Tonight was special.
I’ve been in touch with Mike for a few years now, and we had spoken on the phone once or twice, which was an experience all by itself. It’s uncanny, to say the least, to talk to someone who was pre-pubertal the last time you spoke. Things are familiar but different.
We were really good friends in junior high and ninth grade, but in tenth grade I switched to another high school, and I lost touch with my old friends. In general, I’m pretty crappy when it comes to keeping in touch with friends. (Thank heavens for the Internet, though.) I’m not sure how Mike and I found each other again, but I think I might have googled him one day and found his blog. We’ve been emailing off and on, but this is the first chance we’ve had to get together in person.
He tells me that the GenXers are so into texting that they don’t know how to conduct conversations anymore. Fortunately, we haven’t forgotten how to talk. I suppose these sorts of reunions could completely flop — how much is there to talk about after you’ve had the “who have you kept in touch with” conversation? Turns out, a lot. We had a great time, and I only broke it off because I wanted to get to my hotel before 11 to have some time to unwind, and blog, and check my email . . .
So yeah I’m down in LA for a Kaiser affair. (Sorry, Sis, but I got here too late in the evening to do dinner with you. Next time I’m down here, I promise. It’ll be in about one month.) Jake has his Freshman Retreat tomorrow and I suspect we’re going to be doing the same thing, my son and I: breaking into small groups and discussing relationships. How can you spend a whole day doing this? I guess I’m going to find out (Jake and I both). And I have not just one day of this, but THREE, blessedly scattered one month apart.
Back to Mike: we had a great time. So much fun to see someone I haven’t seen since 1976. 1976! Can you imagine? Back then, 1984 still sounded like the distant future, and don’t even mention the Millennium. We would be pushing forty then. We would be old.
But if growing old means more pleasures like these, I guess it won’t be so bad.
D.
Phil Nugent of Nerve dissects the television industry’s timidity in 10 Sexual Controversies That Changed TV. Commenters take Nugent to task over painting an excessively gloomy picture of Hollywood’s handling of gay issues, so don’t miss the wrap-up at the end.
But honestly, who looks to network TV for cutting edge programming? All gays are either asexual, or sexual far off camera; all teenagers contemplating premarital sex decide against it (That Seventies Show was a notable exception); all pregnant teens invariably decide not to abort. One does not look to television for spine.
D.
18.5%: that’s my current body fat measurement. Solidly in “good” territory and close, very close, to “excellent.” I suspect this means I’m close to my target body weight . . . body mass index be damned.
After my last session with the trainer, I rented a truck, came home, and loaded up all the cardboard and packing paper. I suspect I had a couple hundred pounds or more of cardboard — maybe more, since I’m terrible at guessing weights. I know I filled a ten-foot truck and that it took four or five hours to load and unload.
Unloading was the real bitch. The recycle bins are designed to discourage dumping; you have to fit your cardboard through slits and holes and smallish squares, so there’s really no chance of depositing boxes in their natural boxlike state. I had a couple dozen boxes jam-packed with packing paper, and I had to unload all the paper then break down each box. That’s in addition to the dozens and dozens of boxes I had already broken down.
So what it all amounts to is several hours of an almost total body workout: not much on the abs, but lots of leg and upper body work in 90 to 100 degree weather. I’m bushed.
Here’s what I want to know: is there a mitzvah for recycling cardboard and paper? Our rabbi back in Crescent City, a lefty if ever there was one, once tried very hard to find some basis for environmentalism in the Old Testament. He couldn’t. Nevertheless, Judaism is if anything a flexible religion, adaptable to changes in technology and social mores, and so he felt one could exercise great liberty in declaring that certain practices are, indeed, good in God’s eyes.
As an agnostic, this is little more than a passing curiosity for me. I guess I’ll have to be content with the fact that I had one hell of a workout today.
In other news: we received Jake’s midterm grades, and he’s pulling As in everything except his theology class. I suspect this is because he missed an important test, and the teacher probably had to count it as a zero until he makes it up. Or at least I hope that’s the reason. He makes up the test on Monday, and I think we’ll email the teacher to make sure that’s the reason for the low grade.
D.
The earlier years are nested inside me like matryoshkas: the early confusion, the youthful romanticism, the 20-something premature jadedness. They’re all still there.
48 has such beautiful symmetry:
48
24
12
6
3
Halfway to 96. It’s still not too crazy to say to myself, Only half over. (Yes, that’s getting to be a progressively more difficult argument to make.)
When I look in the mirror, I still expect to see 18-year-old me looking back. I still ask the same question I asked back then: Who are you?
D.
It’s September, but here in Bake-o it feels like the middle of summer. And I keep thinking about how, before Karen broke her hip a few years ago, we used to take a summer drive up the Oregon coast. It must be the time of year, but I keep remembering those drives. How on the last drive we made it as far as Newport Oregon, and stayed at an ocean front hotel that had a jellyfish tank in the lobby, and how very pleasant our stay was, and how I thought, “It’s really not that much trouble to get away. This is nice enough, we ought to do this two or three times a year.”
I think that was in 2006, maybe even 2005.
These memories assault me unbidden:
There’s an old guy, in Bandon I think, with a model train collection. He lets people visit but he takes a dim view of children — he watched Jake with a steady intent that was nearly insulting. (Yes, he doesn’t know our son, doesn’t know that Jake is not and has never been a destructive force of nature. Not like some boys.)
There’s a place in Newport where you can paint pottery and get it glazed and fired. We had them mail us a bunch of pieces . . . most were broken when they arrived, but we still have the salad bowl.
South of Newport, there’s a sushi place we’ve been to twice. Last time, they made us wait two hours for our food. They were able to keep Jake (who was quite young at the time . . . six or seven?) well supplied with tofu, but it was still a grueling wait. The kid was great, never kvetched, just played with his toys and ate his tofu.
I keep thinking about the Newport Aquarium, which I think is better than the Monterey Bay Aquarium — every bit as nice but half as crowded. Recently, unpacking, I found a stuffed animal from our last trip. An octopus.
We’ve been to the Oregon Seal Caves twice, I think. Always impressive — both as a geological formation (I think it’s one of the largest sea caves anywhere) and as a noise/stench. Lots of seals or sea lions or whatever. Noisy buggers.
I miss these trips up the coast. I miss the silly dinosaur park north of Gold Beach, the place with the giant cabbages. (The cabbages are real. The dinosaurs are fake.) I miss the petting zoo in Bandon, where my young son had a penchant for taking pictures of animal poops. It’s one of the biggest petting zoos in the world, by the way, and if you have young children, it’s a reason unto itself to make the trip to the Oregon coast.
I miss the coast itself. It’s indescribably beautiful, especially the stretch from Gold Beach to Port Orford. I miss hiking with my son along the coastal trail. They seemed like such boring hikes back then, but now my heart aches for them.
More than anything else, though, I miss traveling as a family. We do a lot less of it nowadays, since Karen doesn’t travel well.
And I keep thinking about the ocean, and the wind in Bandon, and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in Newport, and Yachats (which is just a fun name to say), and all the bridges large and small we cross on our journey north, and the little hotels and tiny towns and restaurants, some gems, some crap, always a surprise.
I’m an odd bird. I was restless after ten years in one place, and yet I dislike change, too. I guess some losses take a while to register.
D.
This is one of those viruses where the improvement is incremental. I know yesterday was better than last Friday because I had no fever, no chills. I know last night was better than the night before because I got to sleep without a cough drop in my mouth. For the past four or five days, I’ve been able to lie down without feeling my lungs collapse into a layered pastry of velcro. And this morning, I had the energy to unpack.
I brought in six or seven boxes from the garage, most of which were labeled ‘kitchen, store,’ meaning these were low priority items that could be left in storage as long as necessary. There’s a futile feeling associated with such unpacking; after all, I have a fully functional kitchen now, so anything I might unpack is, at the very least, unnecessary. And so I’ve had to decide what to do with another two huge pyrex casserole dishes, another three frying pans I never use.
Some things are useful. I found our electric can opener, our Belgian waffle maker, our bread machine. I also found the base of a Cuisinart (nothing else left, just the base), an old mark-up board written on with indelible marker, a wire rack for barbecuing fish (which I’ve never used), a joke drinking mug, a caulking gun.
And so forth. I threw a bunch of stuff out, and I put more stuff out into the garage for eventual donation. I kept the mini-Bundt pan, the fajita iron, the bamboo forms for making sushi. We keep all our wedding china, naturally, but we’ve had perhaps two or three occasions to use it over the years. I broke one of our wine glasses from the wedding china sets — I doubt it will be missed.
I don’t know what impulse led us to grow over the first two decades of marriage, but at last we’re finally shrinking.
Still. I haven’t found our flatware — I know it’s out there somewhere — and I haven’t found the one thing I tend to think symbolizes our decades of uncontrolled growth: an aebelskiver mold I bought in Eugene, Oregon. I even used it once. So, yeah, there’s at least one more box of kitchen stuff out there, along with countless boxes of books.
Oy, the books: we had a built-in bookcase in our master bedroom in Oregon, and nothing like that here. I have no clue what I’m going to do with all of our books.
Time to drink more water.
D.
We got the old computer out of mothballs — that’s the one that has all of my old writing on it. Seemed prudent to transfer all of those files to this laptop before the old computer emits a wheezing gasp of ozone and cacks it. Anyway, for lack of any true inspiration, and because my reader Maureen suggested it, I think I might revisit Brakan Correspondent and think about a revision. Lots of good stuff in that novel, but then there’s lots of stuff in the novel. Way too many characters, everyone fighting for center stage.
I’ve been away from the manuscript for a year. Is that enough time for objectivity? Do I have what it take to cut scenes — to cut characters?
I feel kind of pessimistic about the whole thing: first, that I have the discipline to take a razor to the text; second, that it’s a worthwhile endeavor and not a fat waste of time. I’m not sure I do have the objectivity to see the right thing to do. At one point, I thought I should turn the whole thing into a narrative with two limited third person perspectives (Cree and Boron, for those of you who remember the characters) but then the titular Correspondent’s story becomes too hard to tell. So I’m back to the multiple POV interlaced story line, and that’s just Brakah. What about the giant tarantula subplot? Talk about something which could be surgically excised without damage to the story! Except that Bare Rump does have some of the best lines.
Maybe the undisciplined approach is best. Keep the story wild and woolly and obviously a first novel. Just fix the plotting and tighten what I can.
You’d think one year away from a manuscript would make things easier.
D.