Thursday, July 22, 2010

The Angel

It has been less than a week since I started this bad boy, promising myself that I would compose something new every day. Now, I find myself lying on the floor searching for better wi-fi at 1:30 in the morning. It's not happening today. If it were going to happen it would have looked something like this: I made my daily trip to Target today and ended up at the register with several rolls of film and several CDs all by musicians who are either grandparents or died before they got to be. The girl at the checkout counter looked at me like I had just stepped out of a time machine. I could hear her thinking, "You know we sell digital cameras and iTunes gift cards, right?" Instead, she took my money and said, "Have a nice day, ye olde farte." OK, so she didn't say that last part, but I'm sure she thought it. Then, I had Chinese food for dinner, and my fortune cookie read: "A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking." IF I had written something today, it would have been about the relationship between those two experiences, and the advent of "new media" and it's effects on the way we gather and distribute information (insert circumspect, self-deprecating blog joke here). But, I didn't.

In lieu of a real entry, I'll post a short, short story that I revamped for consideration to be read publicly next month. That's what I was working on instead of blogging. OK, that and having a beer with an old friend. Sue me.

The Angel


Steam is pouring out from the side of the car’s hood that isn’t pinned against the pavement, and a hubcap spins in smaller and smaller concentric circles before it finally rattles to a stop. The street is quiet besides the hiss of the radiator. The summer sun is still low in the sky when Bobby’s bicycle rolls up to the car. It’s a dark green station wagon just like the one Mrs. Whitman drives, except Bobby has never seen hers on its side, so he can’t be sure.

Bobby swings his leg over the back tire of his bike and walks it to the side of the road opposite the car, waiting for someone to walk out of their front door. There is no click of a latch leaving a door jam. Just the slow, regular, thp…thp…thp of baseball cards in the spokes of his tires. He’s only two blocks from his own house, where he could use the telephone, but who would he call? What would he tell them? He’s just a few houses from Helen’s, but he knows there is no one there. She won’t be home from swimming lessons for another hour, at least. All of the grownups are at work. All of the other kids are at summer camp, or swim lessons, or on vacation with their parents. Bobby’s parents can’t afford any of those things, so they bought him a bike. He’s had the neighborhood streets to himself all summer. It’s quiet, but not lonely.

“Are you all right?” Bobby calls tentatively across the road.

No one answers.

“Are you all right?” he asks the car with a little more confidence.

Still. No answer. Maybe the car is empty. Maybe whoever was driving climbed out the door right after the car slid to a stop. Maybe they are in the Stevenson’s house across the street right now, calling a wrecker. Mrs. Stevenson would have fixed them a glass of iced tea and offered to mend any of the clothes that would undoubtedly have been ripped in the crash. After all, Bobby didn’t actually see the wreck. He rode up and found the car already overturned, capsized like a skiff in choppy water. The windshield was cracked pretty badly, so he couldn’t see inside. Now, the undercarriage of the car was staring across the street at him, so he really had no idea if there was anyone inside or not. Surely, if there were some inside the car, they would be calling for help, wouldn’t they? But they weren’t. Bobby stood, holding his bike by the handlebars, certain that no one was calling for help.

There wasn’t a second car. There never had been, as far as Bobby knew. When he arrived on the scene, there had not been a car driving away in the direction he was going, and he had not passed anyone since he left the house. To Bobby, this sounds like a question for the police. Yes, the police. They would be able to look at the street and the skid marks and tell whether or not someone was responsible for this overturned automobile, or if it was just an accident. Bobby had seen it on television. After he and Helen had watched a Cubs game or a Cardinals game, they sometimes watched shows about the police and how they could tell things from looking at other things that most people thought were just other things. If the Cubs or the Cardinals were not on television, they would look through his baseball cards and try to determine their value. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were obviously his two most valuable. Bobby admitted to Helen that the McGwire card was probably more valuable because it is a rookie card, but not because he was going to win the home run race. Helen’s favorite was a Cal Ripken, Jr. card. It was a photo of him jogging around the warning track of Camden Yards in the middle of the fifth inning when he had officially broken Lou Gherig’s record of consecutive games played. Bobby likes that card, too, but really just because Helen likes it. He remembers the night Ripken broke the record. His father had let him stay up late to watch it, but he fell asleep on the floor in front of the television. His dad woke him up to send him to bed when Ripken broke the record. He had never seen anyone so excited as the people in the stands were that night. For a long time after, he wasn’t sure if he had even woken up, or if it was just a dream, but, then Sammy started hitting home runs – 20 in the month of May, alone – and he knew what it felt like to be that excited about baseball.

Yes, this is a job for the police, Bobby decides. He lets his bike fall gingerly to the grass between the street and the sidewalk, and walks up to the Steinman’s house. He rings the bell, but there is no answer. He rings it again, but there is no one there to answer.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Short and the Long of It

From the time of my earliest memories, I have been in love with baseball. In grade school, I watched it every chance I got. I read only baseball books. I played it in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. I collected cards and memorized stats. My friends and I imitated the swings of our favorite players. Baseball was all I wanted, needed, or cared for. Sure, I occasionally cheated on baseball. I'd spend the occasional Sunday afternoon in the park with basketball, or Saturday afternoon in the garage with a guitar, or summer morning on a golf course. But, those and the rest of their kind inevitably proved more flash than substance, and I always went slinking back to a game whose countless merits do not exclude second chances.

There is a fundamental symmetry to the game. Nearly every one of its facets depends upon a multiple of three. There are three strikes to an out, three outs to an inning and nine innings to a game. There are three bases one must safely cross before reaching home to score a run. There are nine fielders and nine batters. Each at-bat exists on a minimum of three players: pitcher, catcher, and batter. The list goes on, and on.

Nevertheless, baseball is a game that most learn in pairs, generally speaking fathers and sons. Sometimes fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, or even (as I was fortunate enough to occasionally experience) grandmothers and grandsons. Still, there is something about baseball that lends itself to fathers to be shared with their sons. Baseball is the only game that exists comfortably both in perpetuity and finality. The game is not over until 27 outs on one side are recorded, but never until then. Within the confines of any given game, any at-bat, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes. Every game, every pitch, holds the possibility of something entirely new. And yet, every game is ultimately the same. There is no running out the clock. There is no punting for field position. There are no fouls to regain possession. There are only outs and an endless number of ways to record them.

This is the fundamental truth about life, which every father wants to reveal to his son. Each day dawns anew, with its own set of opportunities and temptations. Each day contains its own hits, strikeouts, and errors, but your batting average isn't final, your ERA isn't tallied until the final out. And then, you have something tangible to look at and see how you did. Failure against good opponents and success against the mediocre balance themselves out at the end of a season to produce the sum total of your achievement that will exist as long as a crease left in a page left dog-eared, telling everyone who comes after you, I was here and this is my story.

My own father and I used to spend mornings before school playing catch. He would throw the ball over my head, I would track it down over my shoulder and throw it back to him. He would then throw the ball short and I would come charging in, throw the ball back to him and start the process over. As far as I know, we invented this game that I creatively dubbed, "Short and Long." I no doubt grew impatient with him when he wouldn't throw the ball far enough out of my reach to suitably test my limitations. I'm sure I complained not so very rarely that he wasn't making me dive, though, to my recollection, he never responded in anger or even called into question the cleanliness of my school uniform. Instead, he threw the ball a little farther from my grasp, laughing with me when I dove and came up short. There were plenty of opportunities for short words and lost tempers. Opportunities that I'm sure came more frequently and violently as we played catch more rarely and less intently.

My father is alive and well, happy and productive, as is my mother, the bench coach to my father-manager on our little baseball team. They (and their marriage) survived the booby-trapped life of parents with a teenage son testing his limitations beyond ball fields and into cars, girls, and all sorts of more dangerous mischief. I don't play baseball anymore. I don't even play catch with my father. But the game still informs nearly everything we do. Sure, we have found other common interests that include, but are not limited to the works of Samuel Johnson, the music of Bruce Springsteen, and the drinking of dark beers. Still, there is an element of "Short and Long" in every interaction we have, and there will be long after he is gone. Every so often, he and I will have the chance to go to a game together. No matter how many games we go to, I will always feel like the 7-year-old version of myself, helping him record outs on the scorecard, trying to keep up with the subtle nuance of recording each play for inspection as a whole after the completion of the game. Whenever we sit on his back porch, I always think of playing catch deep into summer evenings, swearing that I can still see the ball long after he and I both knew that I couldn't. I know that he thinks of his own father whenever he tells me a story about some long-retired ball player who only a fan would remember. There are hall-of-famers and journeymen, all-stars and flame-outs, but for every game they exist within the same 27-out universe with the same capability of altering its outcome. And as long as there are fathers and sons, there will be someone to record their long-balls and short-falls with the care and precision required by something of utmost importance. And really, what could matter more?

Monday, July 19, 2010

So, you want to have regrets?

There is moral dignity in regret. Regret implies that one has lived and made choices as sincere as they may have been foolish. To regret is to see one's own life as it is and in comparison with how it could have been. Regret, at least to some degree, is the necessary outcome of retrospective introspection, and everyone wants it. Don't believe me? Go to your local bookstore. Any title that purports to be the story of someone who "lived a life with no regrets" either is, or shortly will be, on the remainder table beyond the security alarms, begging to be taken. Look through your record collection or iTunes library, as the case may be. The late nineties and early 2000's were riddled with disposable music about a life with no regret. The eighties are defined by hedonistic music about living life to the fullest so as to avoid regret, all by musicians who now regret the drugs, pants, and hair. You get the idea.

Horace Walpole said that "life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think." We all know people who love to feel their feelings, and, generally, their feelings are hurt. We also know people who either exist in a perpetual state of cynicism or at least try to see the humor in even the most ardently stressful moments of their lives. The fact is that most of us fall somewhere in between. What Walpole fails to mention is that people are not so easily lumped into categories of "feelers" and "thinkers." Most of us think about our lives, and how we feel about them. The place where our thoughts and feelings collide is what we call regret. Invariably, when we consider the places we have been, we come across places where we were happier and wish we could get back, or where we weren't as happy as we thought we would be and wish we had never gone. This is not because each of us has some Aristotelean notion of the perfect life to which our own never quite measures up. It is not because the universe is cold and ambivalent. It is because we are not perfect. It is because, though we often claim to, we are not satisfied with the best. The humor in Voltaire's Pangloss is his obsessive search for "the best of all possible worlds," as he drives himself to death traipsing through the very world for which he is looking. There is no utopia. There is no world other than this. Yes, it is not perfect, but it is by far the best of all possible worlds, rife with doubt, grief, and regret.

Regret gets a bad rap. Anyone who shuns regret (or grief, or any other less-than-flowery feeling, for that matter) is missing the point. There are plenty of beings that do not regret, but, given the choice, I will take regret and grief over the alternative a million times out of a million. Regret and grief are the badges we wear as proof that we were here. They are the seeds we plant that bloom into hope and joy. Regret is the roadmap and grief the lantern we carry forth to avoid the pitfalls that have previously ensnared us- though they may way us down, we are lost without them.

Friday, July 16, 2010

For Faulkner, Forever Ago

Yesterday, I set up my record player at my parents' house. I hope to take it with me to Chicago, but I don't really want to neglect it in the interim. After dinner, my dad and I sat down to shoot the bull (as is our custom) while my mom washed dishes, saying there was just a bit more, just a bit more... (as is her custom).

My dad had already sifted through all of his old LPs that I stole, so I put on Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago. A few tracks in, I realized that I couldn't stop thinking about Faulkner, specifically Absalom, Absalom!. I reread Absalom in January, and had recently purchased For Emma, so was listening to it a lot, while reading. I'll grant you that it's possible that the simple act of listening to a record a dozen or so times while reading a single book will naturally link the two in the reader's/listener's mind. However, I don't think that's where the connection ends.

To begin with, consider just the sound of the record. It's dark, hollow, and haunting. It's like a painting with deep, rich colors, made with wide, but careful brush strokes that capture incredible detail without obviating the viewers use of imagination. Think: Iron & Wine meets Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen meets Starry Night. There's also something faintly Southern about the sound. Acoustic guitars fading out like a lap steel player just missed a fret. A single bass drum backbeat that could be the singer stomping his foot on a dancehall stage along with the beat. To punctuate the link between the sound and the novel, consider a bit of historical evidence: Justin Vernon, the sole composer of the album left North Carolina to spend the winter in a Wisconsin cabin, and emerged after three months with For Emma. Absalom, Absaslom, of course, is the story of the Sutpen and Compson families of Mississippi as told primarily by Quentin Compson to his college roommate on a cold, winter's night in Massachusetts. So, both works are, in the end, a Northern retelling of Southern events that have been refashioned and misremembered over a span of time and space. (NB: I wonder if Vernon is aware of Absalom and the role in the narrative played by Charles Bon. I know the myth about Bon Iver being a purposefully misspelled version of the French phrase for "good winter," misspelled because "hiver" reminded Vernon to much of liver and mononucleosis. But if a folk-pop singer/songwriter doesn't know the power of layers of meaning, he isn't much of a folk-pop singer/songwriter, now is he?)

Now, consider the album's lyrics. The opening track begins with Vernon swooning almost threateningly, "I am my mother's only one / It's enough." He sings later in the song, "I am my mother on the wall, with us all / I move in water, shore to shore / Nothing's more." The primary plot movement of Absalom, Absalom! is motivated by the opaque past of it's central character, Thomas Sutpen, slowly materializing in front of us with an inevitability that draws the reader along, knowing the heartbreak to come, but powerless to turn away. Along the way, Sutpen's son, Henry meets Charles Bon at school. Eventually, to no surprise to even the most inattentive reader, Charles Bon is revealed to be Sutpen's estranged son from an abandoned, Haitian wife. If there is little question as to whether or not Bon knew the truth about his father and his friend, Henry, there is even less question as to whether or not his mother knew the errand on which she sent her son, long before he ever completed it. The novel is broken up by points in time when Sutpen disappears to New Orleans, presumably visiting his abandoned wife, but whatever purpose he imagines himself to carry out is far too late to appease the woman, as her "only one" is already moving "shore to shore" acting out her vengeance upon the Sutpen's. Read the novel for that story.

Skipping ahead one track, to "Lump Sum," Vernon sings an incomprehensible tale of loss, regret, trade, sacrifice, and unkept promises. As if we need to be reminded, Vernon sings, "So the story goes..." at intervals. In Absalom, we're periodically brought back to Quentin and his roommate, Shreve. Shreve fills in parts of the story for Quentin, when he is unable (or unwilling) to draw difficult conclusions about his family history. One can hear him saying, "Thomas Sutpen abandoned his mulatto wife and son, or so the story goes," and, "Charles Bon fell in love with Henry's sister Judith, his own half-sister, or so the story goes." It's then not hard to hear Shreve saying, "So, Eulalia Bon sent her son to school in Mississippi, hoping he would find his father, knowing what would happen when he did," and "Old Sutpen knew that his son, Henry, would murder Charles when he realized that his sister, Judith, was going to marry a black man, or that she was going to marry her half-brother." So the story goes...

The next song, "Skinny Love" is the singer's recollection of his last-ditch effort to save a romance doomed by something he can't remember, something he won't remember, or something that doesn't matter. "I told you to be patient / I told you to be fine / I told you to be balanced / I told you to be kind." I wanted you to be all of these things that you are not. I put you in a box into which you fit uncomfortably for a while, but now you're out and we both know that you aren't going back in. "Pour a little salt we were never here." Quentin's retelling of his grandfather's friend's story echoes these sentiments (or, I suppose it's more accurate to say that Bon Iver echoes Faulkner. Whatever.) Thomas Sutpen came to Mississippi from West Virginia by way of Haiti, leaving behind him a wake of shame and sadness. He arrives in Mississippi with nothing and strong-arms his way into a legacy of prosperity. He was who he told people he wanted to be. He fit into the box he built for himself, but it inevitably failed to hold him. By the end of the novel, all that's left of his legacy is not even a shadow of its previous prosperity. It's not thing more than a thin layer of ice on a Massachusetts window that could be erased forever with a single pinch of table salt. We were never here.

"Someday my pain / Someday my pain will mark you." At this point, does that one really need an explanation? Read the book.

I'll reward your patience and persistence if you've made it this far by sparing you anymore close analysis of Bon Iver songs beyond this last one: "So did he foil his own? / Is he ready to reform? / So many torahs / So many for us / The creature fear." Taking the first two questions in succession as they refer to Thomas Sutpen: 1) Yes, duh. 2) No. He dead. There are a myriad of Torahs. Every traveling salesman has the gospel you need to make your life what you want it to be for four easy payments of $19.95. Ask anyone you know and they'll give you a scripture prescription for whatever ails you. What they won't tell you is that what ails you is fear. What chased Thomas Sutpen from Virginia to Haiti to Mississippi to his unmourned grave was fear. We are weak creatures with strong thoughts. To think is to be afraid. Consider any problem you've ever had or any decision you've ever struggled to make. Can you phrase the crux of the issue beginning with, "I fear that..."? I fear that I'm not smart enough. I fear that the market won't recover. I fear that there isn't enough time. I fear that there's something I haven't considered. I fear. You fear. It's not the absence of fear that gives one courage, but the ability to make the best life you can in the face of fear. Remember Prince Hal's words in Henry IV: "Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them." We do not remember people because they did not fear. We remember those precious few among us who feared, but did not react to it. Instead, they saw their fear and acted in spite of it.

Buy the album:

Buy the book:

Thanks for reading,

M

Every new beginning...

It's officially summer. It has been nearly three weeks since my last day of work. I'm all but moved out of my apartment. I'm sitting on my parents' couch in my underwear watching the third major championship of the golf season at 2:30 in the afternoon. My days are mostly planned around the Major League Baseball television schedule. If that's not summer, I don't know what is.

In September, I'll begin work on a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a specialization in Fiction Writing at Northwestern University. Because I can only watch so much golf, listen to so much Tony Kornheiser, and read so much Cormac McCarthy in a day, I thought I would start a blog to get myself back into the routine of daily writing.

What follows will be an account of my quotidian moving and musing for your casual perusing. I hope you enjoy.

M