It's another paralyzingly quiet moment during Pants's parents' visit. The only sound is the humming of the air conditioner and Pants's mother, R.'s, occasional labored coughs. R. has had pneumonia three times this year, an has now invested in a nebulizer, a machine I remember from childhood because my brother had to use one for his asthma. It makes you look like the smoking worm from Alice in Wonderland, and it almost makes me wish I had rumble lungs just so I could sit around and puff vapor from a machine twice a day. When I smoked as a teenager I think it was this, the fascination with gadgetry and slow, contemplative process of puffing little clouds out of my mouth that formed the bulk of my habit, and not an addiction to nicotine. Addicts are much more conscientious-- I kept forgetting to smoke, and thus had to stifle the highly uncool reflex to cough.
I'm feeling like a bad hostess. When one of your guests has very little short term memory left, the lapse into boredom for them is quick and steep. I am left wishing we had invested in cable, or even had a toddler dashing around to liven things up. As it stands, Pants and I are some of the least stimulating people you'll ever meet. I read, he naps, in the evenings we watch BBC nature programs, and then we call it a night. This seems to suit R. just fine, who, for the first time in ages, is catching up on her reading (World War II espionage and the flora and fauna of Yosemite, which we visited mostly by car yesterday) but for Pants's father...
There's so much I can't imagine about Alzheimer's, especially this strain of it which has set in so early in his life and taken so much so quickly. Every time D. has gotten to visit us in the past three years, we've lived somewhere different, and the struggle to map the interiors of each of our new living spaces as a guest has provided one of the ways I can see the progress of the disease.
Yesterday we drove out to Yosemite. Pants's family has always been big into the national park thing, and they've been almost everywhere. Some of my earliest conversations with D., back when the disease only meant he couldn't work and sometimes lost his train of thought, and back when I was only the new girlfriend, a tenuous experiment after the unmitigated disaster of the college paramour, were about the beauties and memories in various parks. We formed our friendship over maps and snapshots. D. was an avid and capable outdoors man, and taught Pants the wildly attractive art of homemaking in the wilderness. It was a treat to take D. to such an iconic park, even if the static of logistics often got in the way. The road trip was long, so Pants brought along a nostalgic surprise-- two c.d.'s of classic Western songs, to which his parents laughingly sang along. D. has always been tone deaf, and R. sings pitch-perfect but in a high, warbling soprano, so they've always made a funny duet. Pants and his older brother used to snicker through church hymns at their parents' mismatched but enthusiastic performances.
The park, unfortunately, was packed. Frenetic Japanese teenagers, languid Spaniards, and grim-faced, athletic Germans in those awful gardening sandals clogged the walkways and taxed D.'s limited navigational resources. Several beautiful pictures hold D. drifting in their frames, gazing unfocused at the hordes of gabbling foreigners disgorging from nearby tour buses. "Look at me!" I'd call, "Smile!" and more than once it seemed that he humored me out of a reflexive polite obedience, and not because he recognized me or understood that he was part of a picture. This morning we reviewed the pictures on my computer screen, and he seemed shocked and pleased to hear that we'd taken a trip the day before. Each image fired a new synapse that reminded him of fragments of past trips, activities he'd led with his boys, things he'd done as a scout leader, and each new story started with a few confident words and then faded. Conversations now draw on all my reserves of constructing narratives and viewpoints. I told him what he'd seen at each stop, what sounds we'd noticed.
D. and R. have a touching kind of teamwork going, and I think it's ironic and amazing that even though the disease has wrought such merciless and swift subtraction, the two of them are still teaching me about what a relationship builds up over the years. I've read that Alzheimer's can change its victims' personalities, and that the frustrations of forgetting can fray nerves on both sides of the equation, patient and caretaker. But D. and R. are both scientists, and both Christians, a protective (and somehow not contradictory) combination that allows them to draw on reserves of scientific logic and religious faith depending on the situation. They hold hands everywhere they go these days-- her ankles aren't strong and recently she's been short of breath so she leans on him. He depends on her as both rudder and anchor in the chaos of crowds. She has a frank, no-nonsense way of assessing a situation, and he is gentle and humbly accepting of each instruction.
I don't think this symbiotic give-and-take is built in. I think it's a product of negotiation and experimentation under the most extreme of pressures, and the most unstable circumstances. I think it comes from years of planning, and years of coping when plans erode, and a commitment whose strength has held even as so much else has crumbled. I'm humbled by watching them, even as they sometimes drive Pants and me nuts with their nightly phlegm chorus and quirky fascination with roadside weeds. It's helped to remind me what I signed up for that night in December when I sniffled my way through the vows and felt electric and jittery from all the benevolent eyes watching us. Through moves, job searches, endless road trips with impatient pets, meager bank balances, bizarre military subcultures, hurricanes, mountains of flight manuals to be memorized, loneliness and perpetual upheaval, I have a hand to hold.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Friday, July 27, 2007
The Friggin' Angel Gabriel
Pants's parents are in town for a week long visit. Right now, his mother snores with blessed regularity on our living room couch (she's not had a break from being a full time caretaker in weeks), his dad is flipping through an Adventure magazine, Pants is tearing over Death Valley at 400 knots, and Abby is twitching her paws in dream-sleep at my feet. My epic job search has entered a twilight period where one offer is in the works and another languishes in the realm of possibility. Things are quietly waiting for change.
I haven't written much about it before because the experience hardly seems mine to talk about, but Pants's father is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. He's recently moved into an assisted living unit, but Pants's mother and brother and sister-in-law visit him regularly and take him out to go swimming and take day trips with the family and his two small grandsons.
State-hopping with the military has been especially frustrating for me because Pants and I are separated from this loop and often powerless to help when things get overwhelming. Pants's mother is directly descended from iron-willed plainswomen, the kind who will reach fearlessly into the womb of a bellowing cow in labor to untangle the calf, and getting her to admit that working full-time as a public school teacher and a caretaker for Pants's father has been an epic struggle. When I ask her on the phone how things are going, she says, "Oh, fine!" in a strident tone that makes me believe they are anything but. The assisted living arrangement has seemed a blessing all around, but it's been long in coming and has required several tipping points.
Luckily, there is Gabe. Gabe is an 8-year-old cocker spaniel who is Pants's father's best friend and constant companion. As the disease has advanced and the concept of time has fallen away, Gabe has been the one rock solid constant whose presence is reliably uncomplicated. He has been allowed to move into the assisted living facility, and when Pants's father occasionally becomes confused or upset, turning the conversation to Gabe seems to set the world right again.
If only we were all so fond of Gabe.
The cocker spaniel is a mysterious breed. They look so loving and innocent with their huge, wet eyes and their curly, mud-flap ears. But every cocker spaniel I've known has been completely immune to any concept of discipline or reason, and Gabe is no exception. His penchant for overturning trashcans and spreading their contents throughout the house has led Pants's folks to purchase large, industrial metal canisters for their home, the kind you'd imagine for biohazard facilities. Gabe also has a charming habit of urinating all over the feet of visitors, charging at the door with one long scream-bark whenever the doorbell sounds, and leaping back up on to the couch with maddening persistence after being pushed off repeatedly and told "no." His hunger is insatiable, the tragic result of some thyroid malfunction, and anything mildly edible, even if stored on high shelves or tabletops or meant for another pet unlucky enough to share space with Gabe, is in danger. Finally, he's rather blase about appropriate places to relieve himself, as he enjoys full diplomatic immunity from Pants's father, who defends Gabe's every transgression with unfailing filial allegiance.
It feels almost sacrosanct to badmouth this dog, but it's a favorite topic among Pants and I and his brother and sister-in-law. We do it with great creativity and profanity, and usually dissolve into near hysterical giggles with imitations. It's almost as if in skewering Gabe and the domestic chaos he wreaks we can vent a few of our frustrations about the ravages of Alzheimer's and the helplessness we all feel in the face of it.
Gabe has been an especially painful issue this week since he wasn't allowed to make the plane trip out to California. I'm still unclear whether this was because of the cost associated with shipping him or because, in his habit of focusing on annoyances that are not the main issue, Pants vetoed his presence, and I suspect the reason may be a combination of the two. Whatever is was, I spent the week prior to the visit worrying that a Gabe-less week in a totally foreign city would deeply upset Pants's father, and at least the first two days seemed to have borne this out, but yesterday was a little better. The explanation of temporary situations and distances and vacations and "next week" didn't seem to convince Pants's father that Gabe was neither dead nor had he been taken away for good. At first he constructed sad narratives about the course of Gabe's life and his gentle personality and the tragedy of his death, and when I tried repeatedly to correct this story alone with him in the local Starbucks, Pants's father broke down into tears and said, "Bless you, if only that were true." It was almost too much for me, but I figured that if I broke down into tears too, that would only undermine my story about Gabe's being alive but in another state.
The local flower nursery failed as a distraction. Pants's father is an avid gardener and usually enjoys showing me all of his plants and their blossoms, even occasionally plucking some off their stems and putting them in my hair, which makes us both laugh, but our local nursery owner has an apparently limitless pack of dogs, and they sleep quietly in the shadows of the tomato vines and citrus bushes for sale. Soon the flowers lost all attraction and he paced the aisles quickly whistling and patting his leg for Gabe.
I don't often have to handle Pants's father on my own these days. It's a tag team activity for anyone but his mother, whose presence he automatically takes as evidence that things are OK. My fondest hope for this visit, though, has been to give his mom some time to herself to rest, but it's been hard. Not helping things at all is Pants's flight schedule, which has allowed an iron-clad series of excuses for him to disappear for up to 12 hours every day, sometimes flying, sometimes studying in a secure vault. When he comes home, he disappears into the study or into a nap. It's not fair for me to be frustrated by this but I am, and my most persistent visual fantasy today has been of my fingers closing gently and then with increasing pressure over his throat. This is not the kind of stuff I should write about my husband, but I figure it's better to write about it than do it.
Yesterday was better. We swam at the base lap pool and went to the local farmer's market and the activity seems to rinse some of the lingering Gabe anxiety out of the air. Abby has also been helpful in her own way. Her herding instincts have kicked in and she makes laps during the slow, quiet hours during the oppressive heat of the day, like now, her claws clicking on the wood floor as she visits first me, then Pants's mother, and then his father, sniffing each of us and licking our feet. If only Gabe were so subtle...
I haven't written much about it before because the experience hardly seems mine to talk about, but Pants's father is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. He's recently moved into an assisted living unit, but Pants's mother and brother and sister-in-law visit him regularly and take him out to go swimming and take day trips with the family and his two small grandsons.
State-hopping with the military has been especially frustrating for me because Pants and I are separated from this loop and often powerless to help when things get overwhelming. Pants's mother is directly descended from iron-willed plainswomen, the kind who will reach fearlessly into the womb of a bellowing cow in labor to untangle the calf, and getting her to admit that working full-time as a public school teacher and a caretaker for Pants's father has been an epic struggle. When I ask her on the phone how things are going, she says, "Oh, fine!" in a strident tone that makes me believe they are anything but. The assisted living arrangement has seemed a blessing all around, but it's been long in coming and has required several tipping points.
Luckily, there is Gabe. Gabe is an 8-year-old cocker spaniel who is Pants's father's best friend and constant companion. As the disease has advanced and the concept of time has fallen away, Gabe has been the one rock solid constant whose presence is reliably uncomplicated. He has been allowed to move into the assisted living facility, and when Pants's father occasionally becomes confused or upset, turning the conversation to Gabe seems to set the world right again.
If only we were all so fond of Gabe.
The cocker spaniel is a mysterious breed. They look so loving and innocent with their huge, wet eyes and their curly, mud-flap ears. But every cocker spaniel I've known has been completely immune to any concept of discipline or reason, and Gabe is no exception. His penchant for overturning trashcans and spreading their contents throughout the house has led Pants's folks to purchase large, industrial metal canisters for their home, the kind you'd imagine for biohazard facilities. Gabe also has a charming habit of urinating all over the feet of visitors, charging at the door with one long scream-bark whenever the doorbell sounds, and leaping back up on to the couch with maddening persistence after being pushed off repeatedly and told "no." His hunger is insatiable, the tragic result of some thyroid malfunction, and anything mildly edible, even if stored on high shelves or tabletops or meant for another pet unlucky enough to share space with Gabe, is in danger. Finally, he's rather blase about appropriate places to relieve himself, as he enjoys full diplomatic immunity from Pants's father, who defends Gabe's every transgression with unfailing filial allegiance.
It feels almost sacrosanct to badmouth this dog, but it's a favorite topic among Pants and I and his brother and sister-in-law. We do it with great creativity and profanity, and usually dissolve into near hysterical giggles with imitations. It's almost as if in skewering Gabe and the domestic chaos he wreaks we can vent a few of our frustrations about the ravages of Alzheimer's and the helplessness we all feel in the face of it.
Gabe has been an especially painful issue this week since he wasn't allowed to make the plane trip out to California. I'm still unclear whether this was because of the cost associated with shipping him or because, in his habit of focusing on annoyances that are not the main issue, Pants vetoed his presence, and I suspect the reason may be a combination of the two. Whatever is was, I spent the week prior to the visit worrying that a Gabe-less week in a totally foreign city would deeply upset Pants's father, and at least the first two days seemed to have borne this out, but yesterday was a little better. The explanation of temporary situations and distances and vacations and "next week" didn't seem to convince Pants's father that Gabe was neither dead nor had he been taken away for good. At first he constructed sad narratives about the course of Gabe's life and his gentle personality and the tragedy of his death, and when I tried repeatedly to correct this story alone with him in the local Starbucks, Pants's father broke down into tears and said, "Bless you, if only that were true." It was almost too much for me, but I figured that if I broke down into tears too, that would only undermine my story about Gabe's being alive but in another state.
The local flower nursery failed as a distraction. Pants's father is an avid gardener and usually enjoys showing me all of his plants and their blossoms, even occasionally plucking some off their stems and putting them in my hair, which makes us both laugh, but our local nursery owner has an apparently limitless pack of dogs, and they sleep quietly in the shadows of the tomato vines and citrus bushes for sale. Soon the flowers lost all attraction and he paced the aisles quickly whistling and patting his leg for Gabe.
I don't often have to handle Pants's father on my own these days. It's a tag team activity for anyone but his mother, whose presence he automatically takes as evidence that things are OK. My fondest hope for this visit, though, has been to give his mom some time to herself to rest, but it's been hard. Not helping things at all is Pants's flight schedule, which has allowed an iron-clad series of excuses for him to disappear for up to 12 hours every day, sometimes flying, sometimes studying in a secure vault. When he comes home, he disappears into the study or into a nap. It's not fair for me to be frustrated by this but I am, and my most persistent visual fantasy today has been of my fingers closing gently and then with increasing pressure over his throat. This is not the kind of stuff I should write about my husband, but I figure it's better to write about it than do it.
Yesterday was better. We swam at the base lap pool and went to the local farmer's market and the activity seems to rinse some of the lingering Gabe anxiety out of the air. Abby has also been helpful in her own way. Her herding instincts have kicked in and she makes laps during the slow, quiet hours during the oppressive heat of the day, like now, her claws clicking on the wood floor as she visits first me, then Pants's mother, and then his father, sniffing each of us and licking our feet. If only Gabe were so subtle...
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Disenchanted
Things are going wrong in our little rental house.
Just in the past week, the air conditioning unit revealed itself to be older than Pants and me put together and far too small for the house since its various add-ons. Then the breakers kept popping, randomly, and various outlets and appliances, most notably the refrigerator, would lapse into eery, silent death. It's weird to have to keep checking things when the place seems too quiet. Then yesterday the thermo-coupling (??) on the water heater went out and Pants and I had to take angry cold showers in preparation for work/interviews.
At each new and irritating event, we called our property manager, who has a wispy princess voice and a talent for seeming perpetually bewildered. I picture her sitting in a bower of trees, shaded from the harsh light of the sun and weaving garlands of daisies for her hair. Occasionally a blue bird or a butterfly will light upon her outstretched finger and she'll sing it a little song. Then, from somewhere deep in the patch of clover by her side, a phone rings. Startled, she drops the garland, and the blue bird cocks its head in curiosity and perches on her shoulder as she gently lifts the receiver and says, breathlessly, "Hello...? [Our Town] Real Estate?"
And on the other end is me, sweating in the dark and constantly yanking open the refrigerator door to make sure my lunch meat isn't going bad. Luckily, Pants has no qualms about using the No Bullshit voice with this woman, so while my attempts to garner her empathy ("I have an interview in two hours and no hot water to take a shower") inevitably fail, his implicit threat to burn down her magical unicorn grove somehow gets through. We now have an new air conditioner, a replaced breaker, and in another 30 to 40 minutes, hot water.
Tomorrow I have another interview, a second one for a job I really, really want. My task is to prepare a five minute presentation on anything in the world, and be interesting, memorable, and engaging. In theory, this sounds doable, but when I started to scroll through my list of possible topics-- Tupac, crazy dictators, infectious skin diseases, and famous people eaten by bears-- I started to realize how very much time I've spent alone in the past few weeks. Where was I when they were teaching charming skills like napkin folding?
So today is for cramming and hyperventilating and self doubt. Then tomorrow morning I will run another 4.5 miles and ride the tide of endorphins into the presentation reminding myself that it's only five minutes, it's only a job, it's only... Christ, it's only a job?
Still, there are other options. Downtown there's a bright orange sphere on wheels from which a bored, sweaty college kid sells orange-flavored chipped ice. The hinges on the orange open at the middle and he sits inside with little more room than a golf cart's interior would offer. Throughout the afternoon, he periodically gets out of his orange ball and rotates the stand so that the sun is partially blocked by the top half of the orange. But in order to stay completely in the shade, he'd have to turn his stand's back to the street, so there's a good hour and a half there where he sits in his orange, squinting and baking and possibly hating God. So there's always that.
Back to cramming...
Just in the past week, the air conditioning unit revealed itself to be older than Pants and me put together and far too small for the house since its various add-ons. Then the breakers kept popping, randomly, and various outlets and appliances, most notably the refrigerator, would lapse into eery, silent death. It's weird to have to keep checking things when the place seems too quiet. Then yesterday the thermo-coupling (??) on the water heater went out and Pants and I had to take angry cold showers in preparation for work/interviews.
At each new and irritating event, we called our property manager, who has a wispy princess voice and a talent for seeming perpetually bewildered. I picture her sitting in a bower of trees, shaded from the harsh light of the sun and weaving garlands of daisies for her hair. Occasionally a blue bird or a butterfly will light upon her outstretched finger and she'll sing it a little song. Then, from somewhere deep in the patch of clover by her side, a phone rings. Startled, she drops the garland, and the blue bird cocks its head in curiosity and perches on her shoulder as she gently lifts the receiver and says, breathlessly, "Hello...? [Our Town] Real Estate?"
And on the other end is me, sweating in the dark and constantly yanking open the refrigerator door to make sure my lunch meat isn't going bad. Luckily, Pants has no qualms about using the No Bullshit voice with this woman, so while my attempts to garner her empathy ("I have an interview in two hours and no hot water to take a shower") inevitably fail, his implicit threat to burn down her magical unicorn grove somehow gets through. We now have an new air conditioner, a replaced breaker, and in another 30 to 40 minutes, hot water.
Tomorrow I have another interview, a second one for a job I really, really want. My task is to prepare a five minute presentation on anything in the world, and be interesting, memorable, and engaging. In theory, this sounds doable, but when I started to scroll through my list of possible topics-- Tupac, crazy dictators, infectious skin diseases, and famous people eaten by bears-- I started to realize how very much time I've spent alone in the past few weeks. Where was I when they were teaching charming skills like napkin folding?
So today is for cramming and hyperventilating and self doubt. Then tomorrow morning I will run another 4.5 miles and ride the tide of endorphins into the presentation reminding myself that it's only five minutes, it's only a job, it's only... Christ, it's only a job?
Still, there are other options. Downtown there's a bright orange sphere on wheels from which a bored, sweaty college kid sells orange-flavored chipped ice. The hinges on the orange open at the middle and he sits inside with little more room than a golf cart's interior would offer. Throughout the afternoon, he periodically gets out of his orange ball and rotates the stand so that the sun is partially blocked by the top half of the orange. But in order to stay completely in the shade, he'd have to turn his stand's back to the street, so there's a good hour and a half there where he sits in his orange, squinting and baking and possibly hating God. So there's always that.
Back to cramming...
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Lights, candy, and baby pygmy goats
In the past when I've left you, blog, I've always come crawling back with confessions that I did nothing, had no fun, had in fact been lying on my back picking at my navel and watching the shadows leak across the ceiling and thinking nothing of consequence. This time it's different. I did things! I talked to people! I went places and held infants of another species!
My friend A. came to visit from Texas. I'm not sure why I'm abbreviating her name since she's not running from the law or anything, but it does give her a certain air of mystery that seems to suit her so I'm going with it. A. arrives periodically in my life at each of our new postings like a much needed rain, a very polite rain that leaves no puddles but graciously nurtures everything and cleans off the dust. This time was no different.
I picked her up at the airport in Oakland (which was an adventure in itself because apparently no one in south Oakland trusts credit cards as a means to pay for gas. In fact, they laugh at them and say, "Nah, honey, you got to have actual money.") Then we drove the three long hours back to the Central Valley, a trip which is only interesting if you challenge yourself to make a whole crushed salad with your tires.
California's Central Valley is like the produce section in the grocery store of America (South Texas is the discount beer section, and the Florida Panhandle is the religious greeting card section), and the land is laid out like a giant food quilt stretched flat and tucked in at each horizon with roads for seams. Right now is the tomato harvest, and the whole way out to Oakland I shared the road with double-trailer trucks piled high with small rosy tomatoes. Full trucks going north, empty ones going south. Occasionally I'd pass a truck full of yellow or purple onions, and even more rarely, a garlic truck shedding its garlic dandruff all over my windshield. The best parts are the on and off ramps and the odd bump or curve in the road, where these trucks lose some of their load. It seems so incredibly wasteful, like there's a perfectly good set of ingredients for a simple spaghetti sauce, but whee!-- there it goes. Lettuce season was earlier in the spring, and it was fun to see the leaves take to the wind like little green wings.
Anyway, A. and I managed to find a few things to do in the Central Valley despite her San Francisco friend's warning, "There's nothing out there!" We went to a Portuguese bakery, found good Thai food in Fresno, saw an old Taoist temple and Chinese boarding house, visited an art museum hidden way out in a corn field, and went to a county fair where we got to hold baby pygmy goats. Beat that, Most Gorgeous City in America.
I'd never been to a county fair before, so the whole animal husbandry element was a real novelty. I mean, I've seen my share of sketchy carnivals where the games of chance are as rigged as real life and the carnies make me suddenly remember every cautionary threat my parents made about eating vegetables and staying in school, not to mention that weird undercurrent of popular fatalism it takes for people to get on the rides knowing that they were assembled only hours ago and will be gone tomorrow regardless of whether or not you've still got all your limbs. I'm not a fan of carnivals-- at least, not for the usual reasons. I like them because of their tawdriness, because of all the pretty lights, and because there's always at least one kid there who's having so much frantic, over-stimulated fun that he pukes, fantastically, athletically, all over something.
But a fair? That's apparently a whole different thing. It wraps a carnival in a folksy cloak of legitimacy because it gets people to bring out the things they're proud of-- their quilts, their glossy, angular dairy cows, their fat and sleepy rabbits, their buttermilk pie, their giant zucchini, their pygmy goats, their 800 pound pig. The 800 pound pig, by the way, was named Sean. Just Sean. Lots of the animals had funny names like Little Paris Hilton or Ricky Bobby or honorary titles reflecting the family who raised them or the farm they were raised on, but this monster pig was just Sean, like maybe he chose it and everyone was too afraid to argue.
I went on a photo binge in the rooster tent (which, come to think of it, has got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've ever written) because they were all so beautiful, so ceremonial and war-like, and yet so tourettic and jerky that it was almost impossible to tell which of the four poses they hit during the time it took my camera lens to open and shut would be the one in the picture. Plus, it was evening light, all slanted and golden, and it hit the roosters' combs from behind and made them look even more like weird little dinosaurs with flame faces.
While I was on my photojournalist kick I took a few artsy shots of the lights and the rides and all the shitty prizes, and I'd gotten into that mode where I was seeing things only for form and color and negative space when this short little man with a spiky blond mullet and apparently a raging eye infection came up and asked me who I worked for. When I gave him a blank look, he clarified:
"Like, are you with the newspaper? A big newspaper? Are you going to publish those?"
"Oh. No. I just take pictures for fun."
He seemed greatly relieved. A. suggested later that perhaps the terms of his parole stipulated that he not be in contact with children, which was how I photographed him from 30 feet away, surrounded by kiddies. Or maybe he was on the run. Or maybe he believed that a published photo stole some of his soul. So that was a little bit of the carnival aspect peaking through. That and the little girl who became a fountain of half-digested funnel cake in the middle of the women's restroom and then promptly burst into tears.
We rounded out the night by stopping by to see some very out of place lions yowling and pacing around in cages on the back of an 18-wheeler, waiting to get fed hunks of ground beef. They were supposed to perform the next day in some show called "Walking With Lions," which frankly didn't sound too demanding or stimulating from a lion's point of view. What struck me was that they acted exactly like Linus when he's hungry and pissed off-- lots of throaty moans, slit-eyed glares, and swipes at nearby people. I was invigorated by them and went on another photo binge, but they depressed A., and she stood against the wall in the shadows their cages made. I guess that's the British Imperialist in me-- "Look at these magnificent beasts! Let's hold them up for scrutiny and ignore the question of how they got to be here!"
The highlights of the night for me were holding the baby pygmy goat and seeing the lions, which is ironic when you consider that one highlight could have been fed directly to the other.
My laptop is getting suspiciously hot and Blogger has refused my last 9 attempts at uploading pictures even though they would clearly add so much more to your experience of this post, so I think I may give up for today and take another whack at explaining my fun-filled absence tomorrow.
My friend A. came to visit from Texas. I'm not sure why I'm abbreviating her name since she's not running from the law or anything, but it does give her a certain air of mystery that seems to suit her so I'm going with it. A. arrives periodically in my life at each of our new postings like a much needed rain, a very polite rain that leaves no puddles but graciously nurtures everything and cleans off the dust. This time was no different.
I picked her up at the airport in Oakland (which was an adventure in itself because apparently no one in south Oakland trusts credit cards as a means to pay for gas. In fact, they laugh at them and say, "Nah, honey, you got to have actual money.") Then we drove the three long hours back to the Central Valley, a trip which is only interesting if you challenge yourself to make a whole crushed salad with your tires.
California's Central Valley is like the produce section in the grocery store of America (South Texas is the discount beer section, and the Florida Panhandle is the religious greeting card section), and the land is laid out like a giant food quilt stretched flat and tucked in at each horizon with roads for seams. Right now is the tomato harvest, and the whole way out to Oakland I shared the road with double-trailer trucks piled high with small rosy tomatoes. Full trucks going north, empty ones going south. Occasionally I'd pass a truck full of yellow or purple onions, and even more rarely, a garlic truck shedding its garlic dandruff all over my windshield. The best parts are the on and off ramps and the odd bump or curve in the road, where these trucks lose some of their load. It seems so incredibly wasteful, like there's a perfectly good set of ingredients for a simple spaghetti sauce, but whee!-- there it goes. Lettuce season was earlier in the spring, and it was fun to see the leaves take to the wind like little green wings.
Anyway, A. and I managed to find a few things to do in the Central Valley despite her San Francisco friend's warning, "There's nothing out there!" We went to a Portuguese bakery, found good Thai food in Fresno, saw an old Taoist temple and Chinese boarding house, visited an art museum hidden way out in a corn field, and went to a county fair where we got to hold baby pygmy goats. Beat that, Most Gorgeous City in America.
I'd never been to a county fair before, so the whole animal husbandry element was a real novelty. I mean, I've seen my share of sketchy carnivals where the games of chance are as rigged as real life and the carnies make me suddenly remember every cautionary threat my parents made about eating vegetables and staying in school, not to mention that weird undercurrent of popular fatalism it takes for people to get on the rides knowing that they were assembled only hours ago and will be gone tomorrow regardless of whether or not you've still got all your limbs. I'm not a fan of carnivals-- at least, not for the usual reasons. I like them because of their tawdriness, because of all the pretty lights, and because there's always at least one kid there who's having so much frantic, over-stimulated fun that he pukes, fantastically, athletically, all over something.
But a fair? That's apparently a whole different thing. It wraps a carnival in a folksy cloak of legitimacy because it gets people to bring out the things they're proud of-- their quilts, their glossy, angular dairy cows, their fat and sleepy rabbits, their buttermilk pie, their giant zucchini, their pygmy goats, their 800 pound pig. The 800 pound pig, by the way, was named Sean. Just Sean. Lots of the animals had funny names like Little Paris Hilton or Ricky Bobby or honorary titles reflecting the family who raised them or the farm they were raised on, but this monster pig was just Sean, like maybe he chose it and everyone was too afraid to argue.
I went on a photo binge in the rooster tent (which, come to think of it, has got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've ever written) because they were all so beautiful, so ceremonial and war-like, and yet so tourettic and jerky that it was almost impossible to tell which of the four poses they hit during the time it took my camera lens to open and shut would be the one in the picture. Plus, it was evening light, all slanted and golden, and it hit the roosters' combs from behind and made them look even more like weird little dinosaurs with flame faces.
While I was on my photojournalist kick I took a few artsy shots of the lights and the rides and all the shitty prizes, and I'd gotten into that mode where I was seeing things only for form and color and negative space when this short little man with a spiky blond mullet and apparently a raging eye infection came up and asked me who I worked for. When I gave him a blank look, he clarified:
"Like, are you with the newspaper? A big newspaper? Are you going to publish those?"
"Oh. No. I just take pictures for fun."
He seemed greatly relieved. A. suggested later that perhaps the terms of his parole stipulated that he not be in contact with children, which was how I photographed him from 30 feet away, surrounded by kiddies. Or maybe he was on the run. Or maybe he believed that a published photo stole some of his soul. So that was a little bit of the carnival aspect peaking through. That and the little girl who became a fountain of half-digested funnel cake in the middle of the women's restroom and then promptly burst into tears.
We rounded out the night by stopping by to see some very out of place lions yowling and pacing around in cages on the back of an 18-wheeler, waiting to get fed hunks of ground beef. They were supposed to perform the next day in some show called "Walking With Lions," which frankly didn't sound too demanding or stimulating from a lion's point of view. What struck me was that they acted exactly like Linus when he's hungry and pissed off-- lots of throaty moans, slit-eyed glares, and swipes at nearby people. I was invigorated by them and went on another photo binge, but they depressed A., and she stood against the wall in the shadows their cages made. I guess that's the British Imperialist in me-- "Look at these magnificent beasts! Let's hold them up for scrutiny and ignore the question of how they got to be here!"
The highlights of the night for me were holding the baby pygmy goat and seeing the lions, which is ironic when you consider that one highlight could have been fed directly to the other.
My laptop is getting suspiciously hot and Blogger has refused my last 9 attempts at uploading pictures even though they would clearly add so much more to your experience of this post, so I think I may give up for today and take another whack at explaining my fun-filled absence tomorrow.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Whole Lot of Not Much Going On
I'll be up front about it-- I've been doing nothing of substance. With the exception of applying for a few more jobs and (yay!) scheduling an interview for one, my days have been remarkably full of not much. I've learned to shrink my economic footprint by burrowing deeper into library books, but even the unhealthy amount of reading I do has ceased being productive.
I'm currently locked into a war of attrition with the novel Snow by Orham Pamuk. According to the book jacket prose, which I read like a literary nutrition label, this one is supposed to be beefing up my knowledge of the conflicts between secular and religious Turkish society, but unfortunately my main character is a poet, and wanders through the novel like someone heavily dosed on valium, commenting mostly on his boredom, the beauty of the snow, and his unquenchable lust for a woman about whom he appears to know nothing, whose only interesting feature appears to be her stubbornly zipped fly. All around this guy a military coup is unfolding, a teenager zealot has been shot right through the eye and abandoned in the morgue, and countless officials and henchmen from both sides of the conflict have taken an inexplicable interest in monitoring our protagonist's movements. So far the book has inspired in me a fervent wish for some kind of narrative megaphone with which I could address all the characters: "Ka (the main character) is a retard. Stop encouraging him. Go about your coup."
A friend is coming from Texas to visit me next week and already I'm nervous about how to explain to her the normal trajectory of my day:
6:00 Run 4.5 miles with dog who won't stop pulling on the leash. Look like a sadist trying to remedy this situation.
7:00 Return to front yard, try to conceal dry-heaving from last ill-advised sprint. Dunk purplish face under kitchen faucet and lie prone on tile floor trying to fend off dog licks for at least half an hour.
8:00 Check internet for signs of latest Britney Spears meltdown. Click sheepishly over to the BBC when Pants walks into study.
9:00-2:00 Do something or other. Options include staging Swiffer battles against mounting snowdrifts of pet fur, collecting-- grudgingly-- the little trails of dishes, clothing, trash that mark Pants's journeys through the house, read, search for jobs, embark on random internet searches for exotic diseases and cool music videos.
2:00-5:00 Lament heat. (Close all window coverings, close A/C vents in all rooms but the living room, devour ice from recycled Super Big Gulp cup, lie prone on tile floor, periodically check the totally ineffective thermostat. When inside temperature reaches 92, resort to nakedness and whimpering).
5:00-midnight Attempt to cool down by cajoling various friends with better A/C to invite you over. Bring beer to express your gratitude.
Yeah, she's going to love that.
Recently my mom hooked Pants and I up with a three-month subscription to NetFlix (my mom subsidizes easily 90% of our "fun" budget, which, when you consider what a little shit I was for much of my teenage years, is nothing short of amazing) and we've also been on an obscure movie kick. Our first three were Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, a Miyazaki movie I still hadn't seen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Gaslight.
"Nausicca" was thematically rich and engaging, but since Pants finds my obsession with Miyazaki sometimes tedious-- never ask him about My Neighbor Totoro; his review is, "Everything sucked but the cat bus."-- I let him sit this one out. When it became clear that the movie included extended scenes of pilots being eaten by giant bugs, a horrifying combination tailored to Pants's specific neuroses, I was glad I'd exempted him. Still, the environmentalism message was impressively complex-- not just "Fuck you, Humanity, for sullying this treasured earth" but more of a measured look at complex biological interdependencies that aren't immediately obvious, and the value of a non-reactionary approach to conflict.
"Sierra Madre" was excellent but for the part where the DVD shat the bed two scenes from the end. All I was able to figure out is that Humphrey Bogart gets whacked by some peasants who take his shoes and scatter his hard-earned gold dust and then somehow his compatriots ride laughing into the sunset. Thanks, NetFlix. Watching Bogart go slowly crazy was better than I'd predicted. I expected a lot of progressively whackier monologues delivered in that same machine gun-paced hard-boiled detective delivery he perfected so well in "The Maltese Falcon," but he managed to keep that in check and appear genuinely unhinged.
"Gaslight" was great, even though the mystery bad guy is obvious from the beginning-- those sleazy continental Europeans with their long cigarettes!-- but I found myself wondering yet again how actors in old movies could stand delivering their lines in such close facial proximity. Seriously, could Ingrid Bergman really have focused on anything but Charles Boyer's nose hairs when she delivers all those lines in crushing face-to-face embraces? She also employs some of my least favorite female lead conventions of the time period-- the rushed, passionately delivered line immediately followed by a shaking half swoon into the nearest doorway-- but thankfully the Punch Kiss wasn't in there. Pants and I named this phenomenon after watching "Casablanca" about a thousand times. It's where the female lead gets all hysterical, as women tend to do, and the only recourse is to shake her and then plant a kiss on her mouth that would break any mortal's incisors. Pants and I actually tried this at half speed and still managed to come perilously close to one fat lip apiece. All of this is to say that I admire Ingrid Bergman's acting for all the reasons any normal person would suspect, but also for the fact that she endured an incredible number of Punch Kisses and eye-crossing embrace monologues.
Pants has just come home and informed me that we're due at a 90's costume party tonight. If I'm true to my 90's self, I'll go in baggy jeans, a flannel shirt with a Nirvana T-shirt under it, black Converse All-Stars with purposefully obscure Kurt Vonnegut quotes written on them, and a surly scowl hidden behind a curtain of reddish-dyed hair. I'll be damn near intolerable with my sarcasm and ennui and will answer questions with angry song lyrics. Charming!
I'm currently locked into a war of attrition with the novel Snow by Orham Pamuk. According to the book jacket prose, which I read like a literary nutrition label, this one is supposed to be beefing up my knowledge of the conflicts between secular and religious Turkish society, but unfortunately my main character is a poet, and wanders through the novel like someone heavily dosed on valium, commenting mostly on his boredom, the beauty of the snow, and his unquenchable lust for a woman about whom he appears to know nothing, whose only interesting feature appears to be her stubbornly zipped fly. All around this guy a military coup is unfolding, a teenager zealot has been shot right through the eye and abandoned in the morgue, and countless officials and henchmen from both sides of the conflict have taken an inexplicable interest in monitoring our protagonist's movements. So far the book has inspired in me a fervent wish for some kind of narrative megaphone with which I could address all the characters: "Ka (the main character) is a retard. Stop encouraging him. Go about your coup."
A friend is coming from Texas to visit me next week and already I'm nervous about how to explain to her the normal trajectory of my day:
6:00 Run 4.5 miles with dog who won't stop pulling on the leash. Look like a sadist trying to remedy this situation.
7:00 Return to front yard, try to conceal dry-heaving from last ill-advised sprint. Dunk purplish face under kitchen faucet and lie prone on tile floor trying to fend off dog licks for at least half an hour.
8:00 Check internet for signs of latest Britney Spears meltdown. Click sheepishly over to the BBC when Pants walks into study.
9:00-2:00 Do something or other. Options include staging Swiffer battles against mounting snowdrifts of pet fur, collecting-- grudgingly-- the little trails of dishes, clothing, trash that mark Pants's journeys through the house, read, search for jobs, embark on random internet searches for exotic diseases and cool music videos.
2:00-5:00 Lament heat. (Close all window coverings, close A/C vents in all rooms but the living room, devour ice from recycled Super Big Gulp cup, lie prone on tile floor, periodically check the totally ineffective thermostat. When inside temperature reaches 92, resort to nakedness and whimpering).
5:00-midnight Attempt to cool down by cajoling various friends with better A/C to invite you over. Bring beer to express your gratitude.
Yeah, she's going to love that.
Recently my mom hooked Pants and I up with a three-month subscription to NetFlix (my mom subsidizes easily 90% of our "fun" budget, which, when you consider what a little shit I was for much of my teenage years, is nothing short of amazing) and we've also been on an obscure movie kick. Our first three were Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, a Miyazaki movie I still hadn't seen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Gaslight.
"Nausicca" was thematically rich and engaging, but since Pants finds my obsession with Miyazaki sometimes tedious-- never ask him about My Neighbor Totoro; his review is, "Everything sucked but the cat bus."-- I let him sit this one out. When it became clear that the movie included extended scenes of pilots being eaten by giant bugs, a horrifying combination tailored to Pants's specific neuroses, I was glad I'd exempted him. Still, the environmentalism message was impressively complex-- not just "Fuck you, Humanity, for sullying this treasured earth" but more of a measured look at complex biological interdependencies that aren't immediately obvious, and the value of a non-reactionary approach to conflict.
"Sierra Madre" was excellent but for the part where the DVD shat the bed two scenes from the end. All I was able to figure out is that Humphrey Bogart gets whacked by some peasants who take his shoes and scatter his hard-earned gold dust and then somehow his compatriots ride laughing into the sunset. Thanks, NetFlix. Watching Bogart go slowly crazy was better than I'd predicted. I expected a lot of progressively whackier monologues delivered in that same machine gun-paced hard-boiled detective delivery he perfected so well in "The Maltese Falcon," but he managed to keep that in check and appear genuinely unhinged.
"Gaslight" was great, even though the mystery bad guy is obvious from the beginning-- those sleazy continental Europeans with their long cigarettes!-- but I found myself wondering yet again how actors in old movies could stand delivering their lines in such close facial proximity. Seriously, could Ingrid Bergman really have focused on anything but Charles Boyer's nose hairs when she delivers all those lines in crushing face-to-face embraces? She also employs some of my least favorite female lead conventions of the time period-- the rushed, passionately delivered line immediately followed by a shaking half swoon into the nearest doorway-- but thankfully the Punch Kiss wasn't in there. Pants and I named this phenomenon after watching "Casablanca" about a thousand times. It's where the female lead gets all hysterical, as women tend to do, and the only recourse is to shake her and then plant a kiss on her mouth that would break any mortal's incisors. Pants and I actually tried this at half speed and still managed to come perilously close to one fat lip apiece. All of this is to say that I admire Ingrid Bergman's acting for all the reasons any normal person would suspect, but also for the fact that she endured an incredible number of Punch Kisses and eye-crossing embrace monologues.
Pants has just come home and informed me that we're due at a 90's costume party tonight. If I'm true to my 90's self, I'll go in baggy jeans, a flannel shirt with a Nirvana T-shirt under it, black Converse All-Stars with purposefully obscure Kurt Vonnegut quotes written on them, and a surly scowl hidden behind a curtain of reddish-dyed hair. I'll be damn near intolerable with my sarcasm and ennui and will answer questions with angry song lyrics. Charming!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
