Ten minutes on June 16, 2008

Ten minutes on June 16, 2008

Wandas on Father’s Day

Hot tub to end it and then the tucking in of the little prince. The hot tub was 106 the night was coolish Peter Cat and me after a day of talking we were talked out or so I thought.

Then we started talking about the name Wanda. I am about to see my friend Wanda in Salt Lake, and go camping with her and Anna and Paul. The last time I saw her we’d just gotten off the Green River, Desolation Canyon, and I wondered whether, seeing her, I’d feel that same crazy solidarity I’d felt when we got back to her house put our kids to sleep put her friend to sleep. I remember coming home and telling Kevin I’d had this great talk with her. And we recalled how she had almost single handedly gotten her raft across the river in the teeth of an insane wind that came around the bend and just drilled the rafts backwards. I think I mentally called her Pioneer Woman for a while after that.

Then my brother told a story about a girl he met roller skating named Wanda. She was crazy I think she more or less tackled him he left out some details she was from West Springfield (pretty far away – about ten miles and at least one class level away) and one day Peter was sitting in his Business Math class and he looked up and there she was looking in the school window at him.

Cat remembered a friend named Wanda was she the middle of eight kids in Oakland and had a magnificent voice gospel?

Then I told the story of how my family went to Plymouth (as in Plymouth Rock Pilgrims etc. etc.) when I was a teenager and I wanted to stay home and be with my girlfriend and with my All Star baseball team but my parents wouldn’t let me stay home alone and I was bitter alienated glass nine tenths empty. I wore a hat pulled over my hair and my hair pulled over my face I was reading Huckleberry Finn and identifying with him and I wanted to light out for the territories. And I fell in with a group of kids from Eastern Massachusetts, I think from Framingham, and they had intense Eastern Massachusetts accents:
Card        cahd
Car        cah
Wanda        Woahndah
Yard        yahd

Etc.

And there was one girl named Wanda that I liked and wanted to notice me but I was not from their tribe. And one day they were hanging around as usual doing nothing bored without imagination more or less identical to my own frame of mind and the kids went over to this place back from the ocean and there was an old funky shack and they all started throwing rocks at it and missing I figured well this is one thing I can do and then this girl might notice me so I picked up a rock and broke the window that they were aiming at.

This, sadly, or perhaps not sadly, did not win me any face time with the lovely if thickly accented Wanda.

Later I was in our beach house upstairs and I heard the doorbell and my dad answered a cop asked if I was home and I came down and my dad was standing with him and the cop asked me if I broke the window and I said yes and my father said we’d fix it and then the cop left and my dad said I’m glad you didn’t lie.

And that is how the story would end if this were on TV.

But the next day we went looking for a precut window for the shack and we drove up the gridlock-prone Cape Cod highway to different hardware stores where no one had precut glass that size (it turned out the place really was a funky shack and the guy had jury rigged the whole thing including weirdly measured window panes for the offsize and not even truly square door) and the longer it took the more furious my dad got and I recall him just fuming away unable to control it talking to himself to me to himself.

And that kind of erased the whole wow my dad is pretty cool for not lowering the boom on me for the rock throwing incident feeling of the previous evening.

As I was telling the story I seem to recall putting up one of those shields, an invisible shield, like the kind Sue Storm puts up in Fantastic Four, an energy field that can hold back dangerous rays from weapons and stuff. Or like the Jedi ability to protect themselves with energy fields. And it didn’t feel, doesn’t in hindsight feel, like it was simply a teenager thing to do. Of course it was, partly, but also it was the sense that I didn’t want to be implicated in this elaborate emotionally bruising ritual of anger.

Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don't need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don't need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along... move along.

This is not the only way to express frustration and anger. Move along.

After the hot tub we came home Peter and I and Kelsey was just finishing reading to Bailey his room was a wreck the hour was late I made his bed with him in it tucked in the sheet laid the softest blankest on went and got Cliff and put him on his favorite blue blanket which he nurses and paws in a kind of canine OCD way.

Peter and I talked, and he thought about that girl and said, she was crazy again. And then he thought for a moment and said, Wait. Her name wasn’t Wanda. It was Candy.

And I thought about my own story. Did all that happen just as I imagined it?

I thought tonight about how so much of what we imagine to be our realistic view of the world is actually a creation of our mind, our self or selves, a story that is always straining to explain and give meaning to. And intersecting our bubble are the bubbles of other people, and also all the elements of nonhuman reality. So reality is a diffraction pattern, which forces us to constantly revise our overall story even as it also forces us to consolidate that story.

It is Father’s Day and I realized that probably my view of my father is the myopic view of the first son, up too close and personal to get the entire complicated view, though not without truth or insight.

But perhaps he was a cunning banker warrior?

Luke: No, my father didn't fight in the Clone Wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter.
Obi-Wan: That's what your uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals; he felt he should've stayed here and not gotten involved.
Luke: You fought in the Clone Wars?
Obi-Wan: Yes. I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father.
Luke: I wish I'd known him.
Obi-Wan: He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand that you've become quite a good pilot yourself.

I’m trying to be a good pilot, Dad. Not easy, as I’m sure you know. Which way’s the Death Star?