if
Sunday 13 July 2008 | 6 cookies in the jar
Señor Brujo left yesterday morning for his summer teaching gig, wee Honda packed to the gills with drums, keyboard and cactus paraphernalia. For sustenance, he took a bag of pretzels. He called in the evening from a grotty motel room in T or C, where he’d stopped for the night, to tell me he’d just dined on “some almonds and water.” I’m thinking he’ll return many pounds lighter. He goes into the wilds of rural NM for to work with the small-town small fry, composing music for the opera they will write. Last year’s student operas featured Pueblo natives, European colonists, cowboys, aliens, footballers, spies, and mummies. Not necessarily in that order.
For myself left behind, there’s that reverberating silence that comes when one is the only primate in an enclosed space, after many months of being closely companioned. There are Finny and Pye, to be sure, both of whom enact deep alarm at my having suddenly become a single parent. (It’s kind of a vote of no-confidence, you know, when the dog follows your every movement with cocked, worried eyebrows and the cat shrills at you crabbily from the foot of the bed—anthropomorphizing translation: “What did you do to make Tuna Man leave?! Call him and apologize right now. Because this is ALL WRONG.”) I talk to them endlessly, but the silence is still different. There is no strange “jazz” music, no tuneless whistling, no pep-talking-to-self in the shower, no evil laughter at freshly devised puns while shaving, no sound of flip-flops being kicked off and sliding along the tile floor, no backyard hollering at the dog muted by brick walls and a/c, no percussive two-fingered typing, no drizzle-rattle of coffeepot, no video-game cops radioing one another frantically (”Let’s set up another roadblock!”) in Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. (I cannot mention the B’s unending fascination with this game without also noting how EFFING WEIRD it is for someone who’s otherwise, as his Ex correctly notes, the most cautious driver in the world, to relish the pastime of electronically hurtling Maseratis and Lamborghinis at 160 mph down passenger-car-strewn boulevards while highway patrol helicopters drop bombs, realistically enough, on the player/street racer. To say nothing of the whole driving-under-the-influence arrest thing? Pure shadow play.)
So, here we are.
Yep.
NOT, I hasten to add, that there’s any shortage of Exciting Projects and Important Things to Do in his absence. I kicked off with, 1) Get the DSL and phone lines fixed; which by dint of assorted NVC/DBT skills I managed to accomplish after only an hour and forty minutes on the phone with Qwest.
[Boring blow-by-blow backstory which you should probably skip: I woke Wednesday morning to the sound of male shouting. He’s yelling at the dog, I thought groggily; and then: No, he’s using too many words. Because yelling at the dog generally consists of the same three or four words over and over (”drop it! leave it! Fiona! stop it!” etc.). I staggered to the bathroom, eyes still shut. Who else could he be yelling at? Because he’s not yelling at me….I decided it had to be either the Sponsor (?) or the Ex (?!) because who else does he love enough to be yelling at? But from behind the office’s closed door, there was an abrupt total silence. I was halfway through my Special K when a sheepish Brujo emerged. “The Qwest guy just hung up on me.”
“Oh. Okay.” Beat. “So does that mean they’re not gonna fix the phone?”
“They’re sending us a new modem.”
“But we already know it’s not the modem, because—” I began, unthinkingly. The B. made a weary talk-to-the-hand gesture, shoulders adroop with futility, and I wisely broke off that line of reasoning. “Well, I guess we can try it again.”
The modem arrived and of course made no difference. Backstory concluded.]
We live in such a strange new world, where tasks like dealing with malfunctioning equipment have become, for much of an average workday, our primary employment. What happened to spending the morning sharpening something, or sawing it, or digging it, or (for chrissake) writing it? It’s the kind of thing that makes John Gardner’s anti-hero James Page (in the woefully underrated October Light, about which more directly)—well, it makes him take a shotgun to the television, for starters. Fortunately, on a good day I feel pretty philosophical about the ruin of humankind; though I suspect I was only able to behave with equanimity on this occasion because I drew from my bottomless well of self-righteousness, aware with every cheerful greeting to yet another Qwest employee that the Brujo was in his office listening and by tunkit if I wasn’t going to model for him how to be effective and nonviolent with irritating people and situations. Though I myself came close to losing it more than once, given the sheer numbers of uninterested Filipina call-center staffers through whom I had to wade in order to reach someone who would call me back so I wouldn’t have to shriek over the wavery, wobbly “Mr. Watson come here I need you” overseas connection. Aforementioned call-center staffers quite reasonably thinking I was INSANE.
“So…you are saying that your DSL is not working because of this, ah…this ‘rain on the line’.”
“No, the rain on the line takes out the telephone. The DSL doesn’t work because it’s 115º and the cables are bare uninsulated metal.”
“Uh-huh. So now you think it is not working because it is hot.”
“Well, when it’s not raining it’s hot. So right now we do have DSL. But it’s morning and it’s only in the nineties. In an hour it won’t work any more. Although the heat will dry up the rain, so then the phone will work again.”
“Yes. I see. Would you mind holding, please?”
I don’t blame them. I know it sounds like I’m claiming we have a species of tin-can phone.
(BUT WE DO.)
À la fin du jour, I credit my eventual success to a situation-specific command of the DBT “broken record” skill (”Uh-huh, and what I hear ME saying is….”). Unfortunately I haven’t generalized this ability to many other areas of my life, but like most of my generation, I’m pretty decent with call-center tech support (is that why the Brujo’s rate is fifty-fifty—because he’s half-boomer? and also why, for example, my father can’t deal with customer service people at all?).
Flushed with victory, I then asked to be put through to billing and persuaded them to credit us for two weeks of non-service.
Not many hours later a technician came out with a ladder and repaired the line. The Brujo crept timidly to my office door.
“You’re my hero.”
I glared at him lovingly, exhausted by my own smugness.
Then he packed his car and left, and I went to the State School library, where the undergraduate clerks also seemed to think I was insane, exchanging mocking glances with one another as I filled my little red rolling briefcase with armloads of poetry and all the John Gardner criticism I could find. Because who goes to a PARTY SCHOOL library in the SUMMER to check out BOOKS? I ask you. Surely the best reason to air-condition a massive underground building containing 3.1 million bound volumes is so that half-a-dozen international students can sleep on the leatherette sofas. The library has a gelid, even-more-abandoned-than-usual air. And the clerks rolled their eyes surreptitiously because not only did I check out books but I tried to make clumsy conversation with them. I jammed on my unfashionable straw hat and lugged my briefcase awkwardly up the granite staircases, feeling old and ridiculous, like a character from a Katherine Mansfield short story.
Then I fell into bed and simul-read eighteen books, with interruptions to phone Mandarin, eat salad from a plastic bag and Amy’s pizza pockets, and get very very distracted by this inflammatory thread on the Beautiful Trench’s emergency blog, Sitting with Fire. It’s hard for those posting on the thread and anyone reading it not to have fire metaphors come to mind, because the conversation is so much like flame: darting, unpredictable, sudden, alarming, devouring, playfully violent; and then when it has passed, utterly gone; leaving the bare blackened bones so survivors can see what was lying underneath all the time. Yours truly opened electronic mouth and shoved in foot earlier on, so from henceforth I’m just spectating; as I said to Mandarin and the Umbrella last night:
WHY do I keep posting?!? I am just being flamed into a toasted organic pecan. And there are so much more timely matters at stake, like the great matter of forest fire. Yet it’s kind of amazing how one cackling troll has successfully organized an entire host of e-Buddhists into falling all over ourselves to be reasonable and understanding, while also delicately and/or tartly (depending on our maitri type) setting the anonymous original poster straight on just how hip Zen can be, dammit. But my participating is patently ridiculous; I’m not even affiliated with the Beautiful Trench; and if the B. weren’t watching the Weather Channel in a motel room in Truth or Consequences he would be tickling me and telling me so. I am shutting OFF this infernal machine and going to BED.
Which is as valid a message this morning as it was twelve hours ago. Still, if you’re interested in post-Marxist critiques of American Buddhism, whether balanced and mature or snarling and reactive—as well as similarly binomial defenses of same—it’s a fascinating little impromptu forum. I think.
And the whole disregarded-mandatory-evacuation aspect of the situation has been engrossing as well. En bref, as the remaining residents were being removed, five of them abruptly turned around on the road, halfway-out, and went back to the Trench to weather out the fire and keep the sprinkler pumps primed. Admittedly, their choice may have been one of the primary actions that saved the Trench’s main buildings; yet it was a unilateral decision; and if I were one of those who’d been hauled out, I’d have many intense feelings all at once. Like anger (who do those cowboy motherfuckers think they are); and hurt (the rest of us did a lot too you know); and maybe worst of all, left out (I wish I had been there). But for now the forest fire has chosen to allot its attention elsewhere, and everybody’s being pulled out, for real [Erratum: the five who were at the Trench, remain at the Trench.] Fire is not the only unpredictable factor in our plan-making.
Unlike Robert Frost, I know little enough of it. Late in the spring of my last year in school, our small sixty-acre farm burned entirely, all but the buildings. Sparks from a neighbor’s tractor must have ignited the grass; my father was at work, and my young mother fought the entire thing alone, using garden hoses to save the house, outbuildings and livestock. The school principal drove me home (himself in fact a former California fire captain); it was strange to see all the pasture which had been grass-and-tree covered that morning now smoking and blackened, and reporters from the local newspaper taking pictures. But sadly, I was already so mentally interesting (this was the year I only ate white food) that I remember primarily being deeply ashamed of my mother. She was covered in soot, trembling, hoarse from shouting, and grabbing all the belated firemen to tell them that God had saved her life; she repeated the story for years, voice hushed with awe, how as she ran frantically from rabbit cages to calf pens, she had tripped and fallen just as a wave of flame raced toward her, and then mysteriously, capriciously, decided to take another route. I hope I did not roll my eyes in front of her. Truth be told I was disappointed by the uneventful quality of the whole thing, from my puerile perspective. Nothing major had burned (other than an admittedly costly quantity of hay), not a single chicken so much as lost a feather, and I was still going to be stuck on the same grindingly poor hobby-farm with the same apocalyptic loons. Ah, there’s nothing like the appreciation and gratitude of pre-teens.
Yet it was admittedly curious that around every single building there was an outline of black where the fire had skirted each one. Perhaps Texas grass fires just move fast, and aren’t inclined to linger and eat buildings.
Today I think about the flower gardens and rock-lined creeksides, sheds and shacks and dusty futons where the Young Monk and I tried to court and fight discreetly, and probably failed; the gorgeous echoing baths where Mandarin and I swanned in happy silence, like blissfully boiled-alive frogs; the feet-slicked engawa, glossy black from years of daily mopping and the splendor of nenju; the infinite range of sounds with which a temple’s screen doors can flap shut or be noiselessly, tenderly closed; the dirt-floored student dining area where I once, weeping so hard I couldn’t see properly, accidentally tipped and spilled a five-gallon steel container full of just-sorted red lentils. And spent another hour picking them one by one from the dirt.
Like fire, that might be a metaphor for something; except that it’s not. It was just itself.
6 cookies in the jar
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
Repeating to myself “that might be a metaphor for something; except that it’s not. It was just itself.” Maybe what I didn’t write in my philosophy thesis a million years ago on metaphor was that at first it looks as if the creation of metaphor from our lives is a one-way thing, but in fact we go the other direction (it’s just like, just like how purl stitches are the perfect inverses of knit stitches: I watch my mother managing to teach my nine-year-old son to knit where I have not managed and not managed, and his triumph is sweet) and we create our lives from metaphor also.
Goshamighty, and I wasn’t even thinking about your thesis! [smacks self on forehead] Of course I’m wiggling rhetorically, anaphrastically even, when I coyly suggest that spilling the beans (as it were) “might” be a metaphor, but refuse to say for what.
PLEASE tell me you have read George Johnson and Mark Lakoff, because this will make my day; and said day is in need of some making, owing to a nerve-wracking near-incident involving a) the Brujo’s cactus seedlings, which always seem to suffer some harm on MY watch, and 2) an out-of-the-clear-blue (literally) summer monsoon.
I know I read and referenced Metaphors We Live By in the thesis (but don’t own a copy) and am hazarding a translation from an ancient version of Microsoft Word so I can cringe at said thesis just for the fun of torturing myself. Not that I am bored, but taking a break from swimming and knitting and reading and weeping unabashedly at movies. But if there is yet a chance for your day to be made, well, I want to make it.
Love.
So when do I get to read your thesis, she said evilly….! That would make my WEEK.
Pye sounds a lot like Heather Hamilton. I wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re related.
•
Annoying editor who doesn’t want to seem hopelessly uncool but curiosity gets the better of her: Who’s HH? I even stooped to g••gl•ng and still don’t know. Or do you mean Heather Armstrong and that my ANNOYING REPEATED USE OF ALL-CAPS has long since become tiresome? ;o) If you’re thinking GEORGE Hamilton, my God I couldn’t agree more—maybe even one of the Gabor sisters. She’s so petulant and femme, shrieking at me to come witness her entrances and exits via the painstakingly installed cat door, for example. Or insisting that I touch her kibbles before she will eat them, like her royal food taster. I thought cats were supposed to be all independent and shit. I’m sure it’s user error, but I miss Eloise’s self-reliance.
There. I’ve said it. I had a favorite child. Jesus, this alone could make Pyewacket neurotic.
So glad to read that the UnNarr still attempts to strike up conversations in libraries (the perfect place for it)! And thanks for reminding me about the opus of the terrific novelist John Gardner. The unfortunate timing of his death in 1982 simply confused casual readers into thinking he’d transmogrified himself into the John Gardner who ghosted Ian Fleming (e.g., No Deals, Mister Bond). Those dour trolls at the Library of Congress added one of my favorite subj headings to October Light: “Mentally ill—Vermont—Fiction.” Golly, who could resist that teaser?!
•
Helplessly laughing editor: Just brilliant; I can only hope to earn such a subject heading someday. And October Light! I love it! With exclamation points! I am now slogging through the much less cheery (and that’s really sayin’ somethin’) Sunlight Dialogues right now. WHYYY is Gardner so criminally neglected?! (I mean, I know why: because he pissed off everyone within earshot; but still.)