Heat

It’s a day of fierce, unrelenting heat.

Also a holiday—Constitution Day, according to some. 

Mr. Fernández has a different word for it….

Well, for those who believe in it, it’s something to celebrate. And for me?

Sitting in a café, using the Internet, and consuming the air conditioning.

Also doing Stumbleupon, which shows promise to be a major waster of time. Remember Freerice? Used to do that for hours.

OK, so what have I stumbled upon? Well, here’s Alesund, Norway!

Well, that’s something to see. And what about this?

 Nice, but would you want to walk past it? Something sinister, here. OK, so let’s do this…

Hardly an improvement…

This?

Gentle Reader, we have arrived at page four! This old writer who today had nothing to say bids you farewell.

An ode to joy

Readers, forgive me. I had a tantrum in yesterday's post. Hope this makes up for it! (Crank up the volume!)

Well, we know there are evil winds—Joan Didion wrote her famous essay about the Santa Ana winds almost half a century ago. The Santa Ana starts on the leeward side of a mountain, she writes, and warms up and becomes drier as it moves down the mountain. By the time it hits Los Angeles, it is intensely hot, intensely dry and…

…intensely strong. Hurricane force, at times.

California burning? It’s almost always because of the Santa Ana winds.

But other things happen as well. Crime spikes, tempers fray, kids become unmanageable in the classroom.

Oh, and blood doesn’t clot as easily.

That’s when Didion inserts her famous phrase: “to surrender to the Santa Ana winds is to accept a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

(Or words to that effect—the damn Internet connection is still goofing off….)

Well, maybe that’s what’s needed—to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior.

It wasn’t, somehow, an easy weekend. I didn’t watch TV footage of the Aurora shooting—I’m smarter than that. But I read the accounts nearly compulsively (sometimes the same article, ostensibly to see if it had been updated). I thought about it. I wrote a post that was almost as incendiary as the Santa Ana winds.

Then I remembered—we’re being zapped by increased solar activity. Duluth reported blazing northern lights last week.

And I also remembered—the Santa Ana winds increase the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air.

Meaning a change in the electromagnetic field that constantly surrounds us.

It’s a subject that draws a lot of bunkum, and I almost hate to go there. Ghost hunters wander through houses at midnight, looking for dips in the electromagnetic fields. The UFO believers do similar things. 

But there is some scientific evidence. Solar flares occur normally three times a year. Investigators in Russia determined that suicides rise predictably in one extreme Northern Russian city with each period of flaring.

Aurora—which is seventeen miles from Columbine High School—is also a mile above sea level. Would they be more prone to the effect of changes in the electromagnetic system?

The advantage of thinking mechanistically is that it takes you away from things like “willpower” and “self-discipline.” Your drinking is out of control because of a change in genetic structure, for example, or proteins in the brain.

Might be true.

The disadvantage?

It leads straight to the Twinkie Defense. 'All that sugar made me kill Harvey Milk.'  

And my good friend Susan, I suspect, wouldn’t have it. “No woman suffering from the ravages of PMS has ever committed the massacres that men have.” 

Good point.

Whatever it was, it was intense. My mood was labile. Little things irritated me. And then, Pat sent me a link to the Beethoven clip above.

And I found myself flooded with tears in a coffee house in San Juan.

It’s something so moronic that I rarely admit to it, but here goes. I love orchestral performances because it’s one of the few occasions I can think of where one hundred people gather to do something beautiful.

And I loved this clip for the humor, the playfulness of it all. The musicians coming out of the bank (the Ode to Joy was a gift organized by a Catalonian bank to celebrate their 130^th anniversary). The people looking on, gathering, singing, filming, tapping their feet. The kids imitating the conductor.

The assassin in Aurora did more damage than the 12 / 71 he killed or maimed. But it’s also true that one person playing a musical instrument can…

…change the world?

No.

Yes.    

Should Men Be Allowed?

I know, I know….

That’s a provocative question. Also ironic, for two obvious reasons: I’m a man, my spouse is a man. Hardly the likely person to be asking the question.

Well, I did, right there in my black armchair, as I was cheating at electronic Sudoku. Yes, you can cheat—my version of iPad Sudoku allows you three wrong answers and will still declare you a winner. So, hey, why not? And I give you this tip—added value, as we used to say in Wal-Mart!—to help you along. Your guess should always be for the little box that helps you the LEAST! If putting the 8 in the lower-right hand box would give the next three answers—don’t. Put it in the lower left box—which gets you nothing. Most of the time you’ll be right. If you’re wrong, well, you have two more guesses AND those three other answers.

See?

By cheating, I manage to play expert Sudoku (I say this with pride) and win most of the time.

Today…I lost. 

OK, it doesn’t make me a bad person, as Jeanne used to say. And then I wondered—maybe it does. Not losing, but cheating. Jack wouldn’t have approved.

It was that old rigid morality I wrote about in Iguanas. That fire and brimstone, sulfurous hellfire, miserable sinner stuff. Didn’t believe in it, but he was still shot full of it….

I wondered about it because I was pondering an email Cousin Ruthie sent me—and when she writes, you read! (She correctly diagnosed Santorum—“a lizard!”—and is bang-on about Romney—“a snake in the grass!”) She had read a post about Lexapro 20mg po qd. And then remembered her nursing days. (She held out three years, I managed a decade….)

Well, both of us remember some of the same stuff—the endless notes we had to do to cover our asses, writing out medication charts at 3AM, those funny Latin abbreviations: qd, qid, tid, PO, SQ. She also remembers the guy who tried to grab her boobs every time she walked in the room….

She asks—anyone try that on me?

Errr…no.

And she mentions Clarence Thomas, and how her parents were shocked when she assured them that of course he had come on to Anita Hill, and then told them about her nursing days.

Well, her father and mine were cousins. But they both had that morality thing. And then I remembered the female colleague of Jack’s who approached my mother on the day of Jack's memorial service.

“I want you to know, John Newhouse was the only male reporter that EVERY woman felt comfortable with alone in the news room at night….”

Franny was shocked.

I’m shocked. 

And Clarence Thomas? Well, I believe Anita for one reason.

I don’t believe any woman could invent the story of a pubic hair on a Coke can.

Frankly, the whole thing is drenched with testosterone. And only an androgen-flooded mind could conceive of it.

So that got me thinking about the four guns James Holmes purchased to kill the 12 / injure the 71 in Aurora, Colorado yesterday.*

They were purchased legally, and the vendors correctly performed the necessary background check!

Well, GREAT!

How relieved the families of the 12 / 71 victims must feel! What solace to know that your loved one had been slaughtered / maimed with legal weapons! One imagines them at the graveyard, peering down six feet at the coffin. Mother bursts into sobs, Father holds her, and whispers, “But at least the guns were legal!”

She fishes for the handkerchief, dries her eyes, squares her shoulders, and looks brightly into the future!

And here’s where I asked the question—should men be allowed? 

Nor was it the case that I asked the question because James Holmes is a man. (Although name me, Dear Readers, one massacre committed by a woman….)

Yeah, he’s a guy. He’s also emerging—I write this in case you’ve just come out of 24-hour seclusion—as one of the most dangerous of the schizophrenics.

Bright, tightly wound, wildly violent. 

OK—circle around. Is the US the only place that produces this type of schizophrenic?

Don’t think so.

We may be, however, the one place in the world that reveres guns to such an extent that we allow them on our streets.

That delicate last sentence may be a disservice to the 12 / 71 of Aurora. 

How’s this?

A man’s gun is his dick. And nothing, nothing, NOTHING will take that away from him!

Breathe, Marc….

_____________________
*These numbers correspond to the original figures and may have been updated since.

Madness Revisited

Another killing, another mass killing. This time not in Oslo, but in Colorado atmidnight.

In a movie theater….

OK, you know the facts as well as I. How can you not? It’s all over the news, all of the radio, all over the TV. Twelve people are dead. Fifty injured. The gunman is 24, and is supposed to have acted alone.

Questions arise. The first being, of course, why?

Well, we’ll probably know, or think we know. We’ll get the profile, the backstory, the teachers interviewed, the neighbors quizzed. We’ll see the anguished mom as she races to Colorado to be with her son. We’ll do the whole damn thing.

My take?

The kid had never been alone at night in a forest.

There’s something about it, you know. I used to do it at the Acres—leave the comfortable back bedroom and trot up the hill. Open the shack, blow up the air mattress, and climb into the top bunk.

The first thing is darkness—a darkness so absolute that the old cliché is true. You cannot see the hand in front of your face.

Right. That’s why you have the flashlight.

Second is the sound. At first, it’s the sound of wind high up through the trees. It’s a constant whoosh, varying in intensity, but still constant. You shine the flashlight upward, and see trees swaying.

The forest is communicating. Quite literally—through branches, through roots, through fungi in the soil. 

In fact, the forest is the macro extension of the human brain. The dendrites that form our nervous system? The word is derived from the Greek word for tree.

And so our brain is a forest. And the forest is a brain.

Another sound—the telltale sound of a mouse. You shine the flashlight at the counter, and she’s there. She stares at you. You at her. You give her permission. She goes to the wood box, and retrieves her smallest young. Takes it in her mouth and goes outside. Returns, repeats the procedure. Five times.

On her last trip, she looks back.

It’s not thanks, but acknowledgement.

The eyes are adjusted now. In fall and winter you see stars, more than you’ll ever see in the city. You remember an old friend who climbed to her roof after the hurricane had shut plunged the entire island of Puerto Rico into darkness. She spent hours on her back, at last seeing the stars.

You doze, but not for long. Something is moving, and then snorting. Then a crash through the woods.

Deer.

And yes, they do snort.

I tell you all this because I have seen it, felt it. The experience can be unsettling. What’s out there? Is there something moving, something approaching….

…something I can’t see?

You’re alone. Go outside? Flash on the flashlight?

I’ve done that. And the woods appears normal. It’s just your fear.

Something swoops onto the tree. You remember—the flying squirrel.

I used to describe this to my students, in the days when I was working, had a job. I told them about Franny, who turned off the refrigerator before she went to sleep —it was too loud. And my students?

Most of them slept with the TV on. In fact, most of the TVs were on even as we spoke. They were never turned off.

The question is whether they should ever be turned on. Neurologically, the right side of the brain is stimulated by the cathode ray tube, plasma screens, computer screens. It’s why Internet pornography is so addictive. It’s why volunteers, even if paid to do so, cannot give up television. It’s why your eye is drawn to a TV, if one is on in a room.

Easy to bash television. There’s a 32-inch TV fifteen feet from where I sit. My iPad is charging—I will play electronic Sudoku for perhaps an hour throughout the day.

My worry? This 24 year old kid—which he neurologically is—grew up as skewed as he is because the only reality he saw was provided by screens constantly jolting his dendrites into an alpha state.

He’s never seen the mouse, the young pup in her mouth, the tail hanging down. 

His only reality is a movie house at midnight, smoke bombs, and killing.

Three Piano Movers and a Mother-in-Law

Well, it was emotional hijacking, but very much welcomed.

Not to say needed. I had had a waking dream of Franny, something that I rarely do. Is it that my conscious brain has been dealing with her so actively? Has my subconscious gotten bored with the thing and gone on to something else? Certainly, two or three months ago, I decided ¡ya! Enough already! Franny Shmanny—drop it!!!

Well, there she was in my dream last night, full of piss and vinegar. Jack, too.

“She doesn’t know she’s dead,” I was telling Jack.

“I know, she’s driving me crazy…”

So I was telling Franny she was dead, and sobbing a bit into the pillow. Then I woke up, wondering…

…is she dead?

Certainly wasn’t last night. She was about fifty—well, that sort of makes sense. I would have been 14 when she was fifty—just at that stage where parents become people. And I remember the remark that prompted the realization.

“Milo Flaten is sort of a horse’s ass….”

She flung it off carelessly, a little aside. And wow, she had a comedian’s timing, too.

Floored me.

Well, she could do that. Remember the first time she met Raf’s parents?

It hadn’t been easy for them—doña Ilia and don Quique—to get past their son’s being gay. It wasn’t like now, when I peer at the contact list on their refrigerator door. Quico and Mayra, Frankie and Lucy, Ito and Marc…

…with our telephone numbers beside the names.

Our first meeting was stiff, but cordial. Later, Raf was told that he could include me in family gatherings. I got on my high horse and refused to go.

Wasn’t an invitation.

At about this time, we moved to this street. Mr. Fernández had decreed that the process could be done gradually, a chair or two at a time.

Yeah?

I have just gone into the living room, to count all the stuff.

Three sofas, nine side chairs, three large chairs, seven side tables, one huge china cabinet, a dresser on which rests the treasured photo of Her Supreme Majesty, three large Oriental rugs, an easel on which rests two good paintings by Taí, sixteen tons of bric-a-brac and…

…the baby grand piano.

And we were gonna move all this stuff by ourselves?

Well, we did, mostly. I’d grab a chair, Raf a table, and we’d start off.

Fortunately, it was downhill.

Unfortunately, it was past a seedy bar filled with drunks.

All of whom were laughing themselves silly at us.

Well, it was ridiculous.

Nor, apparently, did they approve of any of our furnishings.

OK, look, Victoriana is not everybody’s favorite style.

Well, a side chair is one thing. A baby grand another. Franny came to Puerto Rico, to observe all this foolishness, and to check out the new digs.

Bringing her little camera with her. Fortunate, too, because she documented the whole thing.

Quite literally. I put my foot down—that piano was gonna be professionally moved.

I had imagined lifts and cranes, pulleys, ropes, weights and counter weights.

Nope.

Three big guys.

Oooops…. Guess it was four. / Photo by ©Frances Newhouse

 Well, Raf and I were cowering in the kitchen, imagining / awaiting the last chord the piano was gonna make as it got dropped down the staircase. Or would it be a sequence of chords? Schoenberg? Cage? A descending passage, certainly.

And where was Franny?

Right there on the staircase, filming it all!

Well, she was fascinated. Told them at one point to stop, slithered past them, and filmed it from below. Incredible—three guys moving that piano!

Two hours later, Ilia and Quique arrived. Bringing mail. Ito was off getting food—and lots of wine.

Well, time for the parents to meet!

And Ilia, bless her, has marvelous social skills. She talked, she laughed, she complimented, she charmed!

We invited her up for coffee.

This was profusely but graciously refused. Ilia is a martyr to arthritis—quite true—and she went into a paean—or perhaps a threnody, maybe a lyric ode—of description as to the suffering and limitations she faced. We repeated the invitation, she refused. She could never get up the steps. Ilia warbled on, a wren trilling, when Franny injected…

“…well, we do know three good piano movers….”

This fortunately went sailing over Ilia’s head.

Not mine, though! I had learned—you gotta be on your toes around that lady.

So I was a bit mournful this morning, as I set off on my morning walk. She’s gone and all we’ll ever have are these stories! No new material! The writer’s worst fear!

I put the B Minor Mass blaring into my ears and did my morning trot. Then came home, sat down to write, checked my emails. And my editor, toiling through the night, had designed a new cover! The old one, though glorious, would not work well as a thumbnail. 12:36 in the morning, my tireless editor, burning that midnight oil, had sent that email. Past midnight, and I am snoring away, but sleeps she? 

Never! Late, late, into the night has she labored, struggling to give birth to a cover worthy of the words I had spilled out those months ago!

Cover photos and design by ©Taí Fernández

 It was a situation that required all the tact of doña Ilia. I raved about the images, about the font of the title, the perspicacious look on the visage of the iguana. Then I asked…

…are you entirely sure about the spelling of the author’s name?

Never gonna live it down, doña Taí!

Note the wine glass on the piano! / Photo by ©Frances Newhouse

Desperately Seeking Harry

It was a day when the news was so bad I had to read about George Michael.

Right—I better explain. Yesterday had been fiendishly hot. I had come home, written a post—hey, and gotten my first comment! Thanks, Anonymous!—and sent it to Harry. I had a brainstorm—Los Choferes Unidos de Ponce! Surely the united drivers of Ponce could—singularly or collectively—find a way to get me from the biggest city in Puerto Rico to the second biggest city. I mean, come on!

I sent Harry the post, and also the news about the UDOP (United etc.). “At precisely 8AM I will be in my car, driving to San Juan,” responded the good Harry. He apparently thinks less of UDOP than I.

Great! Woke up at seven, had my coffee, looked outside, and saw the cold front move in.

Cold I can use….

Rain is another story. Because very quickly, we were in a chubasco.

It’s a word I love, and was curious about. Why did I think it was Puerto Rican slang? So I looked it up, or was about to when…

Drip drip drip drip drip drip…..

You get the picture. Or rather, you don’t.

OK, a chubasco is a strong, sudden, heavy rain. Not a problem—we need rain (actually, apparently everybody except—who else?—the British needs rain).

What I didn’t need was a stream of water pouring into the apartment. I raced to get the two buckets and two pots necessary to collect the water. Also the mop…

…passing Loquito, who was busy pissing on the floor of the living room.

Snarled at him, grabbed the buckets / pots, positioned them and then my cell phone went off.

Harry, informing me that it was precisely 8AM, and he was on the expressway. I did the only thing I could think off.

Held the phone to the rim of the metal pot.

What to do? Rather, how to do it? How can I cancel a SECOND time on my dear friend, who spent all last week in bed in agony (gory details omitted), and now was jumping up to drive 65 miles to get me?

OK—check out the weather situation. Shout at Raf, who is nowhere to be found. The radio alarm, however, is on—as it has been since 6:30. Great, so Raf should know something about the weather, right? I mean, they do talk about the weather on morning radio.

Mr. Fernández, however, had been sleeping soundly in the preceding hour and a half.

Great—a chubasco situation. Pissing cat, sleeping husband, half of Niagara Falls flowing through the apartment.

OK, flip on the computer, check El Nuevo Día. It’s the local rag, though how it can be—electronically—is a mystery.

Chubascos, said The New…and increasingly terrible…Day. 

Thanks, New Day! But I must be fair. The New Day did tell me that Harry was heading for disaster—a truck had jackknifed on the expressway.

I call Harry and tell him all this. Of course he understands.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving my house if it were leaking like that,” he says.

Spend ten minutes deciding whether to kill the cat….

And decide to check out the news.

Something I rarely do. I mean look, does it make sense to take anti-depressants AND read the news? That’s pretty much like combining Antabuse with vodka. 

With pretty much the same results….

Well, it’s not pretty, our world. The guy who predicted the 2008 meltdown thinks it’s gonna happen again, just worse. Watched that for ninety seconds. Bank of America reported second quarter profits. Great—nobody has a job, but the banks are making money! Greece says it can’t make the austerity cuts that the European Union is demanding.

The situation in Syria is unspeakable.

Think it can’t get worse?

Think again, because in a world besieged with every imaginable problem, George Michael comes up with a new one!

Well, new to me, at least.

ForeignAccent Syndrome.

Well, God knows, I should know about this. Number one, I have one (a foreign accent, that is). Two, I’m an English teacher—thus working every day with accents.

Well, here’s the deal. George was singing away on a tour last year, and then fell sick.  Pneumonia. Bad pneumonia. Progressing to a coma. The he woke up.

Speaking with a foreign accent.

Here’s AP news:

Michael said that as he opened his eyes, doctors asked him if he knew who he was—to which he replied, "King of the world?" in the distinctive West Country burr.

It was almost the last straw. The goat that calms the cup (la gota que—oh, forget it). But those seven sturdy years of unrelenting optimism gave me the tools I need.

Another problem?

NO!

An opportunity. So here’s what I’m gonna do. People got a problem with my accent? I’m really Puerto Rican!

I woke up from MY coma sounding like a gringo!
 _________________

Etymological note—chubasco is from the Portuguese chuva, rain.
Meteorological note—been sunny all day!

The Crustiest Old Men in Puerto Rico

They were, with only one exception, the crustiest old men in Puerto Rico.

And believe me—I can tell you. I’ve spent twenty years with these men, these irascible, taciturn (except when provoked, which is almost constantly), grumpy relics of a tradition gone by.

Los choferes de carros públicos they’re called. But don’t imagine that a chofer has anything to do with its cognate, a chauffeur.

OK—the driver (chofer) will be at least 70. He will remember days gone by, when he made three, four, five trips to from Ponce to San Juan (65 miles each way…). His car—most often a minivan—would have had eighteen people maximum.

Oh, and also minimum. Because he didn’t leave until the van was full.

Not a problem if you don’t have a boss with a stopwatch waiting for you.

And if you did?

Well, then you had to get up early, didn’t you?

Well, the people up in the mountains do. Four in the morning. That’s when the chickens start clucking and making sleep impossible. Also when the first públicos leave.

Sensible, really. Why should you be sleeping if the chickens aren’t? And besides, it’s cooler at 4AM. Which is nice, because none of the públicos has air conditioning.

What, air conditioning? When the price of gasoline is near a dollar a liter? (About 4 dollars a gallon….)

But if you are late for work—say, 6AM and expected by 8AM—well, you may have a problem. There are 17 of you in a minivan. It is six-thirty, then seven.

And no one is coming.

Or has come for the last twenty minutes. 

So you wait.

The driver, in the meantime, is enjoying cooling breezes and hot coffee. Also busily pretending that the van of which he is the owner / driver…

…doesn’t exist.

Not bad. But imagine August, or July—which it currently is. Also imagine the humidity—it has rained enough to humidify, but not to cool.

Instantly, on seeing the first drop of rain, everybody will close the windows. 

Why? The windows open out an inch at the bottom—it’s virtually impossible for anything but hurricane band torrents to enter.

But there’s this thing. In Puerto Rican eyes, rain means cold.

Oh, also monga.

OK, not bad, for the first twenty minutes or so. And very fortunately, the 15 co-passengers have practiced excellent hygiene. Only the 16^th has not….

…and he’s sitting next to you!

Tempers fray. People get restless. At last someone calls out—“¡Que nos vayamos! ¡Estamos asfixia’os!” Literally, we're asphyxiating.

The chofer turns the page—he’s on Sports now…. He lights a cigarette. Or goes to get more coffee.

At last, the miracle arrives: the last passenger that can be stuffed into the van. A cheerful guy!

All three-hundred pounds of him.

Oh, and there’s a hitch.

He has a twenty.

Instantly, the chofer who is absolutely not a chauffeur flies off the handle. What? A twenty? Impossible, he can’t change a twenty.

They have this rule, you see.

Nor does the three-hundred-pounder do the sensible thing—go to the same coffee shop and change the bill. Arguing with a chofer is like arguing with a cat.

What, and miss an argument?

The hands are raised, the voices are raised. The chofer walks away in disgust, only to come back and resume the diatribe.

Spectator sports! For the van has now erupted into commentary, laughter, catcalls, encouragement, and fierce partisan side taking.

Invariably, it will be witty. Always, someone will have a mordent sense of humor, dissect the situation, provide the comedy and the backstory.

It’s now 7:30. Remember that boss?

At last, the argument will be resolved. The chofer will agree—¡esta vez solamente!!—to change the bill. Or a passenger will change it for him. The three-hundred-pounder will attempt—catch that verb?—to enter the van.

The vans—as you may know—have two doors, each opening the opposite direction.

But the chofer NEVER opens the other door.

Another little rule….

Which means the three-hundred-pounder is coming in…

…sideways.

Oh, and the empty “seat?” It’s in the very back of the van, an area very justly called la cocina.

The kitchen….

There’s no way the guy is gonna make it.

So he does the sensible thing. He waits for someone to move.

And nobody wants to go there.

Resolution?

Well, there’s a crazy gringo who has decided to sit in the front row of seats.

And who needs to get to work….

And of course, the gringo has a problem. No, not three-hundred pounds, but…

A height of 6’3”.

Which means that he looks like a string bean imitating a football player in a tackle.

Well, it’s an experience. And it taught me a lot.

Spanish, for one thing.

It taught me how amazingly resilient and patient Puerto Ricans can be.

Also how funny….

And it gave me time to reflect, as I did this morning, on days gone by, and how so much has changed.

I had gotten up, taken my walk, and then left to take the público down to Ponce. And why wake up at 4 to do that? So I sat for an hour in the plaza talking to Tico. We had the driver (that’s Tico). We had the van.

We didn’t have the 17 others.

And Tico had made no trips yesterday.

Also none as of today.

So I waited an hour, and talked to Tico, and learned that his father had been a chofer for fifty years. The fare was 3 dollars then. Times had changed. Everybody has a car now.

Then Tico moved off. I sat and waited.

And into my mind popped…

…JackDelano!

I met him only once—but he was our own Eisenstaedt / Dorothea Lange / Ansel Adams. Came to Puerto Rico in the 40’s, under the same project as Eisenstaedt. Went everywhere, just as the others did, and took amazing photos.

I could have waited, but both Tico and I were tired. And hot. So he went home, I went home, and, still curious, looked up Delano. Knew he was good, but didn’t know how good.

He’s major league.

Malaria poster in small hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Jack Delano, December, 1941. Image courtesy of  Wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano)

Jack Delano in his studio. Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, 1990. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano)

Dust Bowl Days

It’s a curiously haunting photo, this newly released image from Life Magazine—or is it?

It could be just me—the dust bowl was an unspoken, unacknowledged force in my childhood.

It marked Jack. Born in 1909, he was 20 when the Great Depression hit. He took a year off school, and went out to North Dakota.

No money.

The stories got told. Feeding the newborn lambs: he would sit in one room next to a partly barricaded door. He’d grab the first lamb, feed it with a bottle, and then toss it over the barricade into the other room. Then grab another.

Why? Where was the ewe?

He needed wood for the wood-burning stove. And there was none. He hit on the idea of chopping down telephone poles….

He baked his own bread, and was a bit ashamed of having to. He was caught in the act by a cowboy, visiting, looking for coffee if not a free meal. So Jack threw a towel over the dough, talked to the cowboy. At last, the cowboy spotted the rising dough. “Christ, son, you gotta knead that dough!” shouted the cowboy. Threw off the towel, punched down the dough, and started kneading away.

The stories carried the message—life is grim. You can lose everything overnight. Only the tough survive, and sometimes not even then.

And another message—implicit, not stated. You got it easy. You weren’t there in that cold dark house with the damn lambs puling and needing to be fed and the wind attacking the house and coming through the cracks in the walls and wondering…

…am I ever gonna get out of this place?

Ever get back to the university?

Ever make anything of my life?

“He didn’t think he’d make it,” Franny once said of him in those years. And he couldn’t quite believe that he did.

And what of this family, in the photo above? Here’s the caption:

"Farmer John Barnett and his family are 'Okies' who stuck to their land near Woodward. They have 21 dairy cattle which yield a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett takes care of a vegetable garden that is always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, do plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts eat jack rabbit." Oklahoma, 1942. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Oh. It almost raises more questions than answers. Seven gallons of milk from 21 cattle? That’s a third of a gallon per cow. And that garden—blowing away. Couldn’t she mulch it? Or was it so infernally dry, and so fiercely windy, that nothing could be done?

The jack rabbit—the only meat that they could eat? Here in Puerto Rico there are chickens everywhere in the country. Why no chickens there?

They stuck to their land—why? Nowhere to go? Obstinacy? Didn’t believe it was any better anywhere else?

Mostly, though, it’s the faces that haunt. Barnett—strong and tough and lean. Life has beaten him—does he know it? Can’t look into the camera, and yet his eyes are lifted—as if wishing to see out. His wife, also looking down, is she as submissive as she appears? Does she really acquiesce, as she sees her garden—that is, the food for her family—blow away? What woman would not be full of rage—rage at a man who had taken her to this barren place, who had put her and her children is this position? Rage at a man who had failed to do what a man was supposed to do: support his family.

Each of the children now—so different. Delphaline—and what’s the story behind the name? And yet she looks out at the camera, apparently untroubled, a typical girl. She has none of the tight-lipped, compressed look of her mother.

Lincoln, who I assumed was the youngest. But he appears, instead, the shyest. And then Leonard! That look—wry, innocent, savvy, questioning, impish…what? What is he thinking, as he sits in front of his broken father? Is there some life in him that has been snuffed out of his father?

A photo captures a moment. But life goes on. Jack went on, made a life for himself, got the hell out of North Dakota.

And also didn’t.

Self Sorrow

Well, it was my own damn fault and I knew that, and…

…just made it worse.

I was racing against time. I had an hour to apply for a TED fellowship, and needed to enter the URL for this blog into the application form. And could I do it? No, a back slash was missing, or I had typed too many “p’s” or a “www” was required. I kept diminishing the form, going to the blog, and trying to figure it out. I finally got it—just do a copy / paste of the damn address bar. 

OK—did that, went to maximize the application form, and discovered…

…I had hit the tiny red “x” button, not the tiny yellow diminishing button.

It’s all different on the Mac, you see.

And all my work was gone….

I erupted in fury, raging into the kitchen. I was hungry, my jaw hurt, I had to teach in 20 minutes. I broke down and started crying for…

…my old life at Wal-Mart.

Which is paradoxical, because in some ways I can’t believe I ever did that job. It’s another lifetime ago. ‘Wow, that was the weirdest gig I’ve ever done,’ I often think.

But there I was, sobbing for a job gone away. And I realized….

…it’s mourning.

And always, you think you’re done with it. ‘Got that squared away,’ you think, and then find yourself in tears a moment later, when you flip on the radio and get “Turn, Turn, Turn.” (“To every thing there is a season, a time to laugh, a time to cry….”)

The wise Harry likens it to peeling an onion. You do layer after layer. The onion gets smaller and smaller. But there’s always another layer.

And I had lost 200 friends. Or were they? Weren’t they just students, co-workers, people I knew and liked?

Something in me says no. I sat with these people for hours in my room, hearing their stories, laughing, condoling, crying. I think now of a presentation a student gave, ending with the ultrasound film of the baby she was carrying. You could see the heart beat. Everyone in the room was in tears.

I think of the very tough speech I gave my students after Franny died. A student had just dumped a load of very negative energy because her boss needed a report, thus interrupting her work.

“You know what?  This is not a problem. This is a stupid minor issue. This is an annoyance. I’ve just spent three weeks helping my mother die. That’s a problem. That’s something that took more from me than virtually anything I’ve done. I’ll carry that to my grave. So no, you don’t have stress. And don’t tell yourself that this is a problem. You have a job and you’re healthy and your kids are OK and guess what? Don’t bring this attitude into my classroom.”

The students were shocked.

Right—so shouldn’t I take my own advice?

There’s a difference, I think. I ate something. I took a deep breath. I went and taught my student, and it was a good class. And then another student—also a good class. Then I got a break—two cancellations. I came home at 4, not six. Took another deep breath, went to the computer and re-did the form.

And the Mac remembered my copy. Worked like a charm. I hit “submit” and got a confirmation email in seconds.

It’s fair, I think, to wail. It’s stupid not to. I had been, being the good soldier—chin up, shoulders back. I had been strict with myself—to-do lists, no veg’ing out, no naps or reading or doing Sudoku for hours at a time.

I had imposed a structure, and that was good.

And then I thought—why?  What difference does it make? Why shouldn’t I play Sudoku all day? Isn’t this all so artificial, this “structure” of mine?

Yeah, it is.

But it’s also necessary. Just as it’s necessary to wail, to sob, to cry for a life now gone, and for 200 people who vanished in 20 minutes. We don’t have a word for it—this feeling. It wasn’t self-pity, but self sorrow.

And justly so….