Visitation

I see the month of February is practically over, which is shocking to me since I feel like 2012 hasn’t really started yet. And yet it has. My self-improvement project continues, as I suspect it will for a long while.

I have not heard a peep out of my brother in Los Angeles. Even though I shortened it considerably, perhaps he is still reading the letter I mailed to him three days before his birthday. There is a lot in that letter to digest.

I did, on the other hand, have a really nice visit from my father. Our father, I suppose I should say in the spirit of brotherly unity, which is emerging as a theme, although that phrase – our father – does sound mighty Catholic. It was the end of January and my fever was evidently at full throttle because I woke up one night in the midst of the flu’s second assault to find my father, who has been dead for more than three years now, perched on my dresser wearing what appeared to be a wizard-ish outfit. I was shocked to see him, naturally, although he looked great. He reminded me, in a fatherly sort of way, that not only was his birthday coming up but so too was one of my nephew’s.

So the next afternoon I sent an e-mail to my brother (the father of my nephew). I haven’t spoken with this particular brother in nearly a year, so I felt a little intro was in order: Sorry I have not been in touch … And then I explained that I was quite ill but wanted to wish my nephew a happy fifth birthday. And my brother’s reply came back in less than 20 minutes and with such joviality that it occurred to me that perhaps lots of people just don’t communicate very much. I haven’t been in touch with this particular brother because I think he’s an asshole, and I assumed that his lack of communication meant the feeling was mutual. For so many years now I thought my brother was using his two children as an excuse to avoid conversations with me, but perhaps I have been wrong. Maybe he really is overwhelmed.

My sister – our sister – and her two daughters and her husband are coming out west this summer. This trip of hers is one of the things that got me amped up on the need to go see a therapist because earlier this year, when she mentioned that she was going to bring her family out this way, my immediate thought was that if we had a halfway normal family, my two brothers in California and I would all get together at some point with my sister and her family. We could maybe rent some rooms somewhere on the Oregon coast. Or maybe somewhere in Northern California. But, since we’re not really on speaking terms at the moment … you know. If that’s not a sure sign of a low-class family I don’t know what is.

Anyhow, on Valentine’s Day of all days I had a real estate agent come over to the house and have a look. Then we went down the road for coffee to “talk it over” and she told me, when I asked her point blank, that yes, she does believe that my house could be sold, and probably fairly easily and no, she does not believe I am trapped in this structure until the day I die or the day it burns to the ground, whichever comes first. When I asked her the question I used those scenarios, more or less, because, I’ve realized since, they’re exactly the scenarios I’ve been carrying around with me for a few years now. I slept so soundly that night I cannot quite describe it. So soundly, in fact, that the following morning I decided that I probably shouldn’t start the selling process without having a very clear idea of where I’m going next. Which of course I do not have. Not even remotely.

Finally (for now at least) I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about God. I’m not really sure what I believe or don’t believe, and I’m not really sure that what I believe or not matters much. I do have a friend who I met through AA, and she and I do get to talking about God from time to time, and we’ve both run into the issue as if it were a wall, a very solid, concrete wall. The alcoholics talk a lot about God and the importance of God and getting right with God as part of the “recovery” process. And for now, for today and for at least a few more days, I think what I need to do and what many of us need to do is the exact opposite: Before we turn this that and the other over to God, we need to get on good, comfortable speaking terms with the demons.

And I thought I had problems

On Friday afternoon I went down to the neighborhood theater and watched a movie about Marilyn Monroe. I wasn’t blown away by the movie itself, which is one of many nominated for an Academy Award, but it did get me thinking about fame and fortune. I love money, unapologetically for the most part, but when it comes to fame, I think people who aspire to celebrity are well on their way to complete madness.

This includes presidential hopefuls, people who want to run large corporations, actresses, and little girls from semi-rough neighborhoods in New Jersey whose voices somehow serve as the cornerstone of dreams that are shared by millions.

What I heard on Saturday afternoon wasn’t initially clear to me. I thought the guy on radio was dedicating her most famous song to someone else. A couple of songs later a minister came on the radio program I was listening to and was asked to explain how this death would impact the black community as a whole. Oh, I thought. She died. Wow.

It would have been hard to live through the 1980s and early 1990s without knowing the songs. I never owned any of her music but I heard plenty of it. Some of it I really liked; most of it I did not. I never saw either of her big movies, both of which looked awful enough in previews. I don’t really follow celebrity gossip much, but I had heard the stories about the marriage to a guy whose name was apparently synonymous with thuggery but whom I’d never heard of otherwise. I heard about the drugs and I saw a picture of her on stage in which she looked not unlike an elderly chicken.

I saw, of course, the interview, and yesterday, on Monday (I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this) I spent many hours watching other interviews and reading articles and watching clips from the news programs. Like a student completely unprepared for the exam but dead set on getting an A, I absorbed at a fevered pace. I have many questions and comments, but I’ll close with the one that keeps raising its hand in a demand for attention: Why is everyone so anxious to blame the ex-husband?

Greetings from Issue City

In addition to going to Missouri and dealing with being sick not once but twice, there was something else that kept me busy-ish during the month of January.

I got caught up with some family correspondence. I’ve been neglecting it for a long while now. I’ve been avoiding it as well. Those are two very separate things, I’m learning – avoiding something and neglecting it.

This is the beginning of a long and probably tedious story, but it is one that has to start somewhere and that somewhere, I’m sorry to say, is right here and right now. It began a few days after Christmas with the arrival of a card with a Los Angeles postmark. It was some High Catholic foolishness and on it was scrawled an inane message from my brother down there – the one I haven’t spoken to since two days before Michael Jackson died, and that was in June 2009. I tore it to pieces, which I tossed directly into the trash. Normally I’d recycle something like that, but I’d rather contribute to a landfill than put that kind of toxicity into the earth we all have to share.

Everything this particular brother of mine does infuriates me, but here are a couple of specifics.

The lesser of the two is that this card he sent to me and to others in our family is from a collection that our father kept. They were designed by a friend of his from high school who went on to become a monk who specialized in calligraphy. The problem here is that had anyone else in the family taken these cards from the house and mailed them around as holiday greetings, it would have been turned into a federal case. By my brother in Los Angeles. But because he is special, because he is the chosen one among us, it’s perfectly fine.

Just like it was perfectly fine for him to sit in his apartment and tell me he’s not sure how he feels about another of our brothers taking family photos out of the house. It takes a certain sort of person to say something like that while seated in a living room adorned with family photos, a rug we all hooked together in the early 1970s, several Christmas ornaments my mother collected over the years, our parents’ wedding china. My brother is that sort of person. He is exactly that sort of person.

Worse, though, is that my brother’s casual little holiday greeting implies, I think, that if we haven’t spoken for two and a half years now, that must be because of something trivial and ridiculous that’s entirely on my side of the fence.

I fretted and fumed for a few days. I came down with a cold, one year ended and another began, and I quit smoking. And I started writing a letter. My first attempt was 22 pages long and included footnotes. Attempt number two was shorter – 14 pages or so – and did not include footnotes. The version that was mailed to my brother and that he hopefully received on his birthday – which this year was on Friday the 13^th – was eight pages. I haven’t heard a word back, of course, nor do I expect to. But writing and sending that letter did set a thing or two in motion and has transformed this place of mine here into what a therapy-addicted friend of mine used to refer to as Issue City, and it’s a town, if you will, where I plan to be for a while.

There went January

Apologies in advance for the negativity, but 2012 is certainly off to a shitty start.

A few days before the end of 2011, I caught some sort of cold thing, which was miserable but that did prompt me to throw out not only the cigarettes but the ashtray as well. The cold lingered a bit and then went away. Sort of, but not completely. Those five words are the theme of the year thus far: Sort of, but not completely. The sickness, the illness, was at just the right pitch that if I was experiencing nicotine withdrawal, they were covered up by cold symptoms.

Underlying the sickness, in the background of it, was the murky malaise brought about by being sort of working but sort of not working. I struggle to see myself and present myself as a flexible, go-with-the-flow type of person, but when it comes to work, I am simply not. Beginning around the middle of December and going straight through until last Friday, there has not been a single normal week. The last week of last year and the first week of this year were screwy because while the holidays took occurred on a Sunday, they were observed on a Monday. Most people in my work sphere disappeared the Thursday and Friday before Christmas, so that week was a weird one. Then on the last Thursday of the year the cold arrived, and I feel like I’ve been hacking and coughing and sneezing and complaining ever since.

The week before last I got on a plane and went to Saint Louis. Then last week I got on another plane and returned. So there went two more weeks. And, just to add to the general weirdness of it all, last Thursday afternoon I was sitting right here at my desk and at about 1 or so in the afternoon, I realized I felt awful. After arguing with myself for a while, I conceded and buried myself beneath the covers, fully dressed except for my shoes. A couple of hours later I got up and was shivering so violently that I could barely shut the computer down. I took the hottest bath I think I’ve ever had and while it was still light outside went back to bed, where I remained until a little past 9 on Friday morning. I don’t think I’ve had the flu for more than a decade. It was strange getting out of bed on Friday. First, I am usually up before daylight. And second, the little white lights in my living room window were on, which was odd. Why I would have turned those on during the afternoon is beyond me. Maybe I did a bit of sleep walking and plugged them in during the nearly 20 hours that I was in bed fighting the fever. Who knows? Anyhow, when I got up I was craving scrambled eggs, which I took as a good sign. But then it got worse over the weekend, then a little better, than worse again. And the sort of but not completely continued.

So, I have a couple of notions about how to better enjoy next January. The first thing I’m going to do is to tell any and all clients – provided I’m still in this business – that I am absolutely unavailable from Christmas Eve through the second day of January. And the days after the second day of January will be normal business days whether clients are working or not. The second thing is to reschedule or completely forego the trip to Missouri. Because January is one of my favorite times of the year, and even though I’m still in the sort of foggy vagueness that can only be brought about by combining little illnesses with fuzzy schedules, I just realized that it’s over this week.

Public seating

For a couple of years now I’ve been complaining and carrying on about people at the coffee shop in my neighborhood and how territorial they are about tables. Seriously, I often want to scream when I’m down there, just because you have a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a glowing image of a fruit on your laptop does not mean you own the space in which you sit. And sit. By the hour. Wearing earplugs, cords stretched across aisles, that horrible, horrible look of manufactured intensity I know so well shielding the faces from any human interaction.

So I have decided to do something about it. On many occasions over the last few months, when I’ve been seated at a table and people are standing around with mugs and plates in their hands, I’ve shared the table. There were two women who meet for coffee regularly. There was a guy and his sister, who was here for the holidays from somewhere back east. There was a guy and his daughter, who was about eight or nine years old. There was a woman who was expecting someone who never showed. It’s not that big of a deal. We didn’t have to have conversations. The little snippets about each of them that I just shared were all overheard by simply listening after saying hello and you’re welcome and please, by all means, have a seat. Then I’d return to my book. In all instances there was nothing painful or even awkward about sitting at the same table with complete strangers. We all came through it unscathed.

At the coffee shop in my neighborhood there is a large table in the front that I’ve always thought of as the group table, or the community table. Maybe that’s a wrong assumption on my part, but it’s larger than all the other tables and it’s rectangular rather than round. Once, one guy told me in a rather condescending tone that he was “sort of, um,” waiting for a couple of friends to join him and that the seating at that table is, “you know, first come, first served.” And I just kind of glared and said oh, okay, and sat down, and after a few minutes he packed his shit and left. I think that’s what got me started.

Recently, I was at Ikea and I stopped at the cafeteria for the meatballs, mashed potatoes and chocolate cake. In Portland, the cafeteria faces west, and there’s something quite nice about gazing out on a silvery winter afternoon at the fields and the hills off in the distance and the airport, watching the planes come and go. I sat at the end of one of the long, narrow tables that has eight chairs on each side. I want to say that one more time: It has eight chairs on each side. Although the cafeteria was pretty busy that afternoon, I had that table all to myself. I felt slightly guilty as people scurried about with the trays, their worried looks, their merchandise, but only slightly. Of the 16 chairs at the table where I sat, only one was taken. When I got up to leave two groups – one of three, the other four – raced, and I mean raced, toward the table I was leaving. One group got there first, as often happens, and so a woman from the group that reached the finish line second said “Oh, I’m sorry” and stepped back a bit and looked at the members of the victorious party with an awkward expression on her face. “My God,” I said as I walked away with my tray, “there are sixteen chairs.”

I have no idea what it is that infuriates me so much about all of this. People not being able to share space might strike me as a little bit too solid a metaphor for what is either an increasing inability to connect with new people or an increasingly alarmed reaction to my ongoing inability to connect with new people. Or maybe it just underscores what I think is the general self-centeredness of people, which seems to me to be on the rise. Or maybe it scares me deep down inside because it causes me to think: Shit, what are we going to do when we really need to help each other? By that, I mean, how will the seat savers and public space hoarders behave when the water and power get turned off, or shut down? You know as well as I do how they’ll behave: Badly.

Anyhow, the other day I met a friend for lunch over in an area of Portland called the Pearl. If you don’t live in Portland, the Pearl is what happens when a lot of mostly white people with a lot of money decide that it would be cool to acquire an urban lifestyle and, in the course of less than a decade, take over a neighborhood that was previously one sketchy block after another of warehouses, loading docks, broken windows and railroad tracks. I’m developing a bit of affection for the people who live over there, I must say, and here is why. They paid their million dollars or more for their view of the city and the mountains and then demanded that the post office alter its schedule and the trains reduce the pitch of their whistle. And their demands, of course, were met. They have enough money to build a new skyline so why shouldn’t the noises that were there long before they were be reduced? There’s a wonderful honesty about it, I think. We get what we want, the streets and boutiques and hybrid Toyotas over there whisper, because we pay for it.

The cathedral of the Pearl District, I think, is the Whole Foods store sitting there on West Burnside, a swirl of moneyed, mostly white folks coming and going, carrying the Whole Foods bags and wearing expressions of earnest urgency on their faces. It’s important business down there, getting the purest of the pure, the most organic of the organic. Because the grocery store in my neighborhood does not carry it, I go to Whole Foods to buy brown sugar in bulk, which I use for my oatmeal. This friend of mine who I had lunch with the other day – she’s my former boss, actually – has a thing for late lunches, and I do get hungry, so after I filled the plastic baggie (God forbid) with brown sugar I went over to the bakery section, which I had never visited before, and got myself a ham and cheese croissant. I figured I’d take it over to Powell’s with me and order a cup of coffee, but as I came through the checkout line I noticed the strangest thing: There are long, narrow tables with chairs that are more like bar stools on the Couch Street side of Whole Foods, and although it’s in one of the snottiest neighborhoods in Portland, the tables there are shared without questions, explanations or apologies. I couldn’t believe it.

Smoke

It was the last Thursday afternoon of 2011. I was sitting at my desk and in the course of one hour I experienced the transformation of what had begun as a weird little tickle on the rear roof of my mouth into a full-fledged cold, or flu, or some sort of malady that fits into that category. I woke up Friday morning and realized I was, in fact, good and sick, so I went ahead and met a friend for coffee, as we’d planned to do, and then I got on the train and went out to do a bit of shopping and have some lunch. It was gray, and cold, and rainy and windy, but I didn’t really feel ill. Not exactly.

I got home before dark, and that’s when my nose began to bleed. At first I was surprised. Then I was annoyed. Then I was terrified. I am going to bleed to death in this goddamn house, I thought. I leaned over the kitchen sink as what I thought was a massive amount of blood splattered into the sink and splashed, as I would discover soon enough, up onto the black and white tile. My neighbor did me up an ice pack, which worked for quite a while. I had a really nice bath and then, around 10:45, woke from a deep sleep and noticed that my face was wet. Once the lights were on, I discovered an ungodly mess. Later, toward 3 o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep briefly in the living room, where I’d laid down on the rug but made sure my head was resting on the wood floor, figuring that if the bleeding started again, wood – unlike pillows or sheets or blankets or couch cushions or the rug – could be easily washed.

I think New Year’s Eve, a Saturday, was probably the worst of it. My face would feel so hot I feared combustion. Then, moments later, it was like ice. I cancelled my lunch plans and laid down on the floor again. At noon I got up and read a little and then laid down again. And then a little before five I walked to a potluck gathering, which I stayed at for an hour or so. I walked back to my house and went out to the little enclosed back porch out back, where I lit a cigarette and heaved and hacked my way through two drags. I had a cold that entailed some kind of respiratory issue, so as my chest got heavier the act of breathing became more difficult. And so there I stood, smoking. After two drags I put the cigarette out. An hour later I broke all the cigarettes I had in the house into at least three pieces, drenched them in water and then drained them into an empty coffee can. The coffee can, and the one remaining ashtray, were in the garbage before the beginning of 2012.

For me, smoking fell out of the social realm many years ago. I do recall (fondly, I have to say) going out to bars and cafes and restaurants and smoking with other people. There was something very reassuring, I thought, about lighting a cigarette right after the after-dinner coffee was poured. There was a time when I could smoke my way through most of a pack in a single sitting – or standing – at a bar. I also thought that smoking was one of the very few pleasant aspects of driving. Cigarettes somehow added a fleck of civility to the depravity of sitting in traffic on the outskirts of a city famous for incorporating public transportation into its urban planning.

The act of smoking changed so much in a relatively brief period of time. For me, it became very private, and very confined to one particular space. And not long after I quit drinking, I started trying to figure out what it was exactly that would prompt me to light a cigarette. Almost every cigarette I smoked, I figured out, I smoked in order to avoid doing something else. They weren’t relaxing. They weren’t pleasant. They certainly weren’t a whimsical ending to a tasty sexual escapade, and from the vantage point of the fifth full day without one, I don’t exactly miss them, I don’t exactly want one, but I cannot honestly say that their absence has gone unnoticed.

С Новым годом

It seems to me that sooner or later every regular blog includes a post about the blog. For this blog, that sooner or later is today.

In September 2009 I decided to post a blog about the death of Ted Kennedy. And then I wrote another, and then I started trolling around here and there for photographs. Then I discovered, much to my surprise, that I had forgotten how much I truly enjoy writing, and by that I mean putting words to a thought or emotion or impulse with zero regard for the audience. That’s the exact opposite of my job, which requires me to write focused exclusively on the audience, with the goal of inspiring the purchase what’s being sold by whomever is paying me to write what they want written. In other words, it’s not writing at all – it’s typing. Writing this blog is another matter entirely. I write for the satisfaction of it, I write to express opinions without having to be polite about it, I write for a certain measure of therapy. It’s a self-centered enterprise, with very little thought given to who might be reading.

But a few months ago I happened across a tool I had no idea existed: In the back room of the blogging program there’s an accessory that spews forth very specific numbers and charts and bar graphs based on who drops in and when and from where. Even though I do not write with a specific audience in mind, I’d be lying if I said that I don’t find the statistics very interesting.

By a huge margin – and by that I mean several thousand – the most clicked upon or opened or read blog post is one I do not even recall writing. It’s about a city in Ohio whose basketball team had just lost a very, very celebrated player, a loss that had much of the sports world worked into a frenzy such that I thought the name of the basketball player had eclipsed the name of the city. After looking at the numbers I went back and read the post, which is one of my rambling odes to the glory of industrial cityscapes and the tragedy, I think, of elevating professional athletes to hero status. What’s truly strange is that the post doesn’t even mention the player by name, so how it caught on is a mystery to me. And it will remain so since I refuse to activate the comments function.

Another mystery pertains to the second most clicked upon or opened or read post. This mystery, for me, is more intriguing. The second most popular post in the history was about a very, very famous Russian author and a big, big book he wrote back in the 1850s. I posted it last fall, when my sisters and I were in the midst of reading that very long and very detailed book. A few months ago I discovered that not only had that post racked up some very impressive numbers but that it also altered the readership of this blog.

To this day, most of those who visit this blog do so on computers – or mobile phones perhaps – that are located in Russia. That baffles me, of course, but I do have three scenarios.

The first is that they’re Internet hackers. According to what I’ve heard and read, it’s something of a golden age of hacking over there in Russia and in countries that were once part of the big union. So perhaps every time their computers pick up a specific word – the author’s name, for example, especially when it’s in the headline – thousands of people either have a look themselves or use computers that are instructed to do so on their behalf. Of course, it’s odd that they’d continue reading, or monitoring. Anyhow, that’s my least favorite scenario.

The second is a bit more to my liking: The Russians remain deeply committed to and deeply in love with the author. Maybe people have their computers set to search for his name as a key word. Maybe people are conducting research for dissertations and on the lookout for something – anything – that testifies to the author’s power to transcend time itself. Or perhaps someone had a few hours to spare and was clicking around here and there on a cold and lonely afternoon on the eve of a Russian winter, when she (I do think of this person as she for some reason) came across a topic with which she was on intimate terms. And perhaps she forwarded it, and, to borrow the phrase of the author, so on and so forth.

Here’s my third scenario. The name of the author in the subject line prompted the blog to be picked up by various individuals and groups who are learning English. A simple forwarded e-mail that said, Look, here’s something about Tolstoy morphed into regular readership as a means of experiencing a regular dose of the language they’re learning in a more conversational rendition. That’s pure fantasy, of course, and it’s therefore not only my favorite of the three scenarios but the one I’m sticking with.

Public grief

I had some plan-free time last Monday evening so I turned on the television. I didn’t want to watch the local news so, since it was almost 5:30, I tuned in to ABC. I know I bitch too much about the clowns who host the network programs, but even NPR – NPR! – routinely trashes Diane Sawyer. I’ve only witnessed her particular brand of maudlin once, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. As I said, I had a bit of time on my hands.

It turned out she was off for the evening, so I watched a few minutes of George Stephenopolus attempting to put sense to the world. I didn’t get past the first story.

Which is that the leader, dictator, czar – whatever he is, or was – of North Korea has died. The first words out of George’s mouth weren’t that Kim etc. etc. had died, which I already knew, but that thousands (28,000 was the figure, I believe) of “American troops” stationed in South Korea are now within less than 100 miles of North Korea’s nuclear might.

I have a few questions. First and foremost, why are so many military personnel from this country doing in South Korea? Advising? Consulting? Waiting? Provoking?

That issue was not addressed, or even mentioned. I’m also curious to know if the death of the country’s dictator put the troops closer to the arsenal that waits across the border separating north from south than they were before his death. When he died over the weekend, was the launching equipment moved, or did the troops move, or both, or neither?

This question was partially answered by one of the correspondent’s, who expressed the nervousness over Kim etc. etc.’s successor, who is his youngest son. He’s still in his twenties, so the story goes, so nobody is certain whether or not he’ll feel obligated to prove himself. I guess the next logical step in that uncertainty would be to volley a few nukes toward the concentration of U.S. citizens that is, for some reason, stationed less than 100 miles away. And I suppose we should all be alarmed. And nervous.

The best part, though –and by that I mean the most offensive – was yet to come. In addition to providing many opportunities to hear an sh inserted into the word peninsula, the quick montage of footage used as a setup for the first correspondent’s report would lead you to believe that everyone in North Korea was so devastated by the passing of the leader that speaking coherently and clearly was impossible. Here’s a news anchor, weeping her way through the announcement of his sudden and unexpected passing. Here are thousands of people on the streets, crying, shrieking, mourning in the most public way imaginable. And here’s a woman holding up a newspaper and wailing that she’s not sure how she’s going to endure this loss “because he loved us all so much.”

The correspondent summed it up beautifully. This is a forced display of public grief, she proclaimed in the most openly mocking tone I’ve ever heard on a program that presents itself as the news. I know nothing of the people or culture of North Korea. I think their military march style looks nutty, not to mention overtly hostile and vaguely creepy, which I’d guess is exactly how it’s intended. But at least when they cry in public it’s over a politician, someone who for better or worse actually matters to the country. Back home, of course, we reserve that sort of thing for people like Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods.

Winter colors

It’s been an unusual December in Portland. While I love the atmospherics around here, I’m sorry to admit that the last two winters have been a bit much for me. When I say I like the winter rains, what I mean is that I like the constantly shifting sky, the dazzling ballet of light in response to gigantic cloud banks coasting across the horizon, the mist, the drizzle, the shimmering silver air of winter mornings. I do not mean downpours that last for days. I do not mean the seemingly relentless winds that cause my entire house to shake and groan.

So this December has been a gift of sorts. The week of Thanksgiving it poured, and poured, and poured some more. One day a record was broken and reset. And I thought, I am not entirely convinced that I have what it takes to endure five, six, seven, eight months of this. The morning after Thanksgiving I bolted out of here and caught a bus to a credit union branch that’s not too far from my house and where I have deposit privileges, only to find that the place was closed that day. My irritation lasted only a second or two. It was clear and cold. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. I went back to the corner to wait for the next bus for downtown, where I had some business to tend to, and thought: I’ll gladly wait here all morning. I even smiled and waved at a few vehicles as they sped past, roaring toward the mall named in honor of an interstate highway.

Sometimes when I blink my eyes I see little shooting, comet-shaped slivers for an instant afterward. Sometimes I enjoy this so much that I blink more rapidly than usual. Usually these slivers are sort of gold, or silver with a heavy dose of tan, or beige, or cream. Over the Thanksgiving weekend I sat down on my couch to read one afternoon. Two of the windows in my living room face south, and the sunlight pouring in as I sat there, the brilliance of the blue sky punctuated only by the black bare branches that announce winter like nothing else, all of it made me feel I might just be in another time zone. I blinked my eyes and what was left behind in my vision – the residue, I suppose you could call it – was not silver or gold but the most pleasant shade of blue I’ve ever experienced. It was blue with a very precise dosage of green. It wasn’t what I’d call light blue, but it had a lightness to it. Sign number one of a brain tumor taking hold, I thought. Or perhaps a holiday greeting from my long-gone grandmother. It was from her that I inherited my love of blue, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been searching for her blue dishes for decades now, and I’ve yet to find them.

The fig tree out in my side yard is doing weird things this year. This past summer, and the summer before, the fruit appeared in the spring, as it always does, but then the late-season cold and wet threw it off course. I think the people who come by in the fall with baskets and pick figs must have kept going this year because what they picked the year before was probably not good. At any rate, the leaves fell. Hundreds are composting beautifully in the yard and hundreds more have gone with the breeze. The branches are bare of leaves but the figs remain. They remind me Brussels sprouts display at the grocery store, still on their stalks.

I decided to attempt hanging lights outside this year not long ago, early on a bright and sunny December afternoon. There are electrical considerations – as there always are in this house – but I was on the enclosed porch out back, doing my business, and out of the corner of my eye, through the south-facing window, the sun was striking a bead of moisture on top of one of the figs, which wasn’t swaying in the breeze exactly, but was moving just enough to cause the sun-captured droplet to appear to be spinning. And it was a bright, bright shade of green, almost piercing. Emerald, I suppose you would call it. For what felt like many minutes I just stared out the window, and by the time I came inside, the inclination toward bright lights this time of year made perfect sense to me. Natural, you might even say.

Holiday mating

One night last week I fired up the candles in the bathroom, turned on the hot water and headed out to the little enclosed back porch right off my kitchen for a smoke. I took one drag, blew out a few smoke rings and that’s when I heard the rustling.

The area behind my house is a treacherous mishap of ill-advised fences, decaying trees, a little pond and bowls of cat food (next door), a roof that slopes down quite low, an overhang that I swear is one day going to hang so precariously that it will simply fall off the house, a shed that’s built onto the side of the house and, like many things that are a part of this structure that has my name on it, is just off enough to render the call of should it stay or should it go impossible to make. It does prevent people from creeping from the front of my house to the back, which is a mixed blessing. At the same time, the underside of it is completely open – I’ll be damned if I know why – so animals, particularly possums, have not only a nice route away from the light and danger of the street but a protected resting area as well. And the roof of the shed slopes upward in such a way that if you were a creature blessed with the ability to leap, it’s a nice springboard to the roof of the house. Best of all, it’s not quite wide of enough to at least serve the one purpose I’d like it to. To put the lawn mower away or take it out requires lifting the entire thing and turning it to the side and then squeezing through the door. I know I dramatize and overreact to almost everything, but each and every time I’ve hoisted the lawn mower in and out my thoughts have carried me back to the afternoon I signed the stack of papers for this house, and in my mind I picture myself quietly and wordlessly taking my cigarette lighter out of my front pocket and burning each and every one of them. I’d be happy to pay the fines.

The other night, there was more rustling, then a pause, followed by more. It was not a possum. Possums have the most impressive size-to-sound ratio of any creature I’ve encountered thus far. Perhaps a cat, I thought hopefully. Then I pressed my face to the door and there, peering around the corner of the house as it perched on the top of the shed, was a big furry shadow and two little bright eyes. Get the fuck out of here, I yelled, making enough of an impression that the animal withdrew its head and scampered on up to the corrugated metal that extends a few feet behind the house. And from there, to the roof.

I turned on every light in the house and turned the water off. Then I went out the front door and stood in the street for a better look. And there, along the fence behind the house next door was another moving mass of fur and behind that, in a lit window, the guy who lives in the house behind me walking back and forth, oblivious to the terror.

My neighbor, a friend of his and I ended up standing in the street just beyond the driveway we share, where we watched the two raccoons roll and shimmy up and down the western slope of my roof. “Ahhh,” my neighbor’s friend cooed, “they’re mating.” A few minutes later they jumped into the car and drove off to a holiday gathering – the loving had not lasted long, and once it was over the raccoons ambled off to tend to whatever business it is raccoons tend to. And I came back inside and resumed the running of the bath and enjoyed the remainder of the blessedly quiet and peaceful evening.

Love letters

Last Wednesday evening I watched the last episode in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, which I’ve been hearing about and meaning to watch since the early 1990s. I don’t usually go in for painfully detailed ponderings of and on battle strategies and troop movement and intricate maps with the names of generals and arrows and tiny triangles that I believe indicate hills.

There was plenty of that, to be sure, but there was plenty more as well. For starters, I cannot make up my mind about Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation seems to have been put forth out of convenience more than anything you might call moral or ethical. What’s interesting though is that the northern folks – they were the enlightened side, as we all know – objected to the proclamation strenuously when they realized that it had become the war’s centerpiece. So much so that there was quite a movement in support of pulling out of the war unless he cancelled it, to which Abraham Lincoln said, no. I’m not sure if I consider that heroic. I suppose it is decent, though.

That’s my anti-North slam. On the anti-South side, here’s a good one. Many Southerners who happened to be in New York City protested because, according to them, the war was hurting the south far more than it was hurting the north. And I thought that causing problems – such as basing an economy on the right to own other human beings – and then racing for and clenching the victim medal was something more of our era.

I was completely entranced in a way that even I found alarming by the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Walt Whitman wrote during the war that Lincoln’s face was so complex that it beckoned the talent of the portrait artists from two or three centuries before, but Lee’s face, man, someone nailed that one. And nicely. The care with which the surrender and the dignity on display from both sides was orchestrated and recorded was intriguing to me. There was something inherently civil about it, not the least of which was that Robert E. Lee, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, dressed for the occasion.

All of this, though, falls flat alongside what I thought were the stars of the show: The letters. They were so beautifully written and recalled a language that existed in a state of grace I’ve never known but have certainly dreamed of. I hit rewind many times so I that I could listen again, and in a couple of instances I listened three or four times.

I didn’t live in the era, of course, but from what I could tell the Civil War was debated and considered and reported in vivid detail in the newspapers. This may be due to geographical immediacy and the fact that there was more at stake. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that even though there were no computers or cell phones, it seems to me that people knew more of the world in which they lived. The number of dead that comes to mind is 800,000, a figure that – and pardon me for saying this – puts another, more recent national calamity into its proper perspective, and by that I mean makes it a shadow at best. And speaking of perspective, as coincidence would have it, I finished the series on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night the CBS Evening News reported that the war in Iraq – the price tag of which is well over $800 billion – is indeed over. But it was the third story of the newscast, preceded by some new bipartisan come-to-Jesus monkey business about Medicare and word that the governor of Iowa isn’t sure that Newt Gingrich is suited for the presidency.

Bashing the balls

The other day my regularly scheduled meetings got cancelled. One, as usual, was cancelled moments before it was to begin; the other, a few hours in advance. I have a few projects going at the moment, and while there were many things I could have done to move each of them forward a tad, there was nothing pressing. And that’s my biggest shortcoming in this business: If I have six “urgent” things to do, I’ll do all six of them. If, on the other hand, I have two or three or four do-it-when-you-can tasks before me, I’ll drag those out as long as possible. I guess my confession here is that even though I routinely ridicule people who slather every interaction and project with a false sense of importance, I apparently abide.

Anyhow, since it was a very cold but very sunny morning, I decided to go do a little shopping. I was going to run out to Mall 205, which is a nice walk from my house, but I hate that place. I suppose I hate all malls, but this one, starting with the sad fact that it’s named after a highway, is especially nasty in my opinion. For those of you who have never been, it’s several acres of fat, mostly white people who channel their apparent anger into the way they command their oversized vehicles. If you are walking into or out of Mall 205 or, worse, riding a bicycle, get your ass out of the way.

So as I put the key into the door as I was leaving, standing there on my front porch it occurred to me that since I had no emergencies to tend to, why not take the train out to the Target store that sits on the edge of a big shopping spread close to the airport?

The mountains were out on full display. A jet with the word Continental painted on its tail sailed overhead, and I thought, Houston. The train glided almost silently along the tracks. Out the window, slightly below it, cars crawled along and they too were blessedly silent. My visit to Target began as it almost always does. I ordered nachos with cheese and jalapenos and sat on a stool, stuffing my mouth with garbage and looking out across the parking lot, where thousands of cars caught and gave back the rays of sunlight.

After the nachos, I wandered around a bit. I looked at the cloth-covered boxes for storing things and I looked at the selection of fancy skillets and I spent a while looking at the lights. Then, I wandered over to the men’s section to look for the main item I was shopping for – long underwear. The underwear section makes me horny. That’s really all there is to it. All that flesh, all those nice curves and hidden treasures, photographed. I’ve wondered, since a very young age, what goes through the minds of those holding the cameras and what goes through the minds of those holding onto other commodities. It’s a question I never tire of pondering.

And, as it always has, visits to the underwear section have something of a lasting impact. For a certain period of time, every male being I encounter after leaving that particular section is exactly the person I’ve dreamed of for decades. It’s the oddest thing, but it’s kind of fun, being flooded by fantasies that drove me to distraction as a hormone-addled teenager and that drive me to distraction still even though I have perhaps arrived in a demographic one could maybe label “dirty old man.” I loved crotch shots then and I love them now.

Which brings me to the checkout line. I placed my items on the belt. The attractive checker (everyone is attractive by that point) removed each of the two packages containing the long underwear, the shaving cream and razors and the strand of lights and looked at each, it seemed to me, with careful consideration. Then another attractive man (everyone is attractive by that point) came up behind me. I’d say he was 38 or so, really short hair, smoky eyes that were either deep green or brown, sweatshirt, jacket, jeans. He had a cart overflowing with shit, it being the season and all, and the first thing he put on the belt was a rectangular box, the top of which was a cellophane window. And the words, in big letters, on the side that was facing me: The Electronic Ball Basher. A toy, to be sure, I thought, and I thanked the clerk and he handed me my bag and I left.

Dysfunction

I became familiar with Barney Frank back in what I now think of as the Newsweek days. A magazine used to arrive in the mail, weekly, and in it there was news. This was before the innernets took over, before updates were posted on the so-called news sites every hour whether there was any new news or not, before every story included a link to a video, or a link to anything for that matter. I got to know Barney Frank through words that had been printed on paper, and I thought he was grand. An openly gay congressman. Holy shit.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but my opinion of him has gone down steadily over the years. One of the reasons for this is that I thought his indignation over the financial crisis was not only absurd but insulting as well. Wasn’t he in charge of the committee that was supposed to be minding the nation’s piggy bank? But the main reason I’ve grown less fond of Barney Frank rather than more is that I do not like the way he comes across. When a reporter thanks him for his time at the beginning of an interview or thanks him for his time at the interview’s conclusion, Barney Frank all but grunts. He’s yappy, I think, but in a way that somehow incorporates the worst of smug. It’s a deadly combo, I think.

But man, he does have a certain flair for saying things that I’d imagine will end up in a collection of quotations at some point. There was the exchange at one of the town hall meetings on healthcare, when he responded to one attendee’s blathering by saying she appeared to have all the intelligence of a piece of furniture – a dining room table, I believe. And my personal favorite – responding to a right winger’s lame taunt that he needed to take an HIV test and share the results by saying that he’d be happy to do that once she shared the results of her IQ test. I loved that.

Last week was pretty good, too. On a sort of schmaltzy interview on the Newshour, Barney Frank was asked if he thought Congress was really dysfunctional. Rather than screw around with qualifiers, his response was to ask the interviewer – Judy Woodruff – how she supposed the people who are members of Congress got there. They didn’t parachute down through the dome on the Capitol building and take their seats as if by magic, he said. The U.S. voters elected one party in 2008, and two years later they elected another. So who, exactly, is dysfunctional? While that sort of response shouldn’t be noteworthy, unfortunately it is.

Mirrors and movies

Without really meaning to, I recently read two novels with Middle Eastern themes, settings and characters. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is an almost unbearably harsh tale of endurance as experienced through the eyes of two women whose lives are forced to adapt to the ever-shifting political and religious landscape in Afghanistan. Maps for Lost Lovers, by Nadeem Aslam, paints an equally harsh picture of what it means to leave Pakistan but only in the physical sense. In both books, there are references – quite a few of them – to the wonders of Iranian cinema. Going to see an Iranian movie, I read over and over, was a vestige of sorts, a reprieve.

Which reminded me of the fondness for those films that struck my mother toward the end of her life. It was the strangest thing, hearing about aspects of my parents’ lives together, their habits and their preferences, that took hold after their children were grown and gone. During those conversations with my mother I had to remind myself that I was one of those children, grown and gone, and that she and her husband – my father – had embarked on an adventure or two that did not include me. One of their habits made me think my parents were … dating: They liked to go to the movies, and their favorite movies, my mother told me, were Iranian. In fact, she kept close tabs on the papers to find out when a new one was scheduled to come to town. One time I asked her some questions. Was it the location of production or the subject matter that drew her in? Both, she said. And what, I asked, is it that you like about those movies? Well, she said, they’re gorgeous.

I spoke with a friend of mine on Thanksgiving whose wife died earlier this year. As it happens, her wife and my mother carried through their lives the same, understatedly beautiful name. And as it also happens, her wife and my mother shared a fondness for the Iranian cinema.

So I was out and about the day after Thanksgiving, which was beautiful here, and I found myself at the book store – the big one – and I thought, certainly there must be …

Mirrors of the Unseen, which is not only a good title for a book but could also be a good title for the lives of both my mother and my friend’s beloved, is 400 pages of Jason Elliot’s ruminations on the Iran of then and the Iran of now. The focus, though, is much more on the then, and the then, on Iran’s calendar, is so vastly endless that centuries I’ve never even heard of are referenced so casually you’d swear they’d unfolded last summer and, at the same time, last summer is discussed as if that is what we mean when we say ancient history. The whole book was wonderfully upside-down that way.

I loved the book, personally. Jason Elliot’s main obsession – and you could watch it move in and take over, as if it were a disease, and perhaps it was – is the alignment of mosques to the spaces that surround them. As seen by the naked eye, many buildings seem to be out of synch with one another but are, in fact, “singing in a chorus of geometries.” [pg. 281]. That was interesting, I thought, as were his observations on how truly ancient Persian culture is and the prevalence of its influence on the world, much of which is credited to Europeans. Here’s a good one, specific to the U.S.: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Although quite a bit of that is carved into the main post office in New York, it’s straight out of the fifth century (B.C.), when those words were used to describe Persia’s Achaemenid mail couriers.

The geometry is a springboard to the country’s love – and I mean love – of adornments that could be dismissed as mere decorations but that are, in fact, more riddles of geometry. Calligraphy, tile, textiles, beadwork and, my personal favorite, the architecture. The architects of many mosques and other public buildings spent at least a decade per structure, a decade during which one of their main priorities was the incorporation of lighting, which, according to the author, they regarded as sacred and as or more critical to a building as its physical elements. All of this, of course, without computers.

What really lodged in my mind from the book, though, is this: Way, way long ago, a Persian ceramicist was accused of stealing another artist’s design. His reply: Imitation is the sincerest form of pottery. I’m not sure why that occurred to me as hysterical, but it did, and so I laughed and laughed and laughed some more.

Camping

Of all the aspects of the occupiers and their movement, there was one that seemed to rankle the general public in a way that no others did. I realized one day that if you want to really aggravate people, you need not waste your time and effort exposing your breasts, going to the gay pride parade bound and gagged, kissing another person – or two, or three – of the same gender or wearing t-shirts with naughty words on them. All you need to do, it seems to me, is camp in a public space. It drives people right to the line that separates the reasonable from the hysterical, and then, very quickly, way past it.

I don’t know what I think of it, or how I feel about it, and I’m not sure it matters. A friend of mine did ask me, nicely, how I might feel if people pitched tents up and down my street.

My initial response was that the question raised something of a moot point since my street is not a public park. The parks in downtown Portland where the camping took place are not, in my opinion, really parks: They’re one city block each (in a city of very small blocks) with statuary and, in one, a building with restrooms. While most people would be hard pressed to name them, during and following the campout these two parks have been discussed in tones and terms so reverent you’d think they were the birthplace of Jesus or one of his very close relatives.

The City of Portland is partly to blame for this. Shortly after the occupiers were evicted and parks employees came to work on a Sunday afternoon to enclose the parks with chain-link fencing to “keep everyone safe,” estimates for what it would cost to repair the parks started getting tossed around, and, as is to be expected, the local news people trumpeted the figures at the top of their talk shows. The most recent figure I heard was $180,000, and I have three things to say about that. First, why do these two city blocks warrant an arborist and a specialist to tend to one thing and another? Does every so-called park get that level of attention? A relatively large park in my neighborhood and the community center housed in it sure don’t. Second, as one occupier pointed out, the estimate for repairing the restrooms reflects what it will cost to restore those facilities to a condition that was lost long before the campers arrived. It’s distorted, in other words. And third, I’ve been on the receiving end of the city’s cost-estimating capabilities - $1,200 for three or four squares of sidewalk that absolutely did not need to be repaired in the first place and that were, ultimately, repaired poorly. I hesitate to bash a government entity, but in this case I think getting a few more bids would be a good idea.

But the more I thought about my friend’s question, the more I thought that I would find a strand of tents pitched up and down my street less problematic than the SUVs and 18-wheelers and pickup trucks sagging with refrigerators and washing machines and dish washers and other vehicles driven by generally careless idiots that roar through with zero regard for those of us who live here. People do need to sleep, and in order to do so most people need to be shielded from the elements. People do not, in my opinion, need to exceed 50 miles per hour on a street that is barely two lanes wide.

I think the revulsion brought about by camping is entertaining in a way. At the same time, I do wonder what’s behind it, or beneath it. Are we that disturbed by people going about the business of daily living, only outside? Does it remind us of where we came from? More troubling or more entertaining, depending, does it remind us of where we appear to be headed? Does it remind us that most of us have lost the instincts that would come in pretty handy if we were forced to survive without what we now consider the basics? Does it force us to ask ourselves as best we’re able what we would do without remote controls, without running water, without the God-given right to waste paper by placing a sheet of it on a toilet seat so that our ass cheeks don’t touch the surface that someone else’s ass cheeks touched before we do our business in a public or semi-public facility?

And what would we do without the perversion of Thanksgiving known as Black Friday? That was an interesting day this year, I thought, because it followed so closely the eviction of the occupiers from the sacred grounds in downtown Portland. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, I imagined that maybe the super sales would fall flat as people honored the time and energy the protestors invested in showing the country and the world that our economy is indeed a fairly tale. What, I wondered, under a trance of almost childlike delight, what if everyone simply occupied their own hearts, souls and spirits rather than rushing out and buying more stocking stuffers for next year’s landfill? But there was no such luck. Record sales, I believe, that actually boosted the stock market, the unintelligible details of which are now broadcast on an hourly basis, and it all got officially underway, as it usually does, with a good old-fashioned campout in the parking lots of malls across the land. And, if the breezy chattiness of the hosts and hostesses who sing the world on the television stations is any indication, that was just fine.

The search

I don’t normally give much thought to getting dressed. I try to wear clothing that serves its purpose (not short-sleeved sweaters, for example, which make zero sense to me), that’s comfortable and that attracts as little attention as possible. In other words, I strive for the exact opposite of trendy, and usually I achieve it.

This year, because I’ve been half-heartedly hunting around for a specific item, I found myself memorializing what I think is my all-time favorite piece. In 1994, I took a long train trip that wound up at Union Station in downtown Portland, Oregon. Kansas City was one of the stops early in the voyage, and while I was there I went to a Goodwill store with a then-friend’s then-girlfriend and in that store I found and bought a deep, deep blue turtleneck that was made of the heavy fabric usually used for sweatshirts. It was, quite simply, perfect: It fit, the neck and the cuffs were form-fitting but not too tight, the color was glorious and it was warm. Before I had to part with it many years later, I wore that sweatshirt (or was it a turtleneck?) pretty much always except for on laundry day. Had I realized back then that putting clothes in the drier is a pretty sure way to destroy them, I’d probably still be wearing that creation, but alas, with only a single glob of threads connecting the neck to the body, I had to part with the turtleneck-sweatshirt combo. And I remember the day clearly, even now.

I’ve checked at various stores and online, and my search – if you can call it that – leaves me with one question: Have straightforward, no-frills turtleneck sweaters been outlawed? One of the problems with buying almost everything used is that I forgot how maddening the mandatory changing of styles can be. This year, someone decided that men’s sweaters should be crapped out with what’s called a shawl collar. Sometimes these sweaters are adorned with buttons but most of the ones I’ve seen simply have a chest-level gash where one half of the sweater goes one way and the other half goes the other and the entire thing culminates in a sort of quasi hood-type thing that dangles in the back. From the perspective of pure practicality, does that “shawl” keep the wearer any warmer? Does it make the sweater fit better? Is it a structural consideration? Or is it just a decoration?

Looking for a turtleneck made out of sweatshirt-weight material online was even more puzzling. Because I don’t buy much on the Internet, I almost never do searches for specific products, which is good, because I’m not sure what the point is, exactly. Type into a search engine the words “turtleneck sweatshirt mens” and if anything remotely along those lines turns up, please let me know. Because I found pretty much everything but. Cardigans, crewnecks, V-necks, mock this and mock that, button-down shirts, underwear, you name it. It made me wonder what sort of coding actually goes into the search engine algorithms. Although the marketing teams behind the search engine biz would love for you to believe that theirs is a world of pure precision, it’s one of the sloppiest experiences I’ve had in a long while. I put the words in different order and the same shit turned up, over and over, shit I didn’t want before, shit I don’t want now.

Which brings me, sadly, to the Gap, where there is no end of shit. That was the company whose logo was on the tag of my beloved sweatshirt turtleneck – or turtleneck sweatshirt – and it’s the tag that’s on a couple of other items that I really like, items I’ve been very careful to not ever subject to the drier. As I recall, that store used to characterized by sturdy construction, solid lines, buttons and zippers that stayed where they were meant to stay and a sort of no-frills tastefulness in general. What happened?

Compromises

I found myself in the middle of a word warp last week. From two completely different stories, a single word – compromise – occurred to me in ways as different as July is from November.

First, the theatrics that went along with the committee thrown together to trim a couple trillion bucks from the budget. I thought the entire thing was a circus from the beginning. My first question, and in some ways my only question, is this: With 535 voting members representing the country’s citizenry in Congress, I wonder what’s behind selecting a dozen of them to tackle the task of solving the nation’s fiscal ills. I have two guesses. The first is that the Republicans really do want to increase taxes, but they don’t want it on their record, so being able to blame it on a committee come election day sure would be handy. The second is that everyone in Washington has acknowledged on some level that the money situation – and therefore the country – has slithered beyond the point of no return. Rather than say this out loud, having a committee to personify the dysfunction is yet another way to distract voters from the truth, which we are evidently incapable and unwilling to confront.

Which was my first encounter last week with the word compromise. Millions of us were apparently turned on by candidates whose main campaign message was that they would not compromise when it came to taxes. And based on last week’s roaring about the failure of the so-called super committee to accomplish anything, millions of us are incapable of making the simplest of connections. One evening my mouth just sort of hung open as I watched one national newscast and listened to some big shot representing the retail industry claim that he’d been blindsided by this travesty. And the rancor out on the Internets was even more appalling, I thought: Throw them out of office! What a bunch of losers! Congress is dysfunctional! As long as I’m throwing the term “millions” around, here’s a prediction: The members of the super committee will indeed be thrown out of office a year from now, and they’ll be replaced by candidates whose talking points cater to an even more simple-minded crowd of millions of voters who want to address problems that have been in the works for at least a century with an answer as simple and easy as apple pie. We want solutions, they’ll say, not compromises.

Closer to home, Oregon’s governor announced he’s putting a moratorium on all executions for the duration of his term. During his first go-round as governor, there was at least one execution carried out that left him, he says, with more questions than conclusions. To avoid finding himself – and the state – in that situation again, he declared himself unwilling to compromise. And in my own way, in spite of my tirade against the use of that word in the context of politics, I applauded.

Dreams

The first time I attempted The Audacity of Hope, I was on a train going to Los Angeles for Christmas. Barack Obama, the author, had just been elected president, and one of his first acts, as I recall, was to enlist for the inauguration the reverend who had just served as the face and voice of the campaign to exclude same-sex couples from marriage in California. I read a few chapters, and with each one the realization that even the country’s first minority president was fully capable of toying with the gays as political collateral became more clear to me, so I left the book on the train.

A few months ago I started it again, and this time I finished it. I can understand the excitement a book such as that would have generated considering the point at which it was published – several years into the W era – but in reading it three years into Obama’s administration, the book read to me like a very well-written bit of campaign literature. We can all gather round and hold hands and acknowledge our differences while at the same time, oh golly gee, we can … hope! the book seemed to be saying.

His first book, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. The key word in the title, Dreams from my Father, I believe, is from. I don’t think Obama’s father is an actual character for a single chapter in the book, but he is a presence on each page. So too are impressions gathered from a lifescape, if you will, that includes Hawaii, Indonesia, Chicago, Harvard and Kenya. What Obama’s writing accomplishes that is truly stunning is the weaving together of all those impressions into an experience that leads not to answers but to questions.

Lots and lots of questions.

Is a man with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya more black than white? Is arriving in the upper echelons of the middle class a betrayal of the poor or is it an accomplishment for all? Should a black person inherently and fundamentally mistrust a white person? Have the image Kenyans have of themselves been defined more by British colonialism than by their ancestors? Is there hope – audacious or otherwise – for inner-city, serially impoverished black people? Does the black church – as a whole – harm more than it heals? What, exactly, was the significance of Harold Washington’s ascension to the mayor’s office in Chicago? Is it a crime to play your part in order to get along? Or is it a concession?

One of the biggest questions, for me anyhow, is the interpretation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By the time Obama started his community organizing job in Chicago, Wright’s church had evolved into a clearinghouse of sorts for the city’s impoverished south side. I’m oversimplifying here, but here’s a synopsis of Wright’s position. It’s great for black people to get ahead socially and economically. It’s not so great when they succumb to what he called “middleincomeness” and shift their allegiances away from where they’ve been to where they’re hoping to go. Another of his trademarks is the notion that as much as those who remain in the inner city have to learn from those who have arrived in the inner sanctum, the reverse is equally true: There are plenty of lessons black corporate lawyers can learn from black women raising four children in public housing in a neighborhood where the sound of gunfire is so ordinary it’s barely noticed. Back in 2008, when I first heard the recordings of the reverend yelling about white folks, my guess that it was the handiwork of shrill conservatives, who consider use of the word “context” an act of elitism; after reading the book, I’d put money on that hunch. A lot of it.

For me, the most intriguing part of the book is the way it tackles nuance. While the main point of a lot of what’s written these days seems to be that we all share something called an “American character” that dictates to us a consistent set of hopes and ambitions, I think our president did a stunning job at underscoring the way different experience and history results in different narratives that, when placed alongside one another and occasionally intersected, define the United States. Everyone’s story, the book seems to say, has merit and has a place in the ongoing national conversation. Even those whose job is to fill the empty heads of people like Sarah Palin with empty words written and spoken with the sole purpose of ridiculing and trivializing the idea that a democracy hears the voices of those many would prefer remain disenfranchised.

Thanksgiving with the alcoholics

Until I became one of them a few years ago, I had always been baffled by people who speak ill of the holidays. What’s not to like? I’d wonder. For me, for years, I didn’t enjoy the holidays because they were a time to gather with people and appreciate one another and share profound – if short-lived – realizations about gratitude and humility. I just tend to like group get togethers and the way that holiday lights and candles and even the music soften the year’s coldest afternoons and evenings. Plus, I really like to eat.

And then, in 2008, I decided to part ways with alcohol, which changed everything. Or it changed the way I experience everything. Most of it is good. The holidays, unfortunately, particularly Thanksgiving, are one of the few exceptions.

It began with one of my brothers. I plan to explore this one more thoroughly someday, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some sharing right here and right now. It’s the holiday season, after all. He’d had Thanksgiving at his house for a few years in a row. At his house, his wife made the turkey according to her specifications (she read somewhere, or perhaps heard from her mommy, that stuffing can turn toxic, which strikes me, in hindsight, as a spectacular metaphor). At his house the guests included his wife’s uncle and his partner, his and his wife’s children, around whose schedules everything revolved, including the ringing of the telephone, and a group of his and his wife’s friends. At his house the dinner was served on matching flatware from matching bowls and platters on a dining room table with extra leaves so that it could be expanded to seat everyone. Like most of their possessions, the table was expensive, but, also like most of their possessions, it had not put a dent in their budget because it was a wedding gift. Even though this meal was held at his house, I like to cook on Thanksgiving, so I always brought a lot of food with me.

So imagine my surprise when, in early November that year, my brother’s beleaguered, put-upon and yet accusatory response to my mention of Thanksgiving: “God, seems like you could do it at your house once in a while.” I will never forget the shock I felt at the end of that telephone call. Since that year was perhaps the last before he and his wife and their children moved to California so that their children could grow up to be more like my brother’s wife’s people than his own, coupled with the fact that our father was clearly in his final days, I had believed that it was going to be really nice, or maybe even special, to spend an afternoon and evening together. In a way that’s both tragic and worthy of celebration, when it comes to members of my family, I made a vow to never, ever entertain such foolish sentiments again. And thus far, I’ve honored it.

Then there’s my friend who I’ve known for 10 years or so. He’s a writer but he’s also quite good at remodeling and building and he’s one of the most well-read people I know. He’s also quite an entertainer, and every year, the week of Thanksgiving, he calls me to tell me that he and his boyfriend are going, as is the custom, to some long-standing mid-day meal hosted and attended by what my friend describes as the bitchiest group of queens in Portland. But after that, my friend always informs me, he’s cooking a huge meal, which he’ll be serving to “half the town” at his place. Somehow, though I’ve been hearing about this gathering for many years and I’ve lived in Portland for many more, I’ve never been part of that particular half of town. I’m almost proud of that.

Many years ago one of my friends introduced a routine so weird I’m still not sure what to call it. After a family gathering, he would say “My mother asked how you were and said it would have been fine if you’d come to dinner.” This usually happened right after Easter, as I recall. Then, after my mother died, he started railing about how much he dislikes Mother’s Day. To which I finally said, “Don’t worry – she’ll be dead before you know it.” So I suppose what happened last year was an upping of the ante on his part, although I’m not sure because I’ve never broached the subject, nor do I intend to. We went out for breakfast right before Christmas, and as we sat there my friend started telling me about an old acquaintance who was in town and how he was being avoided because he was, according to my friend, one of the most annoying, deceitful people to ever come along. Finally, my friend said, “Oh yeah, and he was always invited to our house for holiday dinners.” Clueless to a point that defies description? Or, fully aware that I was on my own for Christmas, just really mean spirited? While I’ve considered this particular person a friend since I was 30 years old, neither explanation works for me. Nor does the friendship.

But other things do work, and they work quite well.

I do remember that it was rainy and cold on Thanksgiving in 2008. I remember thinking, several times, that being in my house, by myself, on a holiday bedazzled with togetherness was the definition of personal failure. While I don’t remember what I made, I do remember walking down my street in the late-afternoon darkness, terrified that I would run into someone I knew and have to quickly come up with something believable if asked where I was going in the pouring rain with a dish covered with aluminum foil. Because going to a Thanksgiving potluck organized and hosted by one of the many nearby Alcoholics Anonymous groups I’d discovered over the previous two months would certainly turn out to be something I’d later recall as a low point, which is a funny thing to remember, three years later, because it was anything but.

Judging a book by its cover

There are very few downsides to reading books like Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one of them is that whatever novel you read following one of them has an unusually high chance of disappointing. And disappointment is exactly what I was left with after reading the last page of Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam.

I found it at a recent used book sale and there were two reasons I bought it: I liked the cover, and I liked the title. After enduring all 369 pages, I still really like the cover, and I still really like the title.

I think the story itself is compelling. Focused on one family, the book is a tour of day-to-day life among a community of immigrants from Pakistan living in the U.K., in a city that was not immediately recognizable to me. It seems to me there were two, possibly three, main plot lines. The first is the search for the killers of the husband’s brother and his live-in girlfriend. The second is the husband’s affair with a woman who, it turns out, needs to accomplish some very specific things according to the almighty Allah: Since her alcoholic husband beat the shit out of her and then uttered the word “divorce” three times in a row, her mandate, as understood by the faithful, is to marry another man and then divorce him. Once that’s accomplished, she has the blessing of Allah to return to her abusive, alcoholic husband and remarry him. Don’t feel bad if you need to reread that to make sure you’ve got the order of it correctly. I sure did.

The biggest disappointment was the third plot line (and I hesitate to call it that because I’m not sure it qualifies), which focuses on the family’s wife and mother, Kaukab. The most devout of the characters, she’s at war on one level or another with all three of her children, with her husband, with the neighbors and with England, in a way that’s both specific and general.

What fell apart for me was that Kaukab’s concerns, like the concerns of nearly every character, are written in a way that is so trite I think I rolled my eyes through most of it. With the exception of the few paragraphs dedicated to Kaukab’s struggle with the language and the disparity between what she says and what she feels, which I thought were excellent, Nadeem Aslam paints her in the same way he paints the rest. He trots out one cliché after another, and they’re clichés conveyed with writing that rarely rises above the level of an earnest amateur.

Of course, in fairness, I do wonder how the book would have struck me had I read it at a different time. Because after a few weeks in Macondo with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the driver’s seat, most writing is bound to fall flat, including mine.