The Worm

Here is a story I began a few months ago and put down.  I have some ideas of where it is going/went, but any thoughts would be helpful.  I just wanted to share what I have.  Thanks!

5/9-7/6/11

The sun came through the window a little too brightly.  Jim looked at the blinds, willing them to fold up and cut the sunlight into yellow lines on the ceiling.  He didn’t move though.  That will faded away when aimed toward his limbs.  He blinked, but that was his eyelids, not himself.  Jim looked down at his hands, wanting to squeeze them into fists, just the right one even.  They looked like beggars hands, fingers cupped and ready for coins.

He heard the key rattling around in the lock, announcing her presence.  The sound of the front door opening came down the hallway, the rustle of paper bags, her footsteps.  After a short amount of time Rachel walked into the doorway and stood there, as if she were the door itself.  She took in the scene.  Jim still in bed, the way he looked at her, a mixture of embarrassment and fear and relief.  She thought of a dog who had fallen in a well, looking up.

“Are you hungry,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Really?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well I got some food and I want you to eat.”

“Okay,” he said.

She said “Bagels and cream cheese, granola, strawberry jam, and yogurt.”

He managed a smile.  “I don’t think I’m that hungry.”

“Pick one,” she said.  She nodded, an acknowledgement of his attempt at humor, but didn’t smile back.

After a pause he said, “Torture by yogurt.”

She was already down the hall.  “It won’t be that be that bad.”  When she was gone the smile faded beneath the pressing sunlight.  He wished he’d asked her to close the blinds, but he also knew her eye-rolling and sighs would be worse than the light.  He closed his eyes, but the red glow of the blood in his eyelids was like the whine of a leaf blower.

When she came back with the yogurt and a spoon and a bowl of cut up strawberries, he asked her about her walk.

“It’s a beautiful day.  There’s a little breeze that makes the leaves shiver and the shadows change.”  Jim looked up though the window but his view didn’t contain any trees or clouds or anything that the wind could move. 

“So,” she said, “Is it something or not?”

“It’s always something,” he said.

“Something you know?” she said.

“Actually, today, I think it is.”  She waited.  “I was…I was thinking about something.  Right when I woke up, like the thought was already there.  It was this talk I had with my grandfather.  I was playing out in the yard in the afternoon.  It had rained that day but now the sky was clear.  I was squatting over the earth, watching a worm move along through the surface layer of the dir, which was already drying up.  I couldn’t believe how it just kept going!  No arms, no legs, it just kept squeezing in and pushing out, using its little bristle arms I guess.  I lay next to it and pulled my arms against my sides and my legs together, and kind of rolled back and forth trying to move forward.  Tworm was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen!  Then I remembered what the other kids at school said, that you could cut a worm in half, and that both halves would become its own worm.  Have you heard that?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So I carefully scooped up this little thing that I’d been watching intently for 10, 15 minutes, put it on a flat rock, and searched around for another flat rock to cut it.  I kept thinking, I’m going to make one worm into two.  It’s going to grow a second brain, it’s going to have a twin, a best friend, forever.  I found a thin, sharp stone, returned to my worm and…”  Jim hit the bed with his hand.  “For a second I was revolted, not just by myself, but by the maimed creature in front of me, as if I’d just cut off a dog’s legs, and there it was, alive, confused and twitching.  Well, I…” Jim’s mouth stopped moving, right in mid sentence, the jaw open but not slack.  “…I…I tell you both sides were moving and wiggling, the front was moving a bit more…umm…panicked.  I realized it was becoming two worms, and in that moment it wasn’t gross or scary anymore.  I watched them for a few more minutes, then took them inside to show my grandfather.  He shook his head and walked us over to the desk that was my father’s desk, but he’d never used.  He pushed aside the yellow pad of paper and ballpoint pens and had me put both worms on the dark brown surface.  He pushed the chair in and I was trapped against the desk.  He said to watch them, and to call me when something happened.  I asked him what.  He said I would know.  ‘Don’t call til you know,’ he said and left the room.  So I crossed my arms on the desk and rested my chin on them and watched the worms twitch and struggle.  Nothing happened for a few hours, except once in awhile a worm came near the edge and I turned it around.  I didn’t leave or fall asleep because I couldn’t disappoint my gramps.  Then I realized that one of them, the one with the head, was changing.  The opposite end of the head half was tapering and becoming a tail.  The other one, the original tail was slowing its twitching, and soon ceased altogether.  It hadn’t been a second worm at all, just a twitchy body part. Instead of creating another life form I’d simply maimed and shortened one that already existed.

‘Grandpa!’ I yelled.  His footsteps came behind me quickly.  He leaned over me.  ‘We’re all like that,’ he said.  ‘The body and the soul.  When you split them apart, the body dies, but the soul lives on.  Now put that poor bastard back where he belongs.’

I took both of them out back.  I dug a little hole until it was mud and put the live little worm back into his home.  Then I dug another hole and buried its dead former tail.”  Jim’s eyes were on the ceiling.  As the silence after his story stretched out he brought them to rest on Rachel.

“Hmm,” she said.  “You woke up thinking about that?”

“I did.  I mean, not all that, just the end, just the part where I buried the live one and the dead one in the same place, and I wondered…”

“Yeah?” she said.  She was getting impatient.  Jim wanted to say it, but now, because he paused, he thought saying it after telling the whole memory of his boyhood would be anticlimactic.

While Jim tried to figure out if he was going to finish speaking or not, Rachel silently left the room.  He knew she had to get to work and didn’t want to wait for him to build up the energy to finish s sentence.  A few minutes later her footsteps came back to the door and “I’m leaving.”

“I wish you’d stay.”

“I have a lot to catch up on at work.”

“We could talk.  Or just sit.”

“I hope you get up and enjoy the day.”           

“I will.  I know I can if you stay.”

The door was shutting.  Time began to pass.

His thoughts began to dip below the surface of the present, to get caught in the jet streams of things he had said and done.  He didn’t fall into reverie, didn’t reminisce, he was simply breathing in the worry about what he had done and what had been done to him.  He jolted back to the present with a shiver, shaking the bed.  But then the bed didn’t stop.  It was the bed that had moved him, or rather, the earth.  He jumped up quickly and ran to the doorway.  How much time was passing?  Earthquakes always seemed longer than they were.  What he thought was a momentary scream cut into his ears, and then his bedroom window shattered.  The shards caught the sunlight as they fell, and it looked to Jim like he were in a sparkly snowglobe.  It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.  An ache he had always felt but never known pulled him forward.  He ran toward the sparkles, to envelop himself in their reflections, but of course, as fast as his mind was recording each detail, his body couldn’t catch up.  By the time his watery limbs had crossed the room the window had become a jagged booby trap on the floor.  It was at this point that Jim thought he should get out of the house.  He jumped on his bed and hurled himself through the empty window toward the backyard.  He felt like a superhero.  He even landed relatively smoothly with a shoulder roll onto the stone and brick ground.  He continued into a standing position and as he came up heard a real scream.  It wasn’t the kind of scream anyone ever wanted to hear, and it chilled him to the bone.  It was a child’s voice, full of panic, of falling or being cut, confused, afraid, trying to scream away whatever was happening.  Jim thought all these things, but his philosophical ruminations came as he was already hopping the fence next door, and then the next fence, to get to the house 2 over where the kid lived.  He figured it was her, Maria or Carla or something.  She was the only kid on the block and he’d only really met her once right after she was born, when he made her parents a cake and, in a fit of mania, threw most of the childhood toys and books he’d been saving for 20 years into a bag and brought them over.  They invited him in but warned him she was asleep.  He desperately wanted her to see him there, not that she would understand he had brought her gifts, but so that someday, when she was older, she might see him again and recognize his face, and put it together with all her experiences with the painted barn with the door that mooed when you opened it, the plastic shark, the fisherman with the gaunt cheeks, the tattered copies of Goodnight Moon and Where The Wild Things Are.  He had even looked at her, willing the word wake up toward her, hoping to wake her up without anyone knowing it was him.  She lay on her back, her head to the side, her flowery lips parted.

She would see him now.

He landed there in her backyard.  Near the askew house was a pile of old boxes, the packing tape cut, their bodies flattened and piled up.  The boxes where shivering.  So were his legs.  For a moment he thought the earthquake was still going, when he heard her muffled cries.  He ran forward, toward the boxes.  He quickly eyed the house.  The upstairs window was broken, and the corners of the building had been slightly rhombused, but it looked stable enough.

“Just not a square anymore,” he said.  “Not the same, not a square.”

He began to dig, picking up the cold, molding old boxes and throwing them behind him like oversized Frisbees.  “Not cubes anymore.”  What the hell did they have these for?  He saw ants and beetles and roly-polies.  Where they crawling on her, even now?  In his mind he imagined her as she was years ago, a little baby, unworkable by his thoughts, covered in crawly little legs.  Just as he was grazing flesh with his digging fingers, he heard her father yelling.  The words were too fast, he couldn’t make them out, were they English?  Was he angry, was he afraid?  Where was he?

Jim grabbed a forearm and pulled.  He almost screamed when he saw the father there.  He let go quickly, disgusted, and looked back at the house.  The girl, it must be her, stood near the pane-less window, crying, silent now.

“Jim, thank you, I can’t…”  The father almost fell, grabbing Jim’s arm and shoulder.  Once studied he limped over to lean on the fence.  Jim looked down at the ground, down at his hands.  “Jim.” The man was breathless.  “Jim, I can’t.”  Jim felt himself shrinking, his elbows coming into his ribcage, his knees eating up his calves.  “Jim!”  Jim, shocked, looked the father in the eye.  “Jim, listen.  I can not walk.  Please, Carla, please.”

Jim was already running through the garage.  Everything looked like it did when he was dancing.  There was a low rumble somewhere, everywhere, and sprays of dust shooting out like hydraulics.  The house was just like his, but the stairs aren’t where they should be.  He stood where the bottom step was, waiting for them to appear.  His body began to slow down, his momentum leaving through his legs straight into the ground.  Next to him was a door, like the door to his bedroom.  He pushed it open and shuffled in, confused to not see his bed there, the sun splashed across it.  Cardboard boxes lined the walls.  And old table with the legs unscrewed and lying next to it.  A dusty director’s chair collapsed in on itself.  In the corner, where his bed should be, the steps came down, cutting into the room.  Underneath the steps was a white box, and he knew it was his.  He crouched down beneath the stairs and pulled it out, and uncovered his old toys.  The little boxy, 1970’s looking metal cars with the doors that really opened, his wand of water and sparkles.  He didn’t see a few things, figures and books he liked when he was older.  Maybe she still had those, held them to her chest right now.  He almost stood up and took the stairs then and there, but he found the barn with the door that mooed when you opened it.  The moo still worked.  He could hear it over the roar.  He opened and closed the door, marveling at the sound, and the painted straw inside.  Maybe she would hear the moos and come down the stairs to find him, an oversized x-men doll clutched under her arm.  Then he would stand up for sure, then he would gather her in his arms and take her out to safety and see to her father.  She’ll be coming any second, any second now.

Wounds

Father’s Day

Recently a strange holiday passed that, as a child, I never gave a second thought.  Father’s Day was just like Mother’s Day, but for dads, just like a birthday, a day where you get or make Dad a gift, write him a card, and spend the day the way he wants to.  I thought this was normal, and the way everyone spent Father’s Day.  Of course people all over don’t spend their days the same way.  A large family Christmas is very different from a lonely one.  But for some, Father’s Day was never a holiday.  The last 2 schools where I worked as a teacher basically turned a blind eye to Father’s Day.  We didn’t look up cool art projects to make, like during Halloween, Christmas, Hanukah, and the 4^th of July.  We didn’t mention Father’s Day, and if we did, it was to select few children who we knew hadn’t been abandoned by their Dads.  Of course there are many reasons for someone not to be there.  People die, people get divorced, people have to work far away, sometimes in different countries, but the deadbeat mom was rare, leaving Father’s Day to celebrate what should be but is not.

I have always been interested in fathers, men taking care of kids, being tough but also being caring.  What made me this way?  Simply being a man?  Not all men are so focused on fathers, we know that for sure.  Did I want to be a father?  At 12, and throughout my teens that was not something I could imagine.  What about my own dad?

Teens

My dad didn’t leave me when I was a kid, nor treat me badly, nor exactly fit the mold of the big tough but caring father.  He always made me feel like he loved me and cared for me and has always been there for me.  But, like most teens, I felt that my parents were preventing me from being who I was.  They had rules that didn’t seem to make sense.  “Okay, I should be nice to people, I shouldn’t spend all my money, I shouldn’t get a girl pregnant, okay I got you!  But why worry about if I get home at 5:05 when my curfew is 5:00.  I mean, yes I’m late but does it matter?  Dudes?”

“Yeah, I cut school, but my grades are fine.  What, that doesn’t matter?  Why?  Why?”

Of course these are silly examples.  My parents were fair, and though sometimes I didn’t feel that their arguments fully made sense, they were never mean or unreasonable.  Still, I felt that I had ideas and wishes that were hampered by the rules of adults.  I think that this is a common, if not universal feeling among those making the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Music

My theory is that one reason for the popularity of hip hop among youths is that the music is filled with this same sense of frustration from a group of people towards another group of people for not allowing them to be themselves.  Somehow, as early hip hop distilled the social ills of the world, specifically the white power structures effect on black people, teens of all races felt a kinship with their own struggle against adults.  Yes, I realize that these aren’t the same things.  The Man though in control, is not our parent, but I think you see what I’m saying (Na mean).  Or maybe I am simply projecting how I felt as a youth being drawn to hip hop music.

It all started because rap was cool.  In my day, in my town, being black was the coolest thing you could do.  If you couldn’t do that, or be Latino, you could dress the right way, and listen to the right music.  So I started listening to KMEL, buying rap tapes, and thinking long and hard about people different than myself.  One could say this music was a great departure from the music of my adolescence; Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Huey Lewis and the Stones, but I think political and storytelling songs like Man In The Mirror, Simple as That, and Living For The City all helped set the stage for my ruminations on the state of the world.

Manuscripts

When I was in middle school I began my first novel.  I had recently learned that there was a time in American history when slavery was still legal, but bringing new Africans into the country as slaves was illegal.  I imagined an alternate reality where this state of affairs continued into something like the present day, and a radical movement began among slaves to commit suicide as a way to end slavery.  I called the book Genocide.  It was set in a middle school.  The main character was named Joe (after Joseph, my middle name.  It was much cooler to be named Joe than Dan and I often gave my characters the nomenclature I wished to have in real life).  Anyway, a racially mixed group of friends, race wars, assassinations, a new constitution, and phrases like “why you pushing up on my girl” and “luckily I shot him in the face” made for quite a read.  Yes, the title was Genocide.  I still have the original, unfinished manuscript, written in terrible handwriting that is only slightly worse than my writing now.

Clearly I was thinking hard on the state of the world, race relations, hip hop, and accurate phrases a middle schooler would say.  There is no way this book would have been written had I not gone to school in a racially diverse setting, or if I hadn’t been drinking rap music in through my ears like a bass heavy elixir of the gods.  In rap I found others unlike, but like, myself, struggling, and I found in their struggle a purpose bigger than myself.  I wasn’t black (still not) but I wanted something tangible to fight against, something besides my loving parents, something that was holding them back, holding us all back.  Being white, this something was also partly inside of me.  Luckily, MJ had already told me what to do, in words that meant and have meant more to me than I could have known at the time.  If you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make that…change.

Wounds

To continue the hip hop created analogy of teens in an adult world and minorities in a white one, there were many great rap songs in the 90’s about the absence of fathers in their son’s lives.  Here was a strange braiding of my struggle as a teen mixed with that of the people in the music.  Here the caretaker had abandoned his charges, charges that were also male.  2PAC’s Papa’z Song and Naughty By Nature’s Ghetto Bastard stirred me down to the base of my soul.  Lines like “had to play catch by myself, what a sorry sight, a pitiful plight so I pray for a starry night” still make my eyes water, maybe because I feel surrounded by children with no fathers.  I recently bought a tiny mitt for a boy close to 5 years old, and we played catch for the first time.  Pac’s words echoed through my head over and over, and the smile that seemed to spread from the boy’s lips to his entire body, to the entire park, and the lack of his father in his life, twists my heart as if I am the boy, and the absent father, and the storyteller all at once.

But why?  I don’t mean why do father’s leave, because that is a question I couldn’t begin to tackle.  Why does it effect me so?  My father never left, so why do I act as if there is a wound there?  Because he didn’t also love rap?  Because he didn’t seem to get me as a teen (oh my god, dad, come one!  Stop trippin!)?  Or was it the couple of years, as I entered the realm of teendom, that my father had to take a job in Washington D.C.?  He made good money, but was gone during the week, or for weeks at a time.  Did I ever fear his plane would go down, or that he wouldn’t return home?  I never gave this any thought.  In fact, I remember feeling proud of myself for not blaming him, for understanding this was something he had to do for the family, and knowing that resenting him wasn’t fair.  But I also remember thinking to myself that I would never work far from my family like that, no matter what.  My father remembers one day when the two of us stood near the Cliff House, looking over the ocean.  He says I was nasty, I believe is his word, nasty and angry about the fact that he’d been gone.  I said he didn’t understand me anymore.  Was I so sensitive that even as I thought I understood, I had buried hurt and angry feelings?  These seeds grew into two interlocking trees.  One, watered by an obsession with boys with absent fathers, the other fed by the deep feeling that my father didn’t really understand me.  I’ll skip the years of therapy but I got over myself and realized that my dad and I have probably the best father-son relationship of anyone I know, that we have always got along really great.  I have also realized that maybe I did feel hurt and abandoned as I entered my teenage years, and that this may have effected my fatherhood obsession, as well as my interest in rap music, 2Pac, and the ills of world.  It can be no coincidence that for over a decade I have fulfilled a fatherly role for a child where her father didn’t, or why I feel I deep pull toward my students who have no men in their lives.  My experiences, but especially my wound, relatively small, have helped me to understand those larger wounds that other’s carry, that our nation carries.  These wounds have helped me see that we all live our lives in reaction to these wounds.  We are all children, raised by children, all of us squinting in the darkness.

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever – Suzanne, Leonard Cohen

We’ve all got holes to fill, and them holes are all that’s real – To Live Is To Fly, Townes Van Zandt

How can I be a man if there's no role model?                         – Papa'z Song, 2Pac

I'm gonna flaunt it, gonna know when, and not now
How will I do it, how will I make it, I won't, that's how            - Ghetto Bastard, Treach

Think it was September, the year I went away,
For there were many things I didn't know.
And I still see him standing, try'n' to be a man;
I said, "Someday you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now each and ev'ry mother's son
You better learn it fast; you better learn it young,
'Cause, "Someday" Never Comes."            

- Someday Never Comes, Creedence Clearwater Revival

I love you dad!

The Tube

I wrote this story on a lark to submit to a little contest.  Since it had to be 250-300 words it became an exercise in minimalism.  Cutting words left and write I got a 700+ story down to 298 words.  If I could, I don't think I would add too many of them back.  This is entirely true.

The Tube

        Just before the Bay Bridge my engine coughed up smoke.  I bought some coolant at a SoMa Shell Station and waited for the engine to cool.

            “That won’t work,” came from the other side of the car, apparently from someone with x-ray vision.  A limping black man in the faded colors of the homeless came around the car and stood close enough for me to smell.  He quickly nodded, transferred his weight to a large walking branch, and leaned over the engine.

            “It’s okay,” I said.  I looked around, expecting to see his accomplice sneaking up.

            “Touch this.  Come on, touch it.”  He held a long black rubber tube.”

            “No thanks.”  I worried I’d burn my hand, even though he held the tube.

            “Come on.”

I thought, “let go of my tube,” but I didn’t want be that jerk who’s mean to the homeless.  I reached out.  Warm.

            “You feel that?”  Leaning over the engine, he began some jabberwocky car talk.  I couldn’t follow.  His voice trailed off.  I heard a sound.  The sound of someone throwing up.  This guy I was trying to treat nicely and let fiddle with my engine just threw up in my car!

            “Um…you okay?”

            He turned, his lips pursed.  He held up the now unattached tube, which was dripping fluid.  “It was the tube.” He spoke calmly, but with the unmistakable hint of annoyance.  He knew what I’d been thinking.  After that I kind of had to let him do whatever he wanted.

            Lester fixed my car while explaining everything he did and how much a mechanic would’ve charged.  He also said a car hit him a month before and “decapitated” his foot.  I gave him all the money in my wallet.  I drove away, with no smoke.

Jon Sarkin's Stroke

Hello Friends,

Once again I have no real post this week.  I have ben writing and working a various music projects lately, but I don't want to post the lyrics alone and the songs aren't complete yet.

Next week I will be back with my submission to the Chronicle of the Bay contest for "Tales of The City"-esque writing.  It is a riveting true story in less than 300 words.  To give you an idea of how short that is, I've done about ten percent already.


Karena send an article awhile back.  You'll see how it related to many of my past writings regarding identity.

Sarkin and his family were interviewed on This American Life in 2000.

The Quaker Meeting (Tunnels 3)

(This writing is related to my last post, with a story in between them which was not ready to be posted)

These are just some of the memories that trickled through my mind as we made our way through the rain.  I wondered what the silence would be like, would my mind wander, would my mind be still.  I felt that in the past year I had been more anxious than before, that my base anxiety level was slowly rising as I aged.  I worried that I would get worse and worse, or at the very least stay this strange ball of nerves I wasn’t familiar with.  I asked myself, is this me now?  My worry only increased as I pondered this, and I often fell into a feedback loop of nervousness.  I was reminded of a line in one of Townes Van Zandt’s songs, a shame that it’s not enough, a shame that it is a shame.

I tried to find the cause to this change.  Was it from all of the years I’d spent working with anxious people?  Had their worries been so constant and normal that they’d washed off onto my own skin?  Was it simply aging?  I pushed these thoughts away and watched the rain hit my window and split off into endless varieties of streams that ran down the glass.

Soon we arrived at the parking lot.  We met Karena’s father and stepmother, the people who first took her to this small building many years ago.  Karena made the usual comments about how it had seemed larger in her memory, how the grounds in the back had felt like the biggest garden imaginable.  I stood beneath my hood where the raindrops made thin tapping sounds and looked at the shiny green leaves shivering.  Where do these places we knew as children go?  What wind carries them away?

We returned to the front of the building and entered a very small entryway.  Beyond the next doors a room open up.  Chairs lined the walls, very few of them holding people.  I only heard our soft footfalls on the rug and the shuffling sounds of our jackets.  After we sat down at the far end of the room I became aware of a slight humming sound.  Soon I was distracted the gurglings and babblings of a baby.  A slim, bearded man had his child in a front pack while he tried to sit quietly.  One might think the baby was unaware of the rule of silence at the Quaker Meetings, but actually you are encouraged to speak when you feel moved to.  Thus we sit in silence until someone stands up and shares something.  The child clearly had things to say, and maybe for this reason, I never felt annoyed or upset that my meditation was being broken.  The sounds were like that of the birds chirping, the wind in the cracks of the door and the rain outside our windows.  At first I tried to meditate, imagining my mind as a calm lake, and whenever  fish though jumped to the surface I acknowledged it and moved on.  This is easier said than done but that act in itself of observing is amazingly calming.  After awhile I decided that my mind didn’t need to be so clear to be here.  Maybe the Quaker let their minds follow the fishes down into the depths.  I opened my eyes and immediately found the source of the low hum I had noticed earlier.  Two large fan spun vigorously from the ceiling, their blades cutting the light cast from the bulbs to such an extent that the place where the wall met the ceiling appeared to be lit with light reflected from water.  The spinning is really a flashing, the flashing mimicking the way light plays on the undulating surface of the calm lip of a lake.  I laid my eyes on this light and felt slightly nauseas, most likely from the ratio of coffee to food in my body.  I held my gaze a little longer before closing my eyes.  Soon I was aware of a dull pain in the middle of my back, of itches on my forehead, my arm and my knee, and strangely enough, the weight of my eyeballs.  The strangest feeling I noticed was after leaning back slightly to adjust my body.  I found it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes closed.  They felt to be naturally pulling open, and I imagined I was on a ship, the sea wind whipping all about, and I was trying to hold a lowered sail down against the deck.  I released my eyelids and watched the watery light on the wall and ceiling across from me.

At some point, after what seemed a timeless amount of moments had passed. A woman stood up and discussed her feelings from watching stories about religious persecution on the news.  She ended with sending her prayers out to those people, especially Muslims around the world.  My thoughts on these people  somehow migrated back towards whales.  More specifically the extended familial structures of killer whales, groups that rivaled that of not just human families, but entire clans.  They travel in matrilines, an extended family based around the mothers, meaning they travel with their mothers, grandmothers, and cousins.  Specific sounds and travel patterns are passed down through the generations, making each matriline distinct from one another.  Each matriline swims together for the rest of their lives with very brief breaks to mate or hunt.  Groups of 4 or 5 related matrilines form pods, which, though they may split off for weeks or months, always link up soon again.  Groups of pods will come together to form a clan, made up of pods who can trace their lineage back a common grandmother.  They speak in similar, but not identical dialects.  Sometimes pods from different clans will commingle to form a community, though they don’t all speak the same dialect.  We have only observed these complex family structures in elephants and higher primates.  The similarities to humans continue with their breeding age of between 15 and 40, and, even more rare among within the animal kingdom, and even species of whale, the females live for decades after they begin menopause.  Their lives seem to be filled with much more than the desire to reproduce before they die.

The Yupiks of central Siberia believed that killer whales and wolves, we deeply connected spiritually.  According to their legends, they were the same beings, appearing as orcas in the summer and wolves in the winter.  In both forms they helped people.  As whales they assisted in the hunting of walrus and as wolves convinced reindeer to let themselves be killed by the humans who hunted them.  The chief difference between their shamanism and that of North America Eskimos was the extreme importance placed on the good treatment of sea creatures.  Even the killing of a whale could only be done by one selected by the spirits, and if successful the hunter gave the dead whale the respect of an honored guest.  Its spirit must be entertained by music and given food, in the hope that it will return again the following year.  These beliefs all seem to suggest a deep connection between all things in nature, where the spirits can become one animal, then another, and even remake themselves after death.  In this way death was rendered not as an ending, but simply veil, a tunnel to a deeper existence.  The Yupiks saw the sky as a curving arch, with stars burning holes through it.  Beyond this blackness was a space of light.  When reading this I was struck by something I had recently come across in a book on physics, which posited that, much like our watery globe, space my indeed curve back on itself, and that if one traveled far enough in one direction the would eventually arrive where they began.

      The First Peoples of Canada and the Americas called their continent Turtle Island.  In British Columbia’s Bella Coola, it was not Noah’s great arc that saved humans from a flood, but a Killer Whale who let the people live inside of himself until the water receded.  The orca’s desire to help may not have been simply altruism, but instinct.  Many of the first people’s believed whales were not only magical creatures, but some of the ancestors of human beings.  They forded the seas in their natural form or as giant canoes, looking for a special place to settle down.  Once a spot was chosen, the came ashore and, after taking on the form of humans, built a village.  In this way, festivals dedicated to whales are not just to appease magical creatures but to honor our ancestors, great travelers who willingly shed their mystical powers to become the human race.

As I sat in that large, cold, peaceful room of silence, and watched the watery light that reflected off the spinning fan blades, I began to not just imagine the whales from afar, but sink down among them.  I was no longer looking at the sun reflecting off the surface of the water from above, but from within below.  I let my mind loosen and travel toward the body of a whale, the beast that so enamored ancient peoples, Melville, Hart, Beale, Ellis, and more recently Hoare, and imagined I was far beneath the surface and gazing toward the strange dancing light that I could see but not touch.  As my deep breaths continued and my body became even more relaxed, my mind began to accept that maybe I was within the sea.  There was then a moment, it couldn’t have been more than that when my acceptance was so deep that I was filled with a panic that caused me to gasp, sit up straight, and break the spell.  I was simultaneously part of the sea, and thus home, and yet afraid of the crushing weight of water.

The brain does not distinguish between real emotions and those created by fiction, nor does the neuron fire differently when hearing music or replaying a song in your mind.  There is a wealth of experience and of living that goes on completely hidden from the rest of the world.  It is not so difficult to imagine that a beast such as the whale, whose environment is so different from ours, lives a life filled with hidden meaning, or at the very least, a secret richness.

When an hour had inexplicably passed, a man stood up and thanked everyone for coming.  He said he was filling for someone.  For a moment I thought this would protect me from being recognized as a new person, but he turned toward us and asked any new visitors to introduce themselves.  I scarcely remember what Karena said, as I was preparing my words.  When it was my turn to speak, I stood up and thanked them for having me.  I said that it was my first time at a friend’s meeting, and that I was able to relax, to sometimes let my mind rest and sometimes let it wander.

Afterward I walked beneath the bare branches, my eye being caught by fragile drops water that survived the ending of the storm.  I imagined I could see the world on the ground taken into its rounded shape, and behind this image that of the gray sky.  The water, like a window, simultaneously portal and reflection.  I smiled at the other who made their way next door to enjoy a potluck lunch and conversation.  I wasn’t ready to join them, possibly because I wanted to extend the solitude a little longer, and I began to think about how these people differed from what I had imagined them to be.  The word Quaker calls up images of men with large hats, much like on the oatmeal container.  Many of the images correspond with those of the Amish; sitting in a horse drawn carriage, long mutton chops, living in moderation and preaching peace.  I didn’t know that their most accepted name was The Religious Society of Friends, and that the term Quaker may have originally been used to mock them.  George Fox, a founder of the Quakers was taking before a Judge on the charge of blasphemy.  Fox kept a journal, where he related that they were called Quakers for asking other to tremble at the word of God.

The Whale (Tunnels 1)

I have some new writing but it isn't ready to post.  Here is a project I've been working on, combining
a few of my interests, and many of the topics of my blog, into a narrative around the theme of how we are fascinated, drawn to, and ultimately shaped by what we fear the most.

The rain was intermittent as we drove south from San Francisco on a Sunday in the Winter of 2011.  The sky had the thinnest of gray clouds, the hue bordering on white in many places. The bushes, trees and grasses blurred together as Karena drove us toward Santa Clara to attend a Friends Meeting of the Quakers.  Her father and stepmother regularly attended these gatherings, and since I had never been to anything of the kind I was curious to see what it would be like.  I have heard that most Quaker events are filled with silence, one moment stretching into the other in a room full of people sitting quietly, meditating in a way, and speaking only when they felt moved to do so.

The rain came and went on the windshield, like water sloshing in and out of a tide pool in the early morning hours.  I found myself drifting into a long neglected memory from childhood, when, as a boy, I stood on a beach in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco, and looked out into the ocean.  A large group of family friends used to go camping together around the Bay Area.  They all had children who went to, or used to attend, my nursery school.  My friend and I had left the group, and ventured out into the woods leading to the ocean.  We found tall trees filled with naked, horizontal branches of a thickness perfect for climbing.  One could be 50 feet up the tree with little effort and even less fear of descending.  Near these trees were old bunkers, the kind of which dot the nearby coast, remnants of a time the United States felt the need to protect its borders with machine guns and mortar from invading ships.  Some of these rooms were blocked off, keeping us from conditions deemed too dangerous, but most of the rooms we were open to exploration.  Each one was empty, some flooded with ocean or rainwater, but the act of exploring was perfect for make-believe.  Just to the east of these barracks was a tunnel that went directly to a small beach that faced The Golden Gate Bridge to the east, San Francisco to the south, and the infinite expanse of the Pacific Ocean to the west.  I can still recall walking through this tunnel for the first time, and though I could see the light at the other end, feeling much more afraid than when I entered the blackness of the barracks.  I believe this is because I could see the outside of these buildings, and I was past the magical age where I believed the inside of a house could be infinitely bigger than the outside.  I was also of the very next age where one makes a point of not believing in things like that.  Maybe this is why, as we walked through the wet and sinking sand between the climbing trees and explored barracks toward the roaring sea, I didn’t tell my companion of the slippery fear the was rising up to me at my feet.  I can’t remember how I made it to the end, I only remember the wind hitting my ears with a violence one imagines when sailing across the sea.

I think it was more than trying to save face with my friend that drove me forward.  In spite of, or perhaps because of my fear, I was also, simultaneously filled with a powerful curiosity.  It is strange how pulled we are toward what we fear the most.  I pulled myself against the wind, toward the water.  For a moment, just a moment, somewhere near the middle, I imagined water gushing into the cave.  In my daydream I wasn’t pushed the dozen or so feet out towards the barracks, but was suspended in the dark waters, weightless and alone.  This especially was frightening because I never learned how to swim, and the thought of floating deep in the water felt akin to being lost in space.  Even today, I am filled with a deep fear that expands within my entire body when I imagine being submerged.  It is the inverse of claustrophobia, the fear of being trapped in an endlessness.

 Then I am out of the tunnel.  The wind lifted its embrace and instead became a calming breath.  Now out of the tunnel I could hear the waves grazing the shore.  Though the ocean spread out to the right it didn’t seem so open and expansive.  To our left the rust colored Golden Gate Bridge reached toward the sky, dominating the view.  The city beyond it appeared small.  Hills hid most of it, and the tallest buildings were dwarfed by the bridge and the distance. 

            Jason began laughing excitedly and pointing.  I squint my eyes, looking beyond the reflecting suns nearby to the blue waves a football field away.  I could make out a dark shape coming out of the water, then submerging.  It was the first time I saw a whale.  We were too far away to be struck by it’s magnitude or beauty, but I knew all about whales, had read about them and watched science specials on PBS.  They seemed to have intelligence that equaled out own, but lived in the alien depths.

The whale itself that day didn’t strike me, but like a symbol of something, it brought up all of the things I thought and felt about those great mammals of the water.  It’s a whale, I kept saying, over and over again.  We watched the same spot on the moving water for five, ten minutes, barely moving, Jason’s arm still slightly extended out, our chests heaving from the excitement.

            As an adult I continued to study them.  Initially my fascination was with the Blue Whale and other baleen whales.  This class fit in more with how I had always imagined them.  Massive and kind, they sing through the water in beautiful but alien tones.  Instead of teeth they have baleen, like a fine-tooth comb, that helps them catch krill.  They seem like gentle giants, big and smart dogs, our secret companions, that fills their lives with secret beauty.  Somehow the fact that these krill were fish escaped me, and I imagined whales as vegetarians, the antitheses of the murderous shark.  These may have originally be based on drawing of dinosaurs in books I loved as a young child.  The carnivorous Tyrannosaurus Rex and Alosaurus were the villains of the prehistoric world, while the nice vegan Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and Triceratops were simply trying to eat and live peacefully.  Most likely, I anthropomorphicized sea creatures in the same way.  I don’t blame myself entirely.  If one looks beyond that one dinosaur books, there are hundreds of others, as well as television programs and films, mostly for children, that demonize predators like sharks and t-rex’s, and, to a lesser extent, wolves, most likely because of their similarity with their cousins, our best friend.  Though I understand how imagining other animals to think like humans we would exaggerate certain characteristics that are already there so that a story feels right on a gut level, it is curious that we don’t associate ourselves with the power predators, the meat eaters.  Possibly it is ingrained in us from thousands of years ago, when we were hunted by larger carnivores, or maybe we just prefer to think of ourselves as peaceful people, the kind you might see in the paintings on pamphlets from Jehovah’s witness.  These tableaus of lions and lambs and black and white people always struck me as strange because they seemed to not only solve humanities problems, but those of hungry animals who probably can’t conceive of a world without the food chain.

The Fog

Here is a story I've been working on.  Any comments welcomed and appreciated!  Inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks.

The Fog

            A dense fog came in from the sea, poised above the houses just a few blocks away, hiding the rest of the world.  Near the border, where the city became nothingness, Colin could make out the wisps of vapor, running like ghosts, as the fog negotiated with open air how far it would creep.  He knew if he approached the fog his view would penetrate it.  He just had to get there.

He scratched his sandpaper chin, surprised at the stubble.  This place is terrible, he thought, it doesn’t even have proper mirrors.  And this glass.  He reached out and touched the window, his focus shifting to the surface itself, where a small grid of threads appeared, the hidden but not quite invisible strength of the glass.  As he did this he saw a man outside, suspended in the air, a flying man who has escaped.  First he felt excited, then a sinking feeling, when he saw the man was hovering, maintaining a constant height.

“Hello Colin,” a voice said behind him.  Colin straightened, first afraid the person behind him would see his secret angel, then let down to realize that the speaker was who he’d seen, apparently hovering, in the window’s reflection.  He turned around.

The guard that called himself Steve was rolling his weight back and forth between his heels and toes.  Colin imagined his thoughts; “Heel, toe, heel toe.”  Colin buried his thoughts of escape, lest his own thoughts could be divined so easily.

“Good morning, Colin.”

“Morning.”

“Nice Day.”

            “Is it?” slipped out of Colin’s mouth.

            “Sure.  I like the fog.”

            “Or course you do.”

            “Love the fog, man, hate sunny days.”  Mr. Davis’ high-pitched voice slipped into the room just before his body.  Colin grimaced to himself, wondering how often he’d be snuck up on today.  Mr. Davis was also the only person Colin had shared his plans with.

            “Mr. Davis,” Steve held up both hands in a strange motion, as if preparing for a hug or miming the lifting of a box.  He looked vaguely like a robot, his arms moving together.  His programming revealed itself.

            “You like the fog, Mr. Davis?” Steve asked

            “Sure I do.  I run hot and I don’t want to get burned.  Hard being out there, connecting these I-beams.”

            “Where do you think you are, Mr. Davis,” Steve asked, then gave me a malevolent wink.

            “You should know Mr. Kowolski, I’m here laying the frame for another one o’ these high rises here on Madison Avenue.  Don’t think I don’t appreciate the job.  I hope you know I take it very seriously.”

            “Who do you think I am, Mr. Davis?”

            “Why, Mr. Kowolski, the foreman.  But I’ll stop dillydallying as you like to say and get back to…”  Mr. Davis looked down at the floor, and then around the room.  “Where’s my hammer?  Where am I?”  He looked back at Steve.  “I thought I was outside.  I’m not though.  And you aren’t Mr. Kowolski.”

            “No,” Steve said.

            “Course not.  I see your uniform.  You the mailman.”

            Steve smiles.  “No.”

            “A doctor?”

            “No, Mr. Davis.”

            “Of course not.  You’re Al Grayson, here to fix the plumbing.  You’d think I could do it myself, but I was never good with pipes.

            “No, Mr. Davis,” Steve said.

            “Well, you must be my neighbor, Don.”  He looked at Colin.  “And his father.”  Colin grimaced.  He wanted to grab Mr. Davis by his shoulders and shake him and yell I’m not the old man, you are, but what would be the point?  He’d forget the whole thing in a few minutes, as he had already forgotten his entrance into the room.  The poor bastard was standing on a steppingstone over to sea of his memory, creating imaginary stones as he went along.

            Steve’s lips stretched into a gargoyle grin.  “My father?  What an honor.”  He winked at Colin, who quickly looked down, afraid to hold eye contact too long.  “Well, I’ll let you two catch up,” Steve said, and Colin watched his shadow slide from the floor.  Colin looked up slowly, afraid he might still be there, crouched and holding on to the ceiling.  He was alone, except for Mr. Davis with his perpetual furrowed brow and half grin.  Somewhere, deep down, did he realize how hard he was working to stay in the present, or did he only know on the surface, between his eyes?

            “Freddy,” he suddenly said, breaking Colin’s gaze, “going to the pool hall?  Wish I could but I’ve got work to do.”

            “Yes, of course,” Colin replied.  He saw no reason to hand Mr. Davis what would only slip through his fingers.

            “Running away are you?”  Colin’s eyes darted to Mr. Davis, then the hallway to see if anyone overheard, then back to Davis.  Had he remembered Colin’s plans?  Why had he been foolish enough to vent, prideful enough to boast?

            “Have you told anyone?”

            “Course not,” Davis said.

            “Well, keep quiet.”

            “Sure Jimmy.  Wish I was going with you but I have to take care of my lil brother.”

            “Your…brother?”

            “I could pack you some peanut butter and jelly.  Wait here.”  Mr. Davis walked into the hallway, looked both ways, then vanished, in search of the kitchen of his childhood.

            Colin’s eyes held to the last spot he’d seen the man, making sure he didn’t reappear, or maybe Steve or that other one.  There were only white walls and linoleum, bathed in fluorescent light, and sounds whose echoes merged together.  Colin closed his eyes, releasing the breath he’d been holding.

            “I’ve got to go now,” he whispered.  “I’ve got to get out of this place.”  He looked out the window one last time, first at the ghostly wall of fog, then bus stop out front.  He didn’t check his pocket for change nor grab an overnight bag.  He simply walked out of the room and down the hallway toward the stairs with the last two words “this place” bouncing around his head.  He paused at the door, his fingertips resting on the wood.  An image flashed in his mind of a man standing just where he was, pushing away the guards and screaming for his parents.  Was it Davis?  No, one of the others.  The apparition faded and he pushed the door open.  The stairwell was as full of silence as the hallway of echoes.  He leaned forward and saw, 2 floors below, the light coming through the window of the front door.  He would be that light now.  He stepped quietly, afraid of his footsteps, and soon was running through the light, pushing the door open, catching his breath at the bus stop.  He checked his watch.  All he had to do now was wait.

The shadows were lengthening.  The afternoon sun had burned off most of the fog, and had now dipped below its frosty layers.  Colin squinted his eyes.  His sighed and leaned back.  The wind was blowing and though he was protected by the kiosk, he watched it dance with the leaves on the trees across the street.  Staring down into the pavement he suddenly realized that there were dozens of ants running around, seemingly randomly, fast and direct.  Colin felt calm watching them, so calm he didn’t hear the hydraulics or the door, or the soft footsteps.  A man sat down next to him.

            “Hello,” the man said.

            “Hello,” Colin said.

            “Beautiful day.”

            “Yes,” Colin said.  “I love sunset.”

            “Do you?”

            “Yes.  Look how the sky turns orange, the sidewalk even.  The skin on my hand…” Colin looked down at the orange tint on the back of his hand and his fingers.  He became aware of the wind, not a cold wind, but not a warm one either, and the impending night.  He wrapped his arms around himself, pulling his bathrobe tighter around his body.

            “Want to come inside,” the man said.  “Have some coffee.”

            Colin nodded, but was looking down at the ants again, who were circling the man’s shoes, confused by the appearance of something new.