestacks of the power plant, to meet Paula. I sat down to read Faulkner’s story Barn Burning, and was in the middle of a very long sentence when I saw her emerge from her car, crackberry on ear. She walked up and spoke a little with her mouth and more with her eyes: “Sorry! Temple…a death…a funeral…” My own phone began warbling its mechanical birdsong, and I picked up, and she got off, and for a moment we were in a romantic comedy where the two never get to talk…
There are some people who seem always in demand, always with several hundred irons in several hundred fires. They have energy, and are involved. So when they focus on you, it feels…well, it feels like you are special, or being honored in some way. This is not something the person necessarily cultivates. It just is. I always think of our friend Allison Lynch Miller that way; she has the ability to make you feel like the sun is shining just on you, or for you, but in an offhand, innocent way that makes it ten times more appealing. Paula is like that. She is apologetic; death has occurred; a funeral must happen, a body must be washed ritually; an important meeting must be moved, but carefully; people must feel taken care of. But the whole time, she is doing that thing with her eyes and hands that says, “here I am, with you, for you.”
Paula is a rabbi, and I am a rabbit; also, I am the spiritual head of the Church League, a Sunday league of disc players who worship a special sect of Ultimate called goaltimate. (I sign my name Rabbi T, with not a little nod to my ex girlfriend who is the real deal). Goaltimate is newer than Judaism, and has a lot less writing and hence less reading, but there are some important similarities. For example, you must do it regularly, that is religiously, but you can also do it religiously, that is, with the aim being joy, and connection with others. Disc has the “spirit of the game” rule, which transcends all other rules. Judaism has the Old Testament. Disc has the Official Rules of Ultimate, 11th Edition. And I quote:
The integrity of Ultimate depends on each player's responsibility to uphold the Spirit of the Game, and this responsibility should remain paramount."
And
"Ultimate relies upon a spirit of sportsmanship that places the responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors, adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play...Such actions as taunting opposing players, dangerous aggression, belligerent intimidation, intentional infractions, or other 'win-at-all-costs' behavior are contrary to the Spirit of the Game and must be avoided by all players."
And
“ Sure, human nature rears its ugly head from time to time - just as in any sport, just as in life. Yet, one of the many beauties of Ultimate is how, even amid the most difficult of situations, utmost graciousness is allowed to meet that challenge head on. Through this balance, Ultimate players are free to demonstrate the most honorable and the most joyous sides of human nature in sport.”
But I digress. Paula and I are both talkers, both from the east coast, so we do that east coast thing, that often-Jewish thing: overtalking, ending each other’s sentences, delighting in the verbal play that Austen also delighted in. I am in a very short time teased, contradicted, agreed with vehemently, questioned, encouraged, challenged, and invited to do the same. For me slipping back into this talk is like bagels and lox on the weekend, like the New York Times and coffee, like being grilled by a jewish mother about anything and everything and then fed like I’m the prince of the world.
And what do we talk about? India! She just went. With Richard, her husband. And Manny, of all people, Manny who she broke up with just before we got together. I love Manny, and she does too, and he is a Buddhist teacher and a mensch and funny as hell. I remember Manny and I on the lawn at a collective house in Live Oak in Santa Cruz. We wer doing that talk of the ex with the new boyfriend. I loved it. He said we would try not to be jealous, and I said I’d try to not make him, and he gave me some advice which he’d gleaned from going out with Paula. Paula, if you are reading this, I’ll tell you what he said.
But you said that Manny taught Buddhism and that Stacey (your beloved Bean) was there and southern India was amazing. And you told me all the books you are reading, on ethics and politics, compassion and justice, and how it is to be a rabbi, and temple politics. The story of Vikram Seth’s brother was one that will stay with me for a long time; he left Buddhism, but came back to it much later in his life, after discovering he was bipolar (was that it?), because it was a practice that helped him with mindfulness, with being present in his mind/s. And as you talked of people you knew, who were doing amazing things, things for social justice, for peace, and doing them with a sense of grace and joy, I kept feeling this pride in our friends, so many, who in their own way do the same, and you among them.
We talked and then we drove up the coast, a windy springy day, and I wanted to find the trail head to the bike trail that goes from Marina to Monterey, so we got off at the exit nearest and parked down at the new huge shopping center. I’m into looking at spaces these days so we looked at the architecture of the place, REI and Target and the others, the styles of lighting, the reason for strips of plantings between the acres of parking spaces. Then we did that kind of hiking often reserved for the homeless, the transient, those intent on getting from here to there without a car. We walked up the street that had no sidewalk toward the ocean, with cars buzzing by, feeling that basic lack of safety so crucial to the alienating structure of highway entrances and freeways. We got to the intersection of the entrance to Highway 1 and the exit off of it, ran across, ran between two barriers, and down to the bike path. Nearby cars raced up and down and by us, trucks with their own hurricanes, and occasionally a bike would pass us, and we walked under freeways and by dunes on a path exactly big enough for two to walk comfortably. And amid all that concrete, all that blooming buzzing confusion, all that speed, we were talking and thinking at the speed of legs, of sentences, and ethics merged with individual people, social networks overlapped like Venn diagrams and made flower shapes of hope.
And that, I think, is what you want in a rabbi, or a rabbit for that matter!
In the end, you drove back to the Temple and the funeral arrangements and the ten thousand things, as they say in the Tao Te Ching, with a few of my stories and a few of your own newly alive for the retelling of them, and the sun went behind a cloud and the wind picked up and the world came back now that the magic bubble was no longer, and it looked different, the same way it always does when you speak with a Jedi warrior, or a strong, smart woman, or both at the same time.
A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
Jane Austen
The novels of Jane Austen are full of men and women speaking to each other, sparring with each other using words as foils. Often it seems the characters have the wit and aplomb of the 18th Century, and the sensibility of the early 19th, a sensibility that includes the notion of affection, the notion that if one is a woman, and smart, and independent, then one wants in a man those same qualities, and (if they only knew it, in her novels and elsewhere) men need and desire the same.
I have been trying to write about last Friday for a week, but everything conspired to come between fingers and keyboard, until tonight. Bailey and Cliff and I read some Moomin stories, me reading aloud and Bay reading over my shoulder, and Cliff gnawing the big blue blanket bunched at the foot of the bed, his ear cocked as if hanging on every word. When I went upstairs, Margann was in the middle of “Becoming Jane,” the film with Anne Hathaway about Jane Austen’s life. The film is based on the more or less accurate portrayal of Jane’s one proposal of marriage, from a very sincere, very wealthy, very dim booby, a nice booby but a booby nonetheless. There is also a dashing love interest, so that the film about Jane seems more like a Bronte novel than an Austen, but never mind. He is dashing, and very clever, and pushes her as an equal, and is usually delighted and a little taken aback when she pushed back, and we feel that Jane deserves this, if only in the afterlife that film offers.
Last Friday I drove to Seaside, deposited five children at their school, and drove up the coast to Moss Landing, to the little café set opposite the huge industrial-iconic smokestacks of the power plant, to meet Paula. I sat down to read Faulkner’s story Barn Burning, and was in the middle of a very long sentence when I saw her emerge from her car, crackberry on ear. She walked up and spoke a little with her mouth and more with her eyes: “Sorry! Temple…a death…a funeral…” My own phone began warbling its mechanical birdsong, and I picked up, and she got off, and for a moment we were in a romantic comedy where the two never get to talk…
There are some people who seem always in demand, always with several hundred irons in several hundred fires. They have energy, and are involved. So when they focus on you, it feels…well, it feels like you are special, or being honored in some way. This is not something the person necessarily cultivates. It just is. I always think of our friend Allison Lynch Miller that way; she has the ability to make you feel like the sun is shining just on you, or for you, but in an offhand, innocent way that makes it ten times more appealing. Paula is like that. She is apologetic; death has occurred; a funeral must happen, a body must be washed ritually; an important meeting must be moved, but carefully; people must feel taken care of. But the whole time, she is doing that thing with her eyes and hands that says, “here I am, with you, for you.”
Paula is a rabbi, and I am a rabbit; also, I am the spiritual head of the Church League, a Sunday league of disc players who worship a special sect of Ultimate called goaltimate. (I sign my name Rabbi T, with not a little nod to my ex girlfriend who is the real deal). Goaltimate is newer than Judaism, and has a lot less writing and hence less reading, but there are some important similarities. For example, you must do it regularly, that is religiously, but you can also do it religiously, that is, with the aim being joy, and connection with others. Disc has the “spirit of the game” rule, which transcends all other rules. Judaism has the Old Testament. Disc has the Official Rules of Ultimate, 11th Edition. And I quote:
The integrity of Ultimate depends on each player's responsibility to uphold the Spirit of the Game, and this responsibility should remain paramount."
And
"Ultimate relies upon a spirit of sportsmanship that places the responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors, adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play...Such actions as taunting opposing players, dangerous aggression, belligerent intimidation, intentional infractions, or other 'win-at-all-costs' behavior are contrary to the Spirit of the Game and must be avoided by all players."
And
“ Sure, human nature rears its ugly head from time to time - just as in any sport, just as in life. Yet, one of the many beauties of Ultimate is how, even amid the most difficult of situations, utmost graciousness is allowed to meet that challenge head on. Through this balance, Ultimate players are free to demonstrate the most honorable and the most joyous sides of human nature in sport.”
But I digress. Paula and I are both talkers, both from the east coast, so we do that east coast thing, that often-Jewish thing: overtalking, ending each other’s sentences, delighting in the verbal play that Austen also delighted in. I am in a very short time teased, contradicted, agreed with vehemently, questioned, encouraged, challenged, and invited to do the same. For me slipping back into this talk is like bagels and lox on the weekend, like the New York Times and coffee, like being grilled by a jewish mother about anything and everything and then fed like I’m the prince of the world.
And what do we talk about? India! She just went. With Richard, her husband. And Manny, of all people, Manny who she broke up with just before we got together. I love Manny, and she does too, and he is a Buddhist teacher and a mensch and funny as hell. I remember Manny and I on the lawn at a collective house in Live Oak in Santa Cruz. We wer doing that talk of the ex with the new boyfriend. I loved it. He said we would try not to be jealous, and I said I’d try to not make him, and he gave me some advice which he’d gleaned from going out with Paula. Paula, if you are reading this, I’ll tell you what he said.
But you said that Manny taught Buddhism and that Stacey (your beloved Bean) was there and southern India was amazing. And you told me all the books you are reading, on ethics and politics, compassion and justice, and how it is to be a rabbi, and temple politics. The story of Vikram Seth’s brother was one that will stay with me for a long time; he left Buddhism, but came back to it much later in his life, after discovering he was bipolar (was that it?), because it was a practice that helped him with mindfulness, with being present in his mind/s. And as you talked of people you knew, who were doing amazing things, things for social justice, for peace, and doing them with a sense of grace and joy, I kept feeling this pride in our friends, so many, who in their own way do the same, and you among them.
We talked and then we drove up the coast, a windy springy day, and I wanted to find the trail head to the bike trail that goes from Marina to Monterey, so we got off at the exit nearest and parked down at the new huge shopping center. I’m into looking at spaces these days so we looked at the architecture of the place, REI and Target and the others, the styles of lighting, the reason for strips of plantings between the acres of parking spaces. Then we did that kind of hiking often reserved for the homeless, the transient, those intent on getting from here to there without a car. We walked up the street that had no sidewalk toward the ocean, with cars buzzing by, feeling that basic lack of safety so crucial to the alienating structure of highway entrances and freeways. We got to the intersection of the entrance to Highway 1 and the exit off of it, ran across, ran between two barriers, and down to the bike path. Nearby cars raced up and down and by us, trucks with their own hurricanes, and occasionally a bike would pass us, and we walked under freeways and by dunes on a path exactly big enough for two to walk comfortably. And amid all that concrete, all that blooming buzzing confusion, all that speed, we were talking and thinking at the speed of legs, of sentences, and ethics merged with individual people, social networks overlapped like Venn diagrams and made flower shapes of hope.
And that, I think, is what you want in a rabbi, or a rabbit for that matter!
In the end, you drove back to the Temple and the funeral arrangements and the ten thousand things, as they say in the Tao Te Ching, with a few of my stories and a few of your own newly alive for the retelling of them, and the sun went behind a cloud and the wind picked up and the world came back now that the magic bubble was no longer, and it looked different, the same way it always does when you speak with a Jedi warrior, or a strong, smart woman, or both at the same time.
