Month: January 2022

“I th – th – think maybe this is a b – b – bad idea . . .”  

It’s two in the afternoon on a Saturday.  Dusty, yellow light filters through large windows.  It’s the time of year in the Flathead when you can’t go hiking or skiing and a winter’s worth of accumulated gravel is still on the road.  I’m sitting across from a class-mate and we are performing a science experiment.  Cups of coffee is the dependent variable.  Heart rate is the independent variable.  I’m fifteen.  This all makes perfect sense.

Resting before us on the laminate table top are three pots of coffee.  Lids have been removed to more quickly cool their contents.  We have a watch and a notepad.  When the coffee is sufficiently cooled, I start drinking a cup every two minutes.  My partner takes my pulse.  Numbers are recorded.  Many trips to the bathroom are made.

The waitress doesn’t even blink.  Two people want three pots of coffee?  Okay.  It’s probably not the strangest thing she’ll see this day.  Depending on when she came on shift, and how long she’ll be there, she will have seen young people, still up from the night before, hazily watching creamer swirl into their coffee.  Later, she’ll see families in for a late brunch with babies screaming and throwing things.  She’ll see transient guys spending a few cents on bottomless cups of coffee just to get in from out of the cold.  That evening, she might have to find space for twenty-three members of the cast of the local high-school play.  She’ll serve order after order after order of deep-fried mozzarella cheese sticks.  

We are of course, at Finnegan’s.  Or, as a dear friend once suggested, Snaggenif which is just ever so much more fun to say.

It was just a diner, but it also was much more than a diner.  It was the epicenter of every teenager’s world in the 1990’s.  At least, every teenager I knew.  Not to romanticize, but it was just true, we didn’t have cell-phones.  If you wanted to know what was going on, it was a good bet you could find out at Finnegan’s.

Nights sometimes stretched out indefinitely there, like some kind of strange David Lynch film.  On some weekend evenings, you could show up at nine and maybe not leave until, well, until your friends had to go home.  Those of us with generous, or even no curfews, sometimes stayed until the bars closed.  As a youngish teenager, it wasn’t generally a good idea to be hanging around Finnegans when the bars let out at two AM.  Drunk adults took over then.

But at 10:30 on a Friday night?  The place would be lousy with kids just barely old enough to drive.  We didn’t really have anywhere else to go, especially during the cold of the school year.  And we apparently had vast stretches of time to blow, drinking coffee and just hanging out.  

There’s some pretty good science around the perception of time, and how our minds remember experiences, but one observation is that humans tend to remember things as going by quickly when our experiences didn’t include a great many novel events – that is, if nothing much happened, our memories tend to catalog those experiences as flying by.  The converse is true.  If a remembered event contained a great deal of novel experiences, our memories record those times as stretching on and on.  

This, then, is the paradox of my Finnegan’s memories.  My memories of these nights is that they were long, sprawling, nearly endless occasions.  However, people came, people went, but not much happened other than the banal delivery of new pots of coffee or baskets of cheese sticks.  Why then are my memories of this time so expansive?  We literally sat in diner booths for hours doing nothing that my adult self would register as noteworthy.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as another change has happened in my life.  In the last year it has become increasingly the case that I am with middle-schoolers.  Among other things like the pungency, the mess, the braggadocio, the microwave burritos, is a kind of verbosity I had sort of forgotten about.  These kids talk non-stop.  There is never not anything to talk about.  

Which isn’t a complaint.  I do find the verbiage exhausting at times, but I also think what they find interesting to be absolutely fascinating.  I’m honored, if not grossed out, when they include me in their expository extravagance. There are so many facets to what they go on about, but most of it is about who did what at school.  

That’s clearly the answer to the Finnegan’s paradox – it might look to an outside observer (my present-day self) like nothing was happening, but like my kids, we were probably talking –  communicating – non-stop: lingering for hours under yellow fluorescent lights, breathing far too much second hand smoke, drinking way more coffee than is good for any one person, creating, breaking, recreating, rebreaking, re-recreating connections.  

I don’t remember what a pot of coffee and an order of mozzarella cheese sticks went for back then, but whatever it was, it was well worth the price.

I’m a sucker for nostalgia, especially when it comes to things.  It’s a streak in me that winds around my every sensibility and has undue influence over the decisions I make.  I hold onto shoes far longer than is reasonable.  I’d much rather use a rugged old heavy toolbox that came from my great-grandfather than a lightweight flexible one from Harbor Freight.  Growing up, I was surrounded by the things built, bought, or plain scavenged from previous generations. Rocking chairs, beds, blankets, old china, wood stoves, prints, juice pitchers, you name it.  There were new things, but new things were relegated to a position of disposability.  If the new electric pancake griddle crapped out, toss it, get a new one.  No big deal.  If the several generations-old green shag carpet needs replacing, well that requires convening a committee of cousins on how to replace it in the most aesthetically similar way possible.  

This attitude was definitely born of the pre-WWII era.  The generation of my grandparents had an outsized influence on the generations to come, and certainly on me.  Their attitudes were formed by twin understandings.  On one hand, this generation grew up during the scarce times of the Depression, followed by the scarce times of the War.  They lived by the motto: use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.  On the other hand, they lived during a time before cheap plastic crap.  Their bicycles might have been heavy, but they were sturdy.  The same was true of everything built before the War, from bookshelves to bed frames.  I don’t know if the members of my family from that generation actively venerated well-made old things or not, but they certainly kept well-made things for a long time.  Part of me wonders if it’s simply a matter of, if you wanted a warm coat in the thirties, your choices were:  wool or wool.  Stuff was well made because there really wasn’t an alternative, and all the better if there was a serviceable old version that could be brought into use.  

Meanwhile, I love building and fixing things.  My cat needs a way to get from the basement floor up to the cat door at eye-level?  Build a clever ramp.  Need more counter space in the kitchen?  No problem – just build it.  And of course there are shows for that.  My absolute favorite are the YouTube videos of people who “rescue” old rusted swords and knives and axes and make them beautiful again.  I can disappear down that rabbit hole for a long time…

The Venn diagram overlap of these two sensibilities came to a crashing head recently.        

The other day, I was admiring an old wall clock at my brother’s house.  We got to talking about how hard it is to maintain these old clocks, how our community does have a fellow who repairs old clocks, but that his talents are a rare commodity and when he retires, we’ll all have to send our clocks to Seattle or Portland to get them fixed.  Ah ha!  A little light-bulb went off in my head.  I maintain an old clock too, and it was long overdue to be oiled.

It’s one of my most prized possessions, though a quick search of the interweb shows that it’s not really worth that much in dollar terms.  I’ve noticed that the value I put on old, well-built things is usually far in excess of what they would actually fetch on the open market.  This clock came to me by way of my paternal grandmother, who, in turn came by it from her mother, who received it as a wedding gift from her brother in 1914.  

That brother would number among the more than 26,000 Americans who perished in the Argonne region of France in the last days of WWI.  This little bit of information is a good example of what drags me so deeply into the singularity of nostalgia.  When I look at the clock, accurately ticking away in my living room, I am in direct contact with those lives who also looked into its silvered face, who also dusted it’s adamantine shoulders.  When I wind it’s mechanisms, my hand is operating the same levers my grandmother operated and her mother before her.  It’s as real as I think ghosts can be.

I pull the clock from it’s overlook and set it out on the table.  I’ve laid a towel on the table so no little dropped parts will go bouncing off the edge.  In a fever-dream a week before, a few clicks on Amazon bought me a little bottle of synthetic clock oil and a book on how to repair clocks.  The book is dense, written by someone who doesn’t write books.  It has interesting information, but is far less handy than the hours of YouTube videos I have watched in preparation for this moment.  I take a deep breath.  Am I really going to do this?  Am I really going to put this object at risk of my, admittedly, shaky hands?  I am.  I figure, the worst that can happen is that I’ll have to take my clock to the old clock repair dude to be put to rights.  

I open the back of the clock.  The innards stare back at me.  They look insanely complex.  After a minute or two, the chaos settles down and I can see two different sections – the chime and the movement.  The chime runs the chime.  The movement runs the movement of the hands.  I realize that if I can successfully get the face of the clock off, I won’t have to take out the movement.  The chime also looks easy to remove, though I decide not to this time.  

Ever so carefully, I pull the pin that holds the hands to the face of the clock.  Then I slip two washers off followed by the minute hand and finally the hour hand.  I lay them out on the towel in the order I pulled them off.  Then, from the inside of the clock, I find the three little brass screws holding the face to the wooden body of the clock.  I find my long skinny flathead screwdriver and begin to back them out.  When it seems like they’re almost free, I carefully grab the heads of the screws with my needle-nosed pliers as I turn them the last little bit of the way so they don’t fall into the clock’s innards.  With a click, the face comes away from the clock.  

My goal is to clean and oil the little spots where there are gear bearings on the front and back plates of the movement.  YouTube has told me that the little applicator on my bottle of oil will put too much oil into each bearing.  Each bearing hole is around 1.5 mm in diameter – oh so very tiny.  If too much oil is applied, it will spill out and down the face of the movement.  Because of physics this dripping will pull all the oil out of the bearing and the bearing will dry out, leading to wear and ultimately the end of the movement.  

I get out the needle I use for extracting kiddo slivers.  If I’m careful, I can lodge a tiny droplet of oil on the end of the needle.  Then, ever so gently, I apply that drop to the bearing.  It is insanely pleasing to watch the oil suck into the bearing and hold there.  Every day contains multitudes of beauty.  This is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time.  The movement, which sits right behind the clock face has a dozen or so bearing points.  Caught in a robust flow moment, I fill each hole.  None leak.  The bearings look good.  

I only drop the needle into the depths of the clock body once.  The clock is like the TARDIS from Doctor Who – it seems much larger on the inside than it looks from the outside.  There are many horrible places my little needle could land when I drop it.  It finds a merely moderately inaccessible spot to land.  My heart pounds in my neck as I carefully fish it out with the needle-nosed pliers.  Clock repair people have a special tool for applying oil to bearings, which I swear silently to myself that I will acquire before my next foray into the heart of this beast.  

I oil the couple bearings on the chime, which I don’t ever use, and sigh deeply.  A few anxious minutes later, I have the clock face back in place.  What’s left is adjusting the hands to show the correct time and setting the internal pendulum in motion.  A day later, the time is holding correctly.        

About half the time, I wake up in the morning to a very quiet house.  In the stillness of the first lights of day, the only sound, aside from the small breathing sounds my cat makes, is the ticking of this old clock.  It is a heartbeat.  It is the sound my grandparent’s house made when all was still.  I feel that sound as a permanent childhood memory.  The ticking of the clock sends me straight back to that living room – the light from the big south windows, scrolled edges of the sofa, yellow reclining nap-chair, baby grand piano, agate-topped coffee table, my grandmother setting the table for lunch, my grandfather stirring pea soup.  

I wonder about the living room my grandmother would have remembered, hearing that sound.  What stirrings of daily life held residence in the corners of her memory?  Did she hear that clock and think of her mother fussing over dinner, her sister fussing about having to practice the piano, the hours of joy she found playing the same.  Did she think about an uncle she never met?  Did the sound bring her peace, the way it does for me?   And of course, I hope, beyond hope, that my own children will absorb this sound as a memory of my living room – games played, meals eaten, fires built, episodes of Star Trek watched – and with that memory I hope they feel connected, as I do, to generations of ghosts that came before.  

        Our paths lead us through and over chasms of light and dark.  There really isn’t another way.  Some are deep and wide and perilous.  Some are lightly filled with honey-meringue and joy.  Some look right, but aren’t.  Some look brutal, but are really blessings.  All of them are invisible until we traverse them.  And thank goodness.
        A common thing a young adult will hear from slightly older young adults:  “You just can’t know what it’s like to have a baby until you have one.”  And it’s true.  No matter how much you don’t want it to be true, it is.  Sure, some of us are more prepared than others.  If, for example, you grew up as an older child with a baby in the house, you have a leg up.  I most certainly did not.  On the night of the birth of my first child – two nights after labor began – I found myself alone in a drab Philadelphia hospital room.  In my memory it is like any other hospital room from the Netflix show Stranger Things.  
        Mother had just undergone surgery to bring our beautiful child into the world and was passed out on drugs.  The nurse said many things very quickly that I didn’t catch or at least caught and released, and then left with a click.  Then there was just me.  And a baby.  And the baby started crying.  And I looked down at this beautiful child with horror.  My first day as a parent – the person who is supposed to do whatever it takes to bring comfort to their brand-new, completely dependent being.  
        I panicked.  I called the nurse.  “Yes?” she said.  “Um, the um, the um . . .” I said.  “YES?” she said with growing annoyance.  I’m sure she was busy.  “I, um, he’s um, he’s crying.” I stammered.  I was holding him – cradling really – and rocking back and forth.  The only thing I could think was that I didn’t have useful nipples, and so what could I do?  The nurse said with annoyance, and I’ll never forget this, “Yes, he’s a baby.  They cry.”  “But, I, um. . . how do I . . . ?” I was going into shock.  “Babies cry when they need something,” she said.  “Can mom nurse him?”  “No. No.  She’s . . . um . . . she’s . . . um . . .”  “She’s sleeping?” It’s like I needed her to speak for both of us.  “Um . . . yeah . . . what, um . . . what do I do?”
        This question:  What do I do?  What can you do?  When you don’t know and you’re thrust into the ring, what can you do?  I have a friend who signed up for fight night one time because you got paid $50 for even just stepping into the ring.  That’s a chasm I’ll never cross, but I recognized the fear in his voice recounting the tale.  That fear was in my voice over the phone to the night nurse.  “Change his diaper?” she suggested.  “Um, yeah . . . um, I . . . um . . .” Another deep sigh.  “I’ll send someone up.”
        That chasm seemed dark, but fast forward a few years and a couple kids later.  Without stepping across to another invisible chasm, I will say that it was decided to do cloth diapers.  And I am now a cloth diaper wizard.  I can capably change a cloth diaper in an airplane bathroom.  Ain’t no thing.  Chasm crossed.  I can turn around and look at it, see the crenelations and spires, trace the outline of every blind crevasse, every dark night filled with worry.  This chasm is straight up invisible to the me who hadn’t crossed it.  There’s no getting around it.
        I wondered recently what a list of invisible chasms would look like – a list of things that were unknowable until experiencing them.  It would have wonderful and exciting things on it like kissing, taking a plane on your own, visiting a place where a very different language is spoken, learning to drive, training for some physical feat that is very hard, seeing the rings of Saturn through a telescope.  

        Seeing the rings of Saturn is a great example of an invisible chasm that seems like it shouldn’t be one.  We’ve all seen pictures of the rings of Saturn a million times.  Why would it be different through a telescope?  Because it is.  It just is.
        But this is life.  And life consists of jagged and ugly crossings:  losing someone close, getting divorced, losing a beloved job, car wrecks, persistent anxiety.  You’re in the emergency room and it’s all going to shit, and there’s nothing you can do.  So much of these kinds of chasms are about enduring loss.  
        We can’t know what loss is until we are faced with it.  As a young person, I didn’t even know I was accumulating things that could be lost later:  Love, friendships, exuberance, ideals, passion, trust.  My grandfather died when I was barely into my twenties.  It took decades to unwind that loss.  When my marriage unraveled a few years ago, it felt like a ghost hand reached into my guts and tore out the best parts of me.  Watching my middlest – when he was all of two years old – disappear into an operating room surrounded by people dressed as aliens ready to attempt to make his little heart function correctly was terrifying.  What really matters is what we do with the chasms.  How do we catalog a life?  Should we even try?  
        Our options are limited.  Denial was a popular response of my younger days.  This isn’t happening.  Everything is OK – take the Calvin and Hobbes route – live and don’t learn.  Usually this is unconscious – a defense mechanism.  I have never met a person who was intentionally in denial about something hard.  We can self-medicate.  Another popular choice of my youth.  Again, we don’t usually understand what we’re self-medicating for until the self-medicating becomes its own difficult invisible chasm to cross.  

        What’s magical about being a person is that we can choose to look down into the gaping vastness.   At a certain point, if we’ve crossed enough of these chasms and, importantly, haven taken the time to look at the crossing, we can start to relate a little.  Take a minute to look back over your shoulder at the space you’ve crossed, or even to just look down because the chasm you’re in will span a lifetime.  Once, a friend confided in me about her experience with chronic anxiety, about sitting in a stairwell outside work trying to breathe and cry and just pull it together enough to put one step in front of another.  I’ve never had that experience.  But I know what it is to be ugly-crying your guts out and then have to go be a person.  Some don’t, but everyone has the opportunity to if you’ve ever chosen look down at the crags and crenelations.  And there’s a shining, beautiful path that will take you by surprise until you’ve experienced it – what it feels like to endure a loss, not on your own, but alongside another who loves without judgment or criticism.
        There’s another invisible chasm which is like the zeroeth chasm on the list.  Looking hard into those dark inner topographies is critical to experiencing joy.  Stepping into the suck makes the bright chasms sparkle and shine.  My memory of my first kiss is ever so much more sweet because I choose to look hard into the loss around last kisses I’ve known.  The joy of attending my eldest’s Christmas choir concert is brought into relief because I choose to feel the loss of my grandfather’s piano playing at the annual Christmas sing.  It can’t be any other way.  You don’t get to have honey-meringue without brutal emptiness.  Knowing this is, in itself, an invisible chasm.
        Some chasms are the result of choices we make and don’t know the ends of.  They are like strings held on one end, blowing unpredictably in the wind on the other.  We have some agency after all, though I would guess less than we think we do.  Others are simply a part of being a human – the mile markers of biological existence: walking, puberty (gah), aging, the final chasm we all will get to cross: dying.  I hated puberty.  (Who loves puberty?)  Getting old sucks ass.  But I wouldn’t get rid of any of those experiences for anything.  Old Dr. M.E.K. had it right when, after my grandfather passed, he said as he was helping our family navigate those final days, “He’s experienced the last part of his life.”  I love that.  Dying as a final part of living.  To quote a Shins song: “the years are short but the days go slowly by.”  May there be ever so many more invisible chasms to cross between now and then.      

        Silver, dancing light penetrates the dark, thick night air.  We’ve all had dinner.  We’ve all had our second shower, according to both custom and necessity.  I sit on a plush rug.  Not far away, sounds of night – a miasma of insects buzzing, food cart hawkers, motorcycle traffic, the beep of bajaj – filter into the living room from a section of the house that isn’t roofed.  I don’t specifically remember, but there might have been Teh Botol.  There probably was Teh Botol.  In my memory it’s a weeknight, maybe a Tuesday.  I’m happy that there is something my host-brother, Uyi (far left, above), and I can share.  
        Why, it’s Kung-Fu, of course.  One night a week, one of the couple television channels that Jakartans had access to in 1995 would play a Kung-Fu movie.  I suspect the movies were produced in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure.  What I can say, is that these movies were filmed in Mandarin, dubbed into English, then carried Indonesian subtitles.  Aside from the obviously utilitarian feature of helping to teach me the language, I found these films fascinating and beautiful.
        My favorites were the ones set in a deeply mythologized Chinese past.  If you’ve seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you’ve seen the Hard Rock Cafe version.  These films we watched were the Somers Bay Cafe version.  They were low budget productions: chintzy sets, gaudy and over-the-top costuming, uninspiring plots, terrible dialog (which, in fairness, could have been a problem of translation).  But the thing which made them incredible was the fight-scene choreography.  
        Pretty much any life situation could land in an all-out Kung-Fu fight.  Taking a walk by moonlight with the pretty village magistrate’s daughter?  Better get out your Kung-Fu.  Fight scenes were long and involved.  There were many considerations to take into account.  How many villains are there?  Is the main villain attacking or has he sent less-experienced lackeys?  What style of Kung-Fu does the hero have?  The villain?  Which style is stronger?  Strength alone doesn’t guarantee victory.  Which style is more ancient, more honorable, reflective of highest virtue?
        My absolute favorite was a movie where at one point the hero is trapped in an ancient cave.  He knows a respectable style of Kung-Fu, but has been bested by the villain, whose style is seemingly unbeatable.  The cave appears to be his last resting place, but no!  Inside the cave are ancient and wise stone tablets that allow a person who is true of heart and spirit and who already knows a style of Kung-Fu to learn an unfailingly powerful style in only a few minutes of study.  The hero, of course, learns the style, escapes the cave, bests the villain using these new/old techniques and saves the day.  
        I don’t know why this memory is so compelling for me.  I tell the story of it any chance I get, and this plot line appears in the Crimson Hen tales coming down the pipeline.  But all I have of it is a memory – a twenty-five year old memory.  I have spent hours Googling what I know of the plot, but I haven’t got enough to make a successful search.  It’s essentially a discrete thing which is unGoogleable.  
        Over tea with an excellent friend the other day we got to talking about this kind of tangible object.  He told a story of a long lost pop music CD he brought back from Italy as a teenager.  He can describe in vivid detail the album art, but nothing useful enough for a Google search.  I’m sorry for the fact that our memories remain stuck in the ether, but I am also so glad these memories exist.  They bring a kind of pastel, washed-out color to the world that can’t exist online.

        In the movie, “While We’re Young,” Ben Stiller’s character pulls out his phone after the group can’t identify an unimportant fact and says, “oh, hey, I’ll look that up.”  Adam Driver’s character – who is playing the part of the hip young up-and-comer – stops him, saying, “no, that’s too easy, let’s just choose to not know.”  It’s a kind of hearkening to a simpler, apparently cooler time when no one really knew anything.  But, there’s a difference between choosing not to Google something and coming across something that can’t be.  
        It struck me later that this is yet another way our lives are different now.  Of course, unless you’re Taylor Swift or Elon Musk, we all live most of our lives in an ineffable, non-searchable mode.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  The Kung-Fu movie in my memory is a thing which should be searchable, but for whatever reason, isn’t.  In the not-so-distant past, every new definable consumable was a found object, either the product of amazing serendipity or the careful curation of sources – like dictionaries.  My mother would jump up from the dinner table, finger in the air with an audible “ah-ha”, and race to the dictionary when a word came up for which there was difference of opinion as to its correct definition.   My brother would come home from college and we’d compare notes:  what, if any, music had you found through whatever random late-night college radio program you might have listened to, or zine you’d stumbled across at Rockin’ Rudy’s back when it was just a record shop?
        It wasn’t necessarily the internet that ended this way of being.  MTV did a fair enough job of beaming whatever was new and hip straight into our suburban homes.  Just one episode of 120 minutes with Matt Pinfield and you’d heard enough contemporary music trivia to fill a very large hole.  But where MTV was a preprogrammed fountain of culture, the internet is really the ultimate democratized searchable bringer of all things.
        And, of course, I wouldn’t change that.  I really like being able to use Google Earth to find street-level pictures of the house where I spent a formative year of exchange in Jakarta as a teenager.  But it’s nice to think that like Harry Tuttle, the renegade heating engineer in the surreal dream movie Brazil, there are objects of our memories that defy search algorithms.  It’s a small thing – a little humanizing, snow globe of memory that is part of the fabric of me that I cherish.