AUTUMN GHOSTS

GHOSTS

I see ghosts. Not everywhere
But here and there. I know them
By their peculiarly beseeching
Watch – eyes longing for the
Familiar, the aura pulse of
Warmth in the air around
Children, the crystals of
Laughter around young
Women.

Wednesday morning, the corner
Of my eye caught a ghost
Grasping the chainlinks around
Corte Madera’s tennis courts.
Looking in, longing, watching
The yellow-green blur of
Life flying from racquet to
Racquet. He is a recurring
Ectoplasm, a Senior who can’t
Afford the forty dollar key to
Tennis playground, but always
Hopes to hit a few with players
Whose partners are stuck in
101 traffic, just a few rallies,
A bit of rhythm between the two
Sets of taut strings. Longing for
Connection.

I have been a ghost
And will be again, longing
For connection.

I am a Senior by Actual Count,
Experiencing the tidal suck
Of life from old marrow, the
Invisibility and inconsequential
Station accorded by the young
To creatures from the dark ages
Before Universal Access and
iPhone intrusion in toilet
Stalls and crosstown busses.
We invented youth! Sixties’ hippies,
Trust no one over thirties,
We declared holy the noble
Naïf, unspoiled by ancient letters
Dusty romance, pro patria poems.
We cooked insouciance
With a side dish of Scorn.
Now we antic, pacifist warriors are
Over Thirty and we see ourselves.
It is us, grasping the
Chain links of years, looking,
Longing, into the playground,
Wheedling connection, response,
Rhythm, a few rallies. At length
We recognize how dead we’ve
Become. Marley’s Ghost, did he
Wander familiar streets unseen?
Sit too deep in familiar chairs?
Weep dry tears as the living
Passed unseeing? Did his
Agent never call, his lovers
Forget his scent, his children
Refigure their lives without
Reference to Marley?

We ghosts cobble up our own
Walhalla, where the young, straight
Men of the tribe come to our tents
To seek wisdom and poetry,
Advice on taxes and women,
To hear elders discuss with
Authority the game paths and
Planting cycles, to plan
Intelligently, soberly, with the
Stabilizing feathers near the
Arrow’s nock, giving the tribe
Its wise spin of continuum.

Like all Walhallas, ours is a
Fraud, a coffee klatch of
Old men complaining in
Comfortable lies.
Ghosts stay until
Transparency becomes
Tedious, then fade
Gladly like dew in
Sunshine.



BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is not fading. He's between books, eating compulsively, exercising infrequently, looking for a consort without fangs, and generally making a nuisance of himself. But there is a slight up-tick in his demeanor, a few new stories, and some hope for his heart, even as the light dims too, too early. This is a dangerous season for the old Depressive. I'll be attentive.

A DECEMBER POEM

CROWS ON FROST

A murder of crows in black, in black:
They strut and flap and hop, complain
Upon the frost-tipped grass across
The Lane. A field of stubborn growth
In California winter (mild
Beside the Bay), with spiteful ice
And bitter green, the frothy hue
Of spinach creamed, black peppered
With, of course, the crows, who would
Be proud to be coarse ground or even cracked,
To match their rasping voices which,
To me, are welcome more than
Fruity songs on winter days. Prefer
The wise-ass caws of skeptic crows
To birdsong in a season of short
Days and long cold nights; sarcastic
Quips in muttered sotto voce jibes
Have kept a crew alive through hardship
More than lyric songs. Good bos’uns cultivate
A crow caw voice, and reprobate demeanor
As they croak “I seen it all, and this ain’t bad
As it might be so grab your socks and hit the
Deck you sons of bitches.” Crows continue
Day by day to say, to say, this very speech
To one another, rain or shine: it ain’t as bad
As it might be. Sure, watch them fly sometime:
Though masters of the art they joke,
Cut up, play silly buggers in the air,
To say “This flying gig is not so tough
That we can’t screw around. Without
A joke what’s worth a fart?” And this is sound
Advice on frosty mornings.


Jan Adkins, 23 December 2010, Novato, California

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself has always been fond of crows. They're black, dire, difficult to categorize, hardy and foolish. Of course he has a connection to them. He doesn't write about cute little birdies, probably because he has a tendency to talk tough. Creampuff.

MARCHING BEHIND THE SAINTS, WITH PARASOL

I DON'T GET INTO THE CITY, MUCH. True, I often scuttle in on Tuesday nights to cook for the Dolphin Club but that’s boats, an obsession that overrides my obsession with staying put. But last Sunday afternoon I took a special excursion.

I play tennis with a friend, Neal Vahle, a writer. Neal is 76 and still wallops me on the court. He’s also a deep old file, a thinker and a theologian who lived for several years in a Wisconsin monastery. I know, I didn’t think they bothered with monasteries there but took stark Lutheran doom straight, by the book, because simply keeping warm in the winter occupied so much effort. Jesuitical contemplation on alternate theory might have slowed them down long enough to freeze to death.

Neal and I were talking about raising children with spiritual values in a secular age. Saturday morning at temple or Sunday morning at church is as rare as rolling hoops and knickerbockers, nowadays. How should my grandsons Max and Lucas be raised to have spiritual values? more importantly, how can they become part of the six millennium heritage that carries so much of our core culture? They might wander away from the powerful river of Judeo-Greek, Christian-Roman, Renaissance-Protestant stories, values, fables, metaphors and history that floats us today, makes us who we are. In tossing away the shallowness and frequent hypocrisy of contemporary churches, liberal parents are almost literally tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

I think about this often. Neal and I talk about it sitting on the bench when serves change. So Neal suggested that I attend a “fellowship service” at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco to hear Doug Fitch speak. Doug is a small, wiry black man with enormous and expressive hands, long-famous as a spell-binding orator, and for many years the minister at Grace Church in the City. Fitch left Grace because there is a mandatory retirement age of 70. After he left, a band of a hundred or so folks began using the Unitarian Church as a Sunday-afternoon venue for a non-denominational spiritual gathering. That's as close to religion as they choose to describe it. So now the gentle spellbinder, born into fundamentalist evangelical faith, now calling on his involvement in Eastern meditation and traditions, holds forth at this odd gathering of Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, loose Lutherans, and even (so I’m told) some Muslims.

It was a wonderful experience. There was a stunning choir, theatrically skillful, with a young, electric choirmaster. They were backed by a band (puh-lease) of keyboard, drums, trumpet and electric bass. The mix was remarkably black for a San Francisco gathering, almost half. The choir reflected this proportion, which was fortunate because the three black basses were sonorous and emphatic, especially when the choir sang some African chants in Swahili – or some dark continent langridge – from the surprisingly strong Christian tradition in large parts of Africa. Amazing.

We sang one hymn but it didn’t count as a Sunday church song since it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Loud and lusty, it was no more go-to-meeting than the second-liners returning from the graveyard, twirling parasols behind a New Orleans funeral. A lot of clapping. Some hands waving in the air, a joyous noise. We didn’t have that at the Thoburn Memorial Methodist Church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Nothing close to it. Sigh.

I can’t call Fitch’s talk a lecture or a discourse. No. It was a sermon. No talk about religion, no mention of Jesus. These folks are anti-Trinitarian, viewing Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a philosophic mischief perpetrated by Constantine in the 5th C. That is, they approach God through the intellectual side door. Of course the sermon had no Bible verse. But, crikey, the rolling rhythms of great religious oratory swept everyone along. We heard the unmistakable notes of Martin Luther King’s Pentecostal heritage – repetition, rhythm, sudden changes of pitch and volume, calling out and asking response, loud exhortation and quiet reflection, shifting from the intimately personal to the abstract whole.

And how could any speech from a pulpit be a lecture if it had (mirabile dictu) an Amen Corner. Yes. No shit. A running basso continuo from a few male members of the choir sitting on the aisle: “Yes. Yes! Tell it. Oh no! Amen. Amen. Yes, brother. Speak the word. Mm-MM! [This last an admonitory expression of anger and disappointment at injustice, obviously the work of the anti-Trinitarian, Satan-less, abstract devil.] DO tell! We hear it. We feel it. We know it. With you now. Yes, brother.” It’s appropriate that the choir members constituted the Amen Corner because it became obvious to me that good Amen-ing is closely akin to scat-singing, a skill that sounds casual and easy to any singer who hasn’t tried it. I was forced to admit that I didn’t have the experience or skill to become a competent or even an unembarrassing Amen-er. Sorry.

Fitch. The little man filled up the vast space under the Gothic hammer beams and inside the colorful, geometric, unreligious but inescapably religious stained-glass, above the unnoticed hard wooden pews. Oh, yes. Tell it. Mm-MM! His body language had expression, authority, and a mime’s wit. He plied the skillfully subdued but operatic magic of his dancing arms and hands. His flashing palms were pinkish orange in contrast to his weathered tobacco complexion. His modest, light suit suggested a boardroom but Fitch revealed a lion chewing on the horse-haunch of a premise. And we listened. We hear it. We feel it. With you now.

It wasn’t empty oratory but a logical, well-built discourse on the importance of continual learning, a constant opening of viewpoint through education in any form in life. “More learning, more life” was the theme but it twined around the critical role of tragedy and defeat in human learning, the regrettable but indispensable tutor of grief, the place of frustration and anger, the path with many thorns leading to the loveliest views. There were many “Amens” from Fitch as affirmations: “This I believe.” There was confession and humility, the little man vaulting above us but remaining one of us – ignorant as we were, blindsided as many times as we have been. He was, he assured us, determined not only to learn all his life but to live a long life (“I intend to reach ninety-nine years. Oh, yes,” to applause) and to savor every glittering drop of it.

This was no Happy Meal Sunday treat with fries. Indeed, it was strenuous in a way. I can’t imagine anyone who could remain a spectator, there. The pulse of spiritual stirring was so involving and strong that we ran to keep up with it. We sorted through old fears and freed pent-up desires. We centered ourselves in silence but we did so as a body of humans together. It was intellectual work.

This community of striving for quiet clarity may be something we lack in a secular life. It’s easy to grow narcissistic when you live with your own echoes. Quiet meditation – which could be called “centering” or “prayer” or even more casual reflection – is not the same experience as solitary meditation. Somehow it draws more amperage from you.

There was one familiar church artifact: the collection. These folks pay the band, support the choir, rent the hall, subsidize Doug Fitch’s enormous labor of preparing his “sermon.” They’re also politically and socially active, righteous San Francisco liberals supporting all the initiatives of justice, peace and diversity that damn near save the Californian Spirit from triviality. So the collection, counted and notated by my painstaking friend Neal, is honest and painless. We got a band, after all. The bass guitarist looked profoundly bored and was doubtless looking toward some livelier gig with more women in less, so he should be paid for his time. And, hell, it probably touched a part of him. After all, California’s mission system was based on paid converts.

Afterward there was the familiar milling crowd noshing on potluck brownies, cakes, nibblies and (Fitch's favorite, we were warned to save some for him) lemon bars. Very nice people. I placed them in the same drawer as my real, kind, jolly Dolphin Club friends.

It was altogether nourishing, refreshing, fertilizing, joyful. I’m ignoble enough to state that I managed to fall in love with every female member of the choir. Oh, yes. Tell it. And no one at my college bar would believe that I could someday moon from actual church pews over a speckled-pup cute woman who would in a more ecclesiastical setting be called a “deaconess.” Oh yes, brother. Speak it. In my defense this certainly had much to do with reawakening spiritual banks dormant in me for years. Amen. Or I may be merely a dirty old man whose shame has eroded sufficiently that I can admit these things. Mm-MM!

Altogether a wonderful time. It couldn’t be better, even with fireworks. First and third Sundays of the month. With you now, brother.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Anything that gets himself out of the studio can't be all bad. And this was a therapeutic event. It had a high mensch-ratio and a low piety score. Not bad for Sunday in a church of any kind. About education, I can't fear for himself. He's compulsive about learning damn near anything, and he tries mightily, with his limited tools, to string everything together in a logical way. Given the reports of low senility rates for scholarly nuns, we hope this constant, bubbling mental activity will fight off Alzheimer's. This would be an especially serious malady in my already odd friend because we couldn't see the symptoms for years.

MARKET STREET 1905

My editor-in-chief at National Geographic, Bill Garrett, send me this wonderful cinema clip. I replied with my recollections of it and my reactions to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfZX-4iQOgQ&feature=related

Thank you for sending this film clip! I’ve seen it before under unusual circumstances but haven’t been able to locate it.

This simple, brief trip down Market Street toward the ever-looming Terminal Building is magical in the way some Civil War photos can reach out of their glass plates to seize your whole attention. Perhaps the long exposure time accounts for the power of those Brady-era photos., Their subjects were staring, unmoving, at the uncovered lens for up to two minutes, enough time to focus on the camera as it focused on them, so that they seem to be consciously murmuring over time, “We were here at this frozen moment – intensely, minutely, hopefully, humanly. Look at us, alive in this slice of time, look at us. We passionately need your collusion, your acknowledgment of our living in your own focus. If you truly see us, we live.”

And in this sense, the film is more than a oddity. The people who looked up at the camera in 1905, a year before most of the city was destroyed by the great earthquake, were almost, almost aware that we would be seeing them now. They didn’t care particularly because they had their own lives – see them rush to appointments, lunches, tasks – but a few seem aware or even amused that ghosts of the future are passing on the front platform of the Market Street Car.

A good number of the folks on the street are aware that the ride is being filmed. They wave, caper dangerously in front of the car, boys hitch rides on car bumpers and carriages to wave. Perhaps they're aware that this film is a bit of boosterism staged to make the city look modern and prosperous. Some careful researcher has noted that the many passing automobiles are really a few autos, circling the route of our car. They pass, turn, pass on the other side, and repass on the right.

The primary impression busy Market Street in 1905 offers us is casual chaos. The number of people wandering on and across the street is remarkable. Many stand in the street, looking about them, apparently thinking of something far from Market Street. Most others seem to be in a hurry; it’s Market Street, after all, and business is booming. Something foreign and even disturbing to us that there is so little demarcation between pedestrian and street traffic. Folks continually bolt from one side to the other or stop to talk directly in the traffic flow. The progress of our time vehicle down Market Street is ponderous to us but of little concern to men and women stepping directly in its path, confident that our car or that carriage or even the nimble internal combustion automobiles will make way for them. It’s faintly amazing; no one is knocked down or run over. There aren’t groups pulsing across walkways, timed by signals; that lock-step rigidity is absent.

The phrase “free-for-all” comes to mind, both in the hurly-burly meaning, and in the assured ownership of common space. The hood-banging, automobile-offended New York pedestrian’s shout is poignantly unnecessary on Market Street 1905: “Hey! Hey! I’m walkin’ heah!”

Women pedestrians are relatively rare. What does this tell us about women in San Francisco before suffrage? They are dressed in dark clothes, probably an artifact of horse dung. Dark fabrics hide dirt and stains We would take Market Street to be a filthy place in 1905. Voluminous, long skirts swept near the surface and picked up a rime of powdered horse dung and dust on a rainy day; on a dry day the entire skirt gathered the blowing, ubiquitous product of horse-transport lodged in the cusps between paving stones.

Everyone wears a hat. It’s a breezy day; we occasionally see men clutching their derbies and slouches with both hands.

There is a significant police presence on Market Street. We tend to mistake cops of this era as ridiculous figures because they wear the dark blue solar-topi helmet familiar to us from Mack Sennet’s Keystone Cops, a burlesque of bumbling and incompetent police officers spilling out of a station house in pall-mall pursuit of nothing more dangerous than a scofflaw. But the police on Market are beefy, serious men who look competent and even formidable. They’re men of quick, practical and experienced judgment; Miranda Rights and civil liberties might be science fiction. These are beat-cops assigned to a specific area, with saps and revolvers on their hips, carrying lead-weighted billies. In 1905 San Francisco was still an exotic port ruffled by tong wars, a hustling Tenderloin District, waterfront brawls, and the usual difficulties with alcohol. Cocaine, heroin and opium were sold over the counter so there is no “drug crime” yet. The Indian Wars and the frontier were recent memories, less than twenty years before, but statistics report that riverine or ocean port cities (San Francisco is both) had much more violent crime than the wooliest frontier towns, including the cattle-droving destinations of Dodge City and her sisters in Kansas and Missouri.

There is a vast fleet of street cars. Our straight-line journey encounters dozens of cars on the Market Street line headed in the other direction, and more crossing Market. One crossing car is an electric trolley, powered by overhead wires. Most are unpowered cars; they move as the grip-man hauls on five-foot handles to seize moving, singing cables beneath centerline steel slots on the street, no more than two inches wide, and they brake by releasing the cable and levering-on blocks of elm against tracks and wheels. A grip man must have had prodigious physical strength and endurance.

We see a lot of bicycles on 1905 Market Street, part of the second wave of “wheelmen.” Bicycles were sensible transportation and a political force in the country, perhaps because they freed great numbers of middle-class citizens from the schedules of trains, the expense and responsibility of horse-transport, and the minor but cumulative expense of metropolitan and intercity light rail. Favored politicians visiting cities were accompanied by bicycle parades, large societies of Wheelmen who were something like the League of Women Voters in their pragmatic, progressive views expressed at the polls. Wheelmen were known as technically apt, educated, liberal groups. On our trip we see one cyclist crossing and recrossing the cable car slot only a few yards ahead of our car. Perhaps there was less danger of sinking his front wheel in the slot than it appears.

The day is fine, the mood is buoyant, the city is teeming and fascinating. Young people can watch this fragment of 1905 as a quaint gleam, inconsequential. As we grow older, however, the life and intensity of experience throughout this journey is almost cruel, a memento mori, reminding us that the twinkling moments that are so real in our memories and so full of dedicated life, are evanescent, shadow-play. It requires age to question the real fabric of time, to ask how a moment in this patently false, transparently-manufactured reality-TV opera we inhabit is more real than the sharply realized moments of our past. It seems impossible that those moments don’t still exist, as temporal stair treads to which we might leap if we held tightly to the banister, or if we somehow seized the opposing cable of a Market Street cars going in the opposite direction with a five-foot iron handle and a grip-man’s tenacity.

It helps, of course to be a little crazy. I benefit from this looseness of logic. There is a sandbar on the Chesapeake I inhabited with a woman I loved on the Glorious Fourth of July in the mid-eighties when I was as happy as I can remember being. Our sailboat was drawn up on the beach. The fireworks were reflected in the water and in that exquisite woman’s eyes. We danced on the sand and needed no music but us. We drank sweet Mt. Gay Eclipse rum. She said she loved me, in French. Life seemed as bright and spectacular and blooming as those bursts of light in the sky.

It all went to hell. The exquisite, rare woman changed her mind, in English, and set a lugubrious and devastating chain of events in motion that tore me out of Eden and away from what I most loved. Life was never that hopeful again. But that sandbar evening is so focused in my mind, like a crystal or a hologram of time, that I can’t believe it doesn’t exist at this moment, somewhere.

I watched this Market Street clip a few years ago, during a piano concert at a church in Noe Valley, in San Francisco. About eight pianists were playing, several of them famous stride piano stylists. My friend Jim Purcell was giving his lecture on the evolution of jazz style at the piano. A remarkable man stage-named Hokum Jeeves also played. He and his partner were trying to restart vaudeville and owned a small theater called Hokum Hall in Portland or Seattle. A few of my friends had acts there. Hokum played a cakewalk in ragtime, and then announced that he would demonstrate a lost skill by playing to a silent film as “professors” had in the early part of the last century. They sat at their keyboards – piano or organ – and played extemporaneously, reacting to the mood and action of the film. I remember Mr. Jeeves blending into “A Bicycle Built For Two” as one of the bicycles wobbled across the screen, and fashioning a clanging bell chord as a pedestrian nimbly stepped out of a streetcar’s way. It was enchanting, and it fit this film beautifully.


Braxinoso Speaks

Himself counts his looseness of mind and his past/present confusion of time as virtues. Perhaps they helped him continue an unremunerative profession past logical limits, but they also inflict enormous pain. I've been with him in the dark times when flashes of hope from the past exact a terrible, ironic toll. Trying to look on the bright side, a real virtue of being able to project oneself into another time is the ability to notice small mechanical or social things hindsight often hides.

CHICKEN ART

My dear old friend Dean Torges, whom I met when I was about twelve, is a master woodworker, a philosopher, one of the most intelligent and most thoughtful men I've ever met. He's a world-famous bowyer, and (this is a compliment from the era of Theodore Roosevelt) a woodsman and hunter of consummate skill. But presently he's building a chicken house. It's a mobile chicken house. A chicken's need for new vistas is something I simply never considered. Still, Dean knows chickens. He's raised them on his little Ohio farmlet for donkey's years and enjoys his own eggs, broilers, and smoked whole chickens. I suppose he knows chickens better than most and if a mobile chicken house will help his fowl, who am I to quibble? He's even built mobile outbuildings, mesh-covered bomb-shelter frames that roll on old lawnmower wheels to keep his chicks out of hawks' talons. Fowlopolis.

He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.

After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:

Dean:

There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.

I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.

Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.

You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.

Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.

It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.

What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.

Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.

MY BOYO

Today is my grandson's birthday: Max is three years old, a remarkable human being.

Any grampa would say the same thing. Perhaps we'd all be right. But I hold that Maxwell Ulysses Burger is, on his third birthday, an astonishingly well-spoken and thoughtful person, the beginnings of a citizen and a raconteuer. He has phrase and grace in his speech and he plays with language. He displays an enjoyment with saying something just so, the way he wants it. He reminds me of the cautionary definition of my own profession from the Irish: "A writer is a failed conversationalist."

His early gifts were mechanical. Things in my daughter's household were retro-engineered by Max.

The kid was and is preternaturally diagnostic. He takes stuff apart. Most often, he puts them back together as well.

He sat on my lap when he was just turned two and plucked a ballpoint pen out of my pocket. He looked at it solemnly and set to work. He took it apart, disassembled it into its component parts – barrel, cap, spring, refill laid out on the counter in front of us – then reassembled it. Once he’d screwed it together, he tested it to make sure it worked, click, click, click, click, then put it back into my pocket.

One morning Sally noticed that while she was cooking something he pushed his little kitchen dining table to a cabinet, climbed onto his chair, thence to the table top, thence to the counter top beside the refrigerator. He stood on the toaster oven and retrieved the sack of coffee beans from the refrigerator top. He dumped some beans into the grinder, fumbled the top on, ground some beans (more or less), pulled the top and dumped the ground beans into the filter of the coffee machine, which he carefully fit into its place. He turned it on (no water) and climbed down to his table. Arriving at floor level, he announced brew’s up casually, “Coffee!”

I asked Sally, “You didn’t stop him?”

“No, I was too fascinated. He watches Patrick make coffee every morning and he remembered the steps. For Max it was no big deal, but it floored me.”

Something that floored me was his cognizance of batteries. Nothing in the remote control line works in Max's house. Batteries gone, You can only detect the absence by the weight, since he generally replaces the battery cover. If you want to use the remote, you get Maxwell’s attention: “Max. Can you find the batteries for this remote control for me, please?” Immediate locomotion toward a chair or couch, a disruption of cushions and/or pillows, Max returns with the correct batteries without comment as if to say, “Here, dufous, why didn’t you get them yourself?”

When I was young there was a kind of string-tension toy. It was a dog or cat or horse made of hollow wooden beads (they probably don’t allow them today; choking hazard) strung together and attached to a spring-loaded base. When the string was tensioned, the animal stood upright, if a little silly. If you pushed the big button under the base, the string went slack and the creature fell into a pile of bead-parts. It was a great little toy because the animal stood there one moment, then fell into a pile.

I mention this because it’s the only way I can describe Max’s Terrible Two tantrums: a space of loud whining, no, no, no, he wants it the OTHER way, he doesn’t want THAT, he won’t eat (wear, carry, wash, drink) THAT, mommy, no, no, give me the OTHER, I want the OTHER. The Other is refused. Time Out is threatened. The count to five begins. “Max, I’m counting. One, two, three, four, five . . . Okay then, Time Out.”

Someone in a neighboring yard has eviscerated a swine or a panther: one hears a siren-loud screech. Max is creating a noise louder than any creature smaller than a city bus is capable of producing. It’s an unsettling howl, the noise of a desert djinn or a hurtling bomb. At this instant the boy we know as Max ceases to exist as a cohesive unit and falls into a pile of trunk, head and limbs in a liquid rush to the floor. This sudden dissolution is entertainingly like that string-toy, a complete collapse. The awful noise continues. Tantrum. Off to the Time Out Place of Penitence and Reflection: the stair landing, a place more barren and uninteresting than Devil’s Island or even Bayonne, New Jersey, the very seat of horrors. The bone-bag that was Max is poured onto the Chair of Correction and a timer is set for two, three, or even (life sentence) five minutes depending on the gravity of the offense.

Mutters and two-year-old curses (“Poopie, bad, booger, poopie!”), a diminishing wail, sobbing, cries for forgiveness, vows of being a good boy, now. Accusations of mommy’s impaired judgment, her mean and even wicked nature (“Bad mommy!”). Then a silence. Occasionally this is accompanied by inexpert creeping away scuffs and creaks but largely the time runs out and the timer bell rings.

“I’m done, mommy!” Reconciliation. Obligatory apologies, “I’m sorry that I _________,” fill in the blank. Order restored, authority maintained, chaos and the encroaching jungle held back another day.

Except that Max’s Time Outs were sometimes suspiciously short. Of course. The boyo was mechanically subverting justice. He’d determined the nature of the timer, climbed up onto the Dread Chair of Detention, retrieved the timer, and reset it to something under a minute. Ding! “I’m done, mommy!”

As the parent of a little person, you must be firm but open to friendly compromise. But remember: they’re all sea-lawyers. They’ll argue until hell freezes over, doggedly and energetically. Anyone who thinks that kids have no attention span has never argued with a two-year-old. Avoid negotiation. You always lose, one way or another, today or down the road.

But time off for good behavior – for inventive re-engineering, is only fair, yes?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Being close to Himself, I see how deeply and enthusiastically he loves Max and his little brother, Luc. He has a bushel of surrogate grandchildren in the Bay Area whom he loves – Hannah Rose, the Dread Pirate Davis, Julianna, Kent, Ainsley, Elizabeth, et als. But if he has learned anything from these surrogates and his joy at being close to them, it is that he needs family. He loves this place, this topography, this particular micro-climate. He loves his friends here. But it's become apparent to him that being a part of Max's and Luc's lives is essential to his heart. Being a part of his daughter's life is much more important than she acknowledges. The time has come for Himself to make a move away from Mt. Burdell and Indian Valley Road and the Pacific. How he'll relocate to Gainesville, Florida, is logistically nightmarish, especially for a man with a definite phobia about moving. It's a painful time, professionally and personally, for the Old Guy.

NIGHT STUFF

My naps are precious to me: gourmet sleep. Yesterday I had one of my best naps. This flu cycles on and on like World War I, control ebbing and flowing between my macrophages and the viri, so I’m mostly tired. Having completed a piece for WoodenBoat I took my little fleece blanket and walked into the Big House backyard. I rolled into the rope hammock at the far end of the yard, tucked the blanket up under my head, covered my eyes with my battered Panama hat, and slept for an hour in the gently swinging hammock. The air was like wine, the temperature perfect, and breeze light, and the sun was filtered through leaves. God smiled on me and I slept as peacefully as a boy.

This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.

Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.

The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.

The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.

Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.

It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.

The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.

My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.

It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.

Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”

THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.

The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.

The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.

CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.

ALIENATION

A dear friend wrote to me:

I'm disappointed because I literally don't see or hear from any friends anymore. It seems life has swallowed everyone up. I don't think this is the way it is supposed to work. I think we are all missing the point. Isn't work supposed to afford us pleasant experiences with friends and family? It seems my kids and friends are so busy trying to stay afloat there's no time for anything.

This is serious business. Why have we become so alienated? How have our social networks collapsed?

I suspect that we’re all in a seething, quiet panic, circling up the wagons wherever we can, cutting out “extras” like fellowship and sharing in the same way schools are cutting out art and music. My friend is right: it's harder to connect than it was.

The reason for that panic may be that beneath the dollars-and-cents strain of life in a recession or depression we’re confronting an appalling knowledge we don’t wish to recognize. But it's the 500 pound gorilla in the room. We have more and more difficulty ignoring it, now.

The awful truth is that we know in our hearts that the machine is broken. It won’t get better. Obama or Nobama, we get the same corporate government the powerful few choose. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter – partisanship is a soap opera designed to give us the illusion of debate and struggle toward the right. We know that all our officials are cogs in the corporate juggernaut that dictates our lives.

Remember Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider? He said something like, “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. But if you tell people they aren’t free, they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove that they are.” This incipient panic is dangerous. We will furiously deny that we don’t have freedom and choice. We don’t want to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, that our votes don’t count, and that everything George W. Bush did was backed up by the Democrats. If we admit to ourselves that we’re ants in a game, we won’t have the comfortable illusion of free will. We’re not in charge, not even as a nation of citizens. Our government doesn’t act in our best interests or respond to our needs. Our government has no moral code we can share. We’re ants.

Perhaps the scariest thing about this scenario is that the Corporate Government doesn’t seem to have a plan. It won’t make any steps ahead and insists that we’re jes’ fine as we are. Keep buying, keep driving, keep polluting! What’s good for US Steel is good for the country! The shadowy boardroom figures that run our country don’t seem to have any notion of change or adaptation. We’re past the Hubbard Peak, we’re running out of oil, the world is evolving into a dangerous global puzzle, but the boardroom is concerned only with next quarter’s profits.

The Last Honest Man to sit in the White House may have been Jimmy Carter, who was bold enough to ask citizens to conserve, change their habits, think about energy. He was a one-term president sandbagged by Congress and the Pentagon.

I believe the effort to deny this hidden certainty of disconnect with our institutions is poisoning us. And I believe it affects the way we shrink away from the world, laagered up in our homes, satisfying ourselves with National Idol and Runway Project as fairytale templates for real life. How many kids, 10 to 20, are obsessed by “second life” games in which dire forces can be defeated? How can they submerge themselves in artificial life and ignore real life? Perhaps because their parents haven’t demanded much of them as citizens-in-training. They haven’t been braced by the certainties of discipline, cultural continuity, family structure. They are the chauffeured generation – playdates, soccer, Little League – an entitled generation that realizes there is no up-side to becoming an adult. They know that entering the adult world is giving up on dreams and trekking across a wasteland.

So what can we do about it? We need our friends and we need our families.

I’m opposed to organized religion but I can now see the benefit of the Sabbath, when families presented themselves as a unit before God, the entire nutso, dysfunctional crew. The acceptance of humility and humanity before God is a connecting experience. Kids see their parents bowing to something much larger and mysterious. They feel the spiritual current of shared past, beyond distant ancestors. They confront the mysteries which, I believe, make life less mysterious. But will I hop down to the nearest Methodist Church or synagogue? I will not. Dogma and magic taint the Christian beliefs. The narcissistic buddying up to Jesus taints the Christiam evangelicals. Echoes anguished and embattled tribes in a distant, harsh land taint the cantor’s song.

Honestly, I’m confused. I do believe we should gather in fellowship and joy. We must share our lives so that none of us can feel like the Lone Ranger, which we ain’t. We should resist alienating ourselves (SO damn easy for me to do). In many ways, a lively and thoughtful social life is also a spiritual life, being human with others. Becoming part of the larger web. How do accomplish this in a corrosive time?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself has a talent for welcoming people to his table. He ignores it too much and at his peril. When he groundhogs up he becomes abstract, pedantic, often a ninnyhammer. He is at his best at a table of friends who are talking, arguing, laughing and sharing. What does a dinner cost? Not much compared to the benefits. Why don't more people share themselves? Alienation is the prime poison of our "interesting" time.