A Pilgrim’s Digression

There are three rules to traveling on public transportation: don’t look someone in the eye, don’t touch anyone, don’t talk loudly. A family on public transport usually violates at least two of these rules (touching and talking), to the displeasure of everyone around them.

L'Enfant Plaza Metro station, Washington, D.C.

Last night, on my way out of town aboard an orange line train to Vienna, a family boarded at L’Enfant Plaza. The family consisted of a mother and father, two young boys between ages five and eight, a little girl about age three, and a male baby approximately one year old. The little girl and baby sat in a double-stroller. The two boys sat on a seat with their mother, and the father stood up.

To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention at first. I noted the struggle to get the enormous stroller into the subway car, but otherwise I was preoccupied with the book I was trying to finish reading, Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Gradually, I began to notice them more, though. It’s hard to ignore such an intrusion into the normal course of events on a rush hour train. And as an “intrusion” is exactly how most people saw and experienced this family.

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Last night, as I was filling up my car, a mini-van pulled into the pump next to me and the woman driving rolled down her window.
“Excuse me, Sir, I’ve got a bit of a situation here and I was wondering if you could help?”

Scary Santa begs for money for Chicago’s poor

I stepped across the pump island so as to hear better and asked her what’s the problem.

She proceeded to tell me a rather convoluted tale about how she recently had an apendectomy, and today she had had to drive down from Richmond to Augusta Medical Center for a checkup. But she’d left her bank card on the table at home, and she didn’t have enough money for gas to get back to Richmond.

Could I help her out? Any money I could spare would be appreciated.
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I’ve always meant to use this space to record some of the family moments I might want to recall later in life. Right now, I just need to use this space to write more, period. So today’s post will do double duty.

Lately, Brendan has reminded me of the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the “Seven Ages of Man” speech.

Schoolboy by Albert Anker (1831-1910)

“Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.”

Brendan is going through this phase–at least I hope its a phase–where he doesn’t want to go to school. Indeed “whining” pretty much does describe his attitude.

This reluctance to go to school started some weeks ago, but reached a sort of culmination last week, when he tried to get out of going to school because, he said, his stomach hurt.

Lynn took him to school anyway, but later in the morning, I got a call at work from the Principal saying that Brendan was in his office complaining of an upset stomach.

I listened patiently to the Principal’s concern that Brendan might be coming down with the flu–although he had no fever–and at an appropriate point, I interrupted him and told him about Brendan trying to get out of going to school that morning.

“He’s not sick,” I said. “He just doesn’t want to go to school.”

“Well that does change things,” the Principal said. “Why doesn’t he want to go to school?”

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At lunch today, I was treated to the sight of a man vigorously picking his teeth as he stood in line to check out.  Apparently he never read the U.S. Army pamphlet “Personal Conduct for the Soldier” [ca. 1949], else he would have come to this illustration in the chapter on table manners:

Two soldiers pick their teeth while eating dinner in the cafeteria

If you have a moment, be sure to follow the link and take a look at the rest of the pamphlet.  There are some unintentionally funny recommendations in there.  Of course, given the date of publication, there is also some mild sexism.

I particularly got a kick out of the illustration in which men are advised not to let the “homely” girl know that they are there to see her prettier sister.

Only about two weeks remain before I must vacate the house at Hillandale. This is a bittersweet time. I’ve spent the past five years and nine months at that address, three days weekly. I cannot say it felt like home; but I was used to it.

Looking at it objectively, it was often a filthy, uncomfortable place to live. It’s little better now. In fact, in some ways it is worse. The extensive renovations promised after Aurelia died are not coming to pass. Her oldest son, Barton, has decided the house must go on the market at the beginning of October, leaving no time to install central air and heat, or to replace the windows or bathroom fixtures. I’ve always doubted that central air and heat could be installed in the house anyway, as old as it is. How does one retrofit for central air a home built in 1928?

The windows seem to me the biggest deterrent to getting the desired $450,000 asking price for the home. Not a single window can be opened, and there are no screens anyway, even if they could be opened. But I can see how it would cost a fortune to replace the windows, which probably makes selling the house as-is more attractive.

So, no renovations. Instead, Nadine and Tim, the two younger siblings (both in their early sixties), are painting–rather sloppily I might add; there are drops of paint everywhere on the wood floors. Also, someone replaced the toilet seat on the decades-old throne in my bathroom. However, the toilet seat doesn’t fit, so when I go pee, either I have to sit down or else I stand and hold the seat up with one hand and my penis with the other.

Tim is staying at the house this week, and I’m sure Nadine is enjoying his visit. If I could convey sarcasm in writing, that would be an example. Tim brought his girlfriend from Florida, or rather the woman he’s mooching off of currently. When I met her last night, she seemed a little “tetched” in the head, to use a rural-ism from my youth. She’s a middle-aged woman, probably in her fifties, with a slightly batty look in her eye and a giggly voice like she’s mimicking Shirley Temple. She’d have to be a little nuts, or perhaps extremely desperate, to think of Tim as boyfriend material. The man gambles and has never held a job in over forty years of adulthood, and that is no exaggeration.

Anyway, I’m sure she adds something valuable to the atmosphere of decay that envelops the house. I can’t imagine Tim ever bringing her to stay at the house while Aurelia was alive. When I arrived last night, the two of them were sitting downstairs cuddling and watching TV in nightshirts; Nadine was already locked in her upstairs bedroom, no doubt peacefully zonked out on her “nerve medicine.”

Furniture leaves the house every day. Whether it is going to auction, or into the homes of family members, I don’t know. My bathroom has become something of a storage room for paint and paint pans. Paint brushes lie drying on the edges of the sink, and globs of paint coat the sink basin. The shower is filthy, probably due to Tim’s extended stay. When the house on Hillandale was his permanent residence, I often found a coating of curly hair in the bathtub in the morning, when I went to take my shower.

One thing about a bald guy like me: no one can blame me for leaving hair in the tub and sink. This morning, I noted that not only was there dirt and hair in the tub, but the plastic curtain had been removed, leaving only the cloth liner.

On the positive side, the house is no longer as hot as it was back in the summer. I don’t need to run my air conditioner in my room all night. The bathroom isn’t so stifling in the morning that only a cold shower can leave me feeling refreshed.

Overall, I am sad to be leaving this era in my life behind. At one time, I had high hopes for writing something worthwhile in that house. back in ‘03-’04, when it was only Aurelia and I living there, the atmosphere was conducive to writing. She told me lots of good stories about her family. I hadn’t yet discovered a certain video game. I had evenings free to sit in my tiny bedroom under the slant of the roof and write. But nothing ever came of it. And that, Dear Reader, is the true story of my life: nothing ever came of it.

Life goes on, though. Death, too. On October 5th, I will begin spending my three-day work week at a hotel in Tysons. I’m looking forward to the cleanliness, and the air-conditioning, and the continental breakfast. Other than that, it’s sad to leave a house with so many memories, and such character.

The bachelor party last night was a success, I think.  I cooked steak and potatoes on the grill, and while I cooked, we sat on the back porch, talking and drinking.  Later, after dinner, we played Madden 10 and made frequent trips to the toilet to relieve ourselves of beer.  It was a tame party, if judged by college boy standards, but pretty exciting for a guy in his mid-thirties.  Between the two of us, myself and the groom killed a 12-can box of Bud Light plus a couple Coronas and a Heineken I found in the back of the fridge.

It’s been a few years since I drank that much.  It felt pretty good.

I have some memories of the night, but in the end, I don’t remember things all that well, particularly after the other men left.  I remember stumbling around outside, trying to walk the dog, afraid she would pull me down if she saw a cat.  I was pretty unsteady.  I remember trying to play World of Warcraft, but the required finger-eye coordination was a little beyond me.  I remember taking a shower. I remember lying on the bedroom floor, laughing so loudly and for so long that it scared the dog.  Somehow I ended up in bed.  I don’t remember my wife coming home and getting in bed beside me.  I woke up at around a quarter to three, mouth dry as a desert and calf muscles aching as if I’d run a marathon.  I got up for a drink of water and haven’t been back to bed.

Other than my achy legs and dehydration, I don’t feel too bad.  This is how my body has responded, every time I’ve gotten drunk in my life.  I wake up early after a night of binge drinking, and I feel energized.  No headache or hangover, just wakefulness, clarity.

In my sleep, just before I woke, I had a dream that for whatever reason motivated me to get up and write a little.  Lying there awake for about twenty minutes, going over the dream in my mind, I imagined myself telling it to my therapist.

It’s a very brief dream.  In the dream, my grandpa and I and some other men, no faces or names to any of them, are being judged on our singing.  The other men have vague identities as “friends” of grandpa’s.  The person doing the judging comes around to each of us with a device that measures whether we would be an alto, a soprano, a tenor, etc., when you sing a note into it.  Grandpa makes some self-deprecatory noises, saying he has never sang in his life and doesn’t expect any great result from this.  But I know he’s really just setting the men up.  He will sing impressively.  Grandpa sings the “la” note and registers as a very low bass on the tone measuring device, and the other men clap and hoot, clearly impressed.

When it is my turn, I sing “la” and measure as a rather flat tenor.  The men don’t respond positively or negatively.  Grandpa says nothing, but looks away, either embarrassed of me or still preoccupied with his own success.

That is the entire dream.  When I imagine myself talking about this to my therapist, he latches on to the symbolism of a competition between grandpa and I.  And this isn’t a competition he ought, by nature, to win.  It’s a creative competition.  Creativity is my field, although singing isn’t my specialty.  Still, why would a man whose interests were in active, athletic endeavors, best me at singing?

Even so, my feelings in the dream aren’t jealousy, or anger, or shame.  I feel proud that my grandfather is such an impressive man.  He can excel in so many fields.  Growing up in his shadow, that was (usually) how I felt, as well.

I remember in the late ’80’s, when grandpa would have been only in his mid to late fifties, he got in a fist fight with a man named Don.  Don was the boyfriend of my uncle Mike’s ex-wife, Debbie, and Don and Debbie had come to grandpa’s to pick up the kids.  Uncle Mike was living with grandpa and grandma at the time, while he found somewhere else to live.  I was there, but don’t even remember what started the fight.  My memory of what I’ve been told suggests that Don and Mike started arguing and grandpa joined in.  He bloodied Don pretty good and sent him running for his car.  Grandpa followed up by throwing a brick that struck the car on the hood as it pulled out, just missing the windshield.

My own Dad used to tell that story with pride.  Pride that the “old man” had sent a guy in his thirties fleeing for his life.  When Dad told it, the story would usually go something like this:

“It was like a fight between two girls until Dad joined in.  Don saw him coming around the corner of the house and he knew the real man had arrived.  He was headed for the car, but Dad grabbed him by the hair and yanked him back, and he laid one on that fella that busted his nose like an overripe tomato.  Don couldn’t get away fast enough after that.  Not a bad showing for a 56 year-old man.”

Now in his seventies, Grandpa remains a large man, with large hands that no one would want to feel hitting their nose or mouth.  But when I was a kid, he was so much larger.

Since last winter, I’ve read four books by Saul Bellow:

1. The Adventures of Augie March
2. Seize the Day
3. The Victim
4. Herzog

And I am in the process of reading two more, his first published novel, Dangling Man, and one of his later book of short stories, Something to Remember Me By (1991).

The latter is called a book of short stories, but it actually contains only three novellas. I would define a novella as anything over 50 pages, which fits the first two stories but not the eponymous final story, which comes in at (only) 35 pages.

Even 35 pages seems too long for a short story, but admittedly when I think of short stories, I think of Hemingway. Now that man wrote short stories.  In fact one, titled “A Very Short Story” is barely a page long but Hemingway manages to pack in a love story between an Italian woman and an American soldier in WWI. The very short story ends with the soldier returning to Chicago, ignoring his lover’s letters, and contracting gonorrhea from having sex in a taxi cab with a salesgirl in a Loop department store.

Now that is a short story and any writer who can pack that much detail into a one page story has my utmost admiration. Not that I am holding Bellow to that standard. However, in the preface to the book, he does hold himself to that standard, many times extolling the virtue of brevity–a virtue he admits he himself has not practiced.

Still, I am reading his stories anyway. The first two are done, the third awaiting my attention tonight. Something to Remember Me By, published in 1991, presents an interesting contrast to the 1944 novel Dangling Man I am also reading.

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I go long periods without blogging, eventually coming to think that I finally have nothing left to say.  Then something happens that I find worthy of writing about.

“Worthy” is probably too strong a word in this case, because I am writing about nightmares I’ve been having lately.  Hearing about a friend’s dreams is like hearing about their sex life: we feel mild fascination at first, followed by disgust and boredom.

Our dreams are not pointless, but they are pointless to everyone else.  So I will try to keep the description here to a minimum.

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After getting on the bus, I took my book from my bag and began to read; but soon I found something much more interesting to observe. A man and woman boarded the bus, actively having a conversation–or at least it appeared they were having a conversation.

It soon became clear that the conversation was pretty one-sided, with the man doing most of the talking. The woman listens attentively, nods, gives him an “um-hum” occasionally. The two of them sit down across from me. Both are professionally dressed, the woman in a cream and beige skirt/blouse/jacket combo, brown handbag. She’s younger than the man, probably in her thirties. She’s wearing tennis shoes, her work shoes in her handbag, presumably.

The man is middle-aged, dressed in a navy blue suit, French blue shirt, and burgundy tie. His starched cuffs protrude just right from his jacket sleeves as he sits. He carries a black, soft leather briefcase which he placed on the floor between his legs. He also placed his umbrella between his legs, leaning it on one knee and holding it loosely by it’s knobby top with his left hand. His hair is brown with gray flecks; his face is unwrinkled, self-assured; he is handsome enough to be a politician. The woman is quite pretty too, but not striking.

Middle-aged men are so often far from striking that when you see one that is handsome, with good hair, but without a belly, without varicosed legs and a three day growth of beard, he really stands out.

The man was talking about his job at the DOJ, explaining the legal aspects of the legislative process, dropping names left and right. Harry, Tom, Judy, Dick…except for the names, which became like a guessing game for me (“Barbara…is that Boxer or Mulkulski?”) I couldn’t follow the particulars of his conversation. He didn’t sound completely pompous, just confident that the woman must be as interested as himself in his very important work.

Then I heard something, and if I heard it right, it was the mating call of the Man in the Navy Blue Suit. I saw the ritualistic dance, too. He wanted her to know he was a significant person in government, as well as a person of wealth and means. He made a reference to his car, a Mercedes which he needed to get serviced this weekend. And maybe he was thinking of getting something else serviced, too. He rubbed the knob of his umbrella almost rhythmically as he talked.

Did I mention there was a wedding band on his finger?

He was like a male peacock displaying his feathers. And then he made his overture to the female. She had been listening attentively, and now she had to get off. As she stood up, he said, “Here, here’s my business card. Call me or email any time.” She took the card, said “Thank you,” and got off.

As the bus pulled away, the man’s smile faded, feathers drooped. He coughed. His hand slowed it’s stroking of the umbrella handle and then finally came to rest. It was an odd display, that last bit with the business card. Maybe he sensed it was a little off beat, maybe just a little. Maybe just enough.

It’s been a long time since I’ve witnessed the dance first hand, and the dance at 20 is different than the dance at 50. I won’t even begin to make a comparison across the age spectrum, because I never learned the dance to begin with. It didn’t necessarily hold me back, though. I found a good mate anyway who accepted me despite my lack of social skills.

But you can tell when someone is attracted to someone else. It’s always fascinating to see how they disguise it while at the same time, showcasing it. I think the business card was meant to be a final display of confidence. He was following the bad advice of so-called alpha males (otherwise known as jerks) the world over: be the flame, not the moth. Let her chase you. Let her make the phone calls. Call her back…or let her hang a day or two and then call her back.

Somehow I got the impression he’d stumbled there on the last step of the dance, though. Maybe the whole dance was a lost cause from the beginning, though the woman did seem interested in him. Women are inscrutable to men, though. We never know what they really think…unless they tell us, in which case we sometimes rather wish we didn’t know after all.

This was just a short scene I noticed today, subject to my interpretation and maybe even misinterpretation. There is a whole story behind it, however, if some novelist wanted to flesh out the structure. Why was he making this move on this woman who, apparently, was a complete stranger? Or had she perhaps instigated the conversation? Did they work together, passing in the hallway day after day until finally they spoke a few words? What was their private lives like?

All I can say is, there’s a story for a better story-teller than me.

If Andy Warhol were alive today, I have no doubt he’d be an avid social networker. I also believe he’d revise his famous dictum, lowering the estimate from 15 minutes to 15 seconds. Or about the time it takes to write a 140 word Tweet, lose interest, and move on to the next fad.

A Slate article on people who post once to Twitter, then are never heard from again, confers something like poetic status on these brief outbursts into the void of time and space. One can imagine some intrepid graduate student in English literature collecting and publishing them in a book of anonymous “Twoetry,” as a way of paying for the health insurance his University refuses to provide its serfs.

Reading this article about Twitter reminded me of another I read yesterday, Can Once-Cool MySpace Stage a Comeback. I never knew MySpace was imperiled, but apparently its position in the online universe of social networking has been usurped by Facebook.

It wouldn’t surprise me if next year, Facebook is the topic of an article about a decline in users due to new competition from [insert catchy web application name her].

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