I took care of Ruby a couple of days last week when her parents, Gabe and Heidi, and my wife Jen were out of town. Wherever Ruby stepped, I followed, unless I could get her—not too hard—to sit for a DVD (Pingu, Ms. Spider, Shrek). That would give me time to clean up the dishes and clean up the detritus in her wake. (We call her, after each visit, as we survey the wreckage, Hurricane Ruby.)

Ruby ate well this weekend. I made porkchops and sauteed veggies Friday night, and she ate more than one whole chop (skinny ones, but still). She asked if she could help me cook the veggies. Sure, I replied, and stood her up on a stool stoveside, where she could reach into the pan. She stirred the zucchini, onions, peppers, tomatoes with a wooden fork and upturned capfuls of herbs which I handed her. Oh, my, such early mastery!

After dinner, in front of the TV, she fell asleep next to me, her angelic little face (yes, angelic in repose) pressed against my ribs.

Saturday night we ate grilled salmon and sauteed kale. Ummm, she kept saying while chowing down, That’s good fish!

Of course, no meal would be complete without ice cream afterwards. We shopped for groceries Saturday morning and bought a quart of good vanilla ice cream plus sugar cones. That’s how Ruby wanted her dessert, in cones, and that’s how I provided it. No wonder the kid has a tummy! Yes, that’s very good ice cream!

Watching Ruby—watching her eat, sleep, watch TV, eliminate, you name it—is a pleasure. A grandparent presides over these little events like some sort of pleased-as-punch and punch-drunk deity. No, he didn’t create the child, though she is in his lineage. She is the new day and delight that many of us, as we grow old, may fail to hold on to in our own lives. She is the new energy from the common human store, and yet what a miracle this new growth seems.

What else of note did I note? Ruby sleeping, sure, as I mention above. And Saturday afternoon, when I took her out to drive to the beach, she fell asleep within a few minutes. So I kept on driving, drove a couple of hours, had a regular country drive, though within the western suburbs. Even stopped at a little lake awhile, but Ruby was still asleep and I didn’t want to wake her. When we got home, two hours after starting, and I told her we wouldn’t make it to the lake, she cried. How upsetting. She cried and quickly forgot and recovered.

Yes, we ate salmon that evening—very good fish!—plus ice cream. Then she watched Shrek, I guess, while I cleaned up. I was in the living room when I heard her little feet thundering across the newly refinished oak floor. I gotta poop! she declared, headed for the back bedroom and bathroom. Here, I said, Ruby, use the main bathroom. It’s nearer!

Which she essayed to do. The little footsteps resumed, like infant thunder, and she pulled up in front of the toilet and pulled off her panties. Clunk! the turd fell in a nice solid lump in front of the toilet. I laughed, picked it up in a tissue and disposed of it. Ruby wiped herself and then we washed our hands.

What a grand time we had of it, last weekend, Ruby and I—eating, drinking, defecating, and, yes, sleeping. Saturday she slept with me in the conjugal bed. We passed out together after reading a story together, and she lay most of the night, despite my careful rearrangements, athwart me, her little feet in my face. What more could a grampa wish for?

For example, about a month ago I went, willy-nilly, to the Mall of America. You know, the place that, according to an early advertising jingle, was a place for fun in your life. Was a reason for being. Was an end-all-and-be-all. Was teleological whoopee.

So it shouldn’t surprise you over much–it didn’t surprise me–that when I went to the Mall for Saturday night dinner with family (two sisters were visiting from out of town), I was rudely assaulted by the din of the place–the crowds, mostly but not exclusively young people, moving in floods like a Pakistani river, say, searching out warm, dry places to overrun.

I'll be damned if they weren't flying through the (burning) air with the greatest of ease. And most obnoxious din.

And I swear these floods of folks old and young–husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend hand in hand, laden with shopping bags–were accompanied by the most godawful cacaphony you’ve ever heard. The din was 110 decibels, make that 120. The din compared favorably, or wretchedly, as you prefer, with that of major sports venues during championship games.

It was, in short, the din of the crowd. The madness of the crowd. The damnation of the crowd.

I could not help but think, then and now, of the fires of damnation. Of how many thousands and millions of souls pressed into a hot place, licked by fires, and wailing like, what else, the damned? I’ll be damned if they didn’t sound just so!

No, no, I am not mad (as Edgar Poe might’ve said). Do not think me mad. And yet the shrieking and wailing and gnashing of teeth of the crowds surging onward, malevolent and irrepressible forces, drove me back, back, I say, to the edge of the void.

Where, looking back in abject horror to the world I had known and clung to and loved, I saw the flood pushing, pushing me, step by step and relentlessly, over the edge of the known world.

I shrieked, Oh devils in hell! It can’t be!

And, in truth, I was a goner.

Wouldn’t you have been?

This cardinal fledgling is taking on adult form and color. But will he fly right, on his own?

Funny how the little things add up some days, like eggs in a basket, eggs that soon may spoil.

Yesterday was one such day, bringing that kind of skein of phenomena we’re too busy usually to notice or to feel. But their coincidence struck me hard and balled me up too.

In the evening my wife Jen and I were driving to St. Paul to meet our son Gabe and his family for dinner. We’d hardly started out when we came upon, in the middle of a busy intersection, a male cardinal and one of his brood. It was just a flash of red, Big Red as I call the male bird, descending suddenly on a dubious pile of fluffy feathers. It was a traffic light that had just turned green, the roaring of vehicles out of the starting gate once more, and the sight of the Red Bird vainly trying to pick up his chick and fly away with it from danger. He plunged down, plucked at the fledgling, and rose up only to lose his load. The fledgling, motionless already or nearly so, dropped down, and we sped on, ignorant of the fate of the fledgling, who may have been on his first flight and, failing to rise, hit a car, or of the father bird for that matter. We sped on, as who in his right mind would stop and pluck a half-live, half-dead fledging out of the busy road at rush hour?

Dinner was fine, fun, at a St. Paul deli called the Cheeky Monkey. Jen and I, Gabe and Heidi and Ruby, and my sister Jeannie chowed down on wonderful sandwiches, cum and sans meat. I tried the cubano, which was prepared as a salad (option on all sandwiches), loaded with meat and wonderful greens. Ruby, our almost 3 year old granddaughter, ate pretty well off our plates and behaved nicely, a good challenge for one and a half hours. But when we left the restaurant she darted away from us on the sidewalk directly in front of the parking lot exit. We all simultaneously yelled at her — just as another customer’s SUV approached the drive. He slammed on his brakes, and we all breathed in alarmed relief. Too close a call for our little fledgling. We scolded her, and she took it all in solemnly a moment, then gave us the raspberry.

Later in the evening, back at home, Jeannie was telling me about a new trend in yoga, which she practices enthusiastically, religiously. It was something about using yoga to companion the sick. Dubious and skeptical as always, I scoffed — at the language and yoga, too, it must have been. This scoff was produced automatically, a real knee-jerk (throat-jerk) response. To companion a sick person? What nonsense! Jeannie teaches college English, as I have done, and I thought she should be more sensitive to this awful jargon. I huffed and puffed and if I didn’t blow the house down I made it haughtily clear, in short order, that sick people were not to be companioned!

(I find, in doing a quick Google search, that this idiom has indeed caught on in the health care field. Here’s the title of an article I’m sure you won’t rush out to read any time soon: “Decreasing Companion Usage without Negatively Affecting Patient Outcomes: A Performance Improvement Project.” Oh, shudder, shudder. We purists of the language, we high priests of usage simply shudder.)

But however I feel about such jargon, what was telling was my quick, rude reaction, cutting off my sister before she could make her point. She is attached to yoga, as I say, the way people are attached to religion. And it seems to have done her good, judging by her lean and healthy look. But I wasn’t having any of it, rude dog that I am. I preferred to assert my own opinion rather than listen to another’s. I swooped down on my sister the way the traffic swooped down on that little bird, and who would rescue her or care to stop?

Richard Yates, 1960, about the time of the publication of Revolutionary Road.

The book is about a young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who live in a shady suburb in Connecticut in the 1950s. They both come from backgrounds that today we’d call abusive. April especially suffers from mysterious deficits in her childhood and is prone to depression. It’s she who hits on the scheme of quitting the rat race and moving the family to Paris, where, sure, she can get a full time job and support her husband, the creative sort, in following his bliss.

Alas, it doesn’t turn out that way. In the contest between the muse and the meatball (thanks, Ron Black, old pal, for this metaphor), it’s the meatball of Madison Avenue that wins.

Frank is a lowly white collar worker with Knox Business Machines (read IBM). He goes into the office in New York City and pretends to work, while his bosses pretend to pay him. But one day, under duress, he blasts out a quick description, for a dealer, of the workings of these mysterious new machines, computers. And is noticed by a higher-up and conscripted to write copy for a big advertising campaign.

Pfitz! go the plans for life in Europe. It’s that Manichean contest I mentioned above (between books and movies), only here it’s for the soul of the man. The meatball has lured Frank with a lucrative offer that, as they say, he can’t refuse.

His doubts mount, and he and April go round and round about their moving plans, which they have announced with some fanfare to friends and neighbors. They’ve gotten the friendship and approval of a mad man in the story, the son of the local realtor—mad, I mean, like a fox, and locked away he’s so brilliant crazy. He sees their moving to Europe as a way out of the madness that is American life in the 1950s, decade of post-war enrichment and engorgement. And, in his foxy crazy way, approves.

Without bothering you with all the details, let’s just say that Frank goes down the road of the big money (or prospect of same). April gets pregnant (and aborts the child, and dies). And life goes on—at least for some, it goes on.

A depressing book? A look at a vanished past? I don’t think so. For the real can’t be depressing, finally, if it smacks us with the truth. And the past can’t be vanished that repeats itself, as the 2010s repeat the 1950s.

Yates’ book hits hard, like that old Santayana aphorism, for we who do not learn from history (and literature, its dreamy friend) are condemened to repeat it.

There’s Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Three Little Bears, and all of ‘em are bright, warm, amiable, available. They all skip rope, it turns out — as I espied the other night, looking out our sun room window — skip, skip, dust and shuttle shuttle boom. And this goes on some time, so I’m tired just watching.

It’s a family that gardens, does house repairs, drives a BMW,  runs its own business, drinks wine (Mama and Papa Bear, on our deck: olé!), and skips rope (if not school). They are sociable, ambitious, athletic, lively, and lovely.

Alas.

For it’s time for us, Jen and me, to move on.

Kylia shows off her tongue roll (mother and sister in background)

The three little bears are Ian (10) and his two sisters, Kylia (8) and Nya (7). They shoot basketball in their driveway, scoot the street on their Rollerblades with hockey stick in hand, fish for friends on Facebook (Ian), model for Target (Kylia), offer to buy our house so they can take up separate residence across from their parents (Nya).

Lawrence runs his own commercial alarm installation business. He worries about the holes in the wall (outside and inside) that his predecessor, the owner, occasioned with errant hockey shots. Sonya gardens, watches the kids and drinks wine with such gusto, says Kylia, that she goes snap, crackle, pop!

Now let’s see what life brings on. (Sure, bring it on.) Now that another parting is imminent. Now that we’re leaving many relatives and friends behind, following our son and his family south to Fayetteville, Arkansas, it seems, and turning the dial of our own life course toward full circle.

Alas.

And what can you do? I’ve always believed that philosophy is better, and cheaper, than impossible dreams.

The faucet is female, he decided ... with whatever reason or apparent reason ...

So he pronounced one day when he was installing a new faucet for the tub in our bathroom. I found the solid brass parts online, and he installed them, one stoical step at a time, just putzing. So he confirmed a bit later when he re-plumbed my hot tub, installing the mysterious, complex plumbing parts he’d bought 

(Obviously, you have to know what’s what, in materials and methods, before you can begin to putz!)

When I think of my own efforts at home  repair, it’s almost always with a blush. I’m so un-Norwidgen, unstolid, unsolid, irascible that when anything goes wrong, with tools or technique — and it always does — I cuss and jump up and down like Rumpelstiltskin. Madder and madder I get, deeper and deeper into the wrathful hole I’m digging toward that China of the psyche we’ve all been warned about. (Sure, there are hungry children down there, and they’ll eat your lunch if you let them!)

It takes a step back — yes, against the tide of progress — for me to calm down and have a little laugh at my own expense. I breathe more slowly, then, and step back, literally, away from the project. I smell the roses (and my greasy, blistered hands). And go on living for another day.

Putzing also reminds me — that is, the word “putzing” — of my early years learning German and so, inevitably, a bit of Yiddish. My Lehrjahre at the University of Minnesota, where I met my wife Jennifer in a German class, included bits and pieces that would contribute to my lexicon of humor. I can’t remember when I learned the word “putz,” but it must have been in the form of the common German verb “putzen,” to polish. Du putzest deine Zaehne (you brush your teeth) oder dein Haar (or your hair).

Of course, you can polish things so much that it’s ridiculous, nicht wahr (not true)? Remember the admiral in Gilbert and Sullivan, for one, who “polished up the [brass] handles so carefully that now [he] is the ruler of the King’s navy!”

If you insist on polishing to the point of exhaustion and perfection, relying on elbow grease to make your way to the top, your underlings may well think of you as a putz. A good German or, rather, Yiddish word for dick, dickhead, penis. You dumb putz, look what you’ve done now! A clumsy Kerl, to boot.

But there are dicks and then there are happy dicks, the latter including those who love putzing, just taking their time, accomplishing the task without blowing it in hot angry haste, those who putz placidly, patiently, at their job are like a lover with slow hands. (“He doesn’t come and go in a heated rush,” as the illustrious Pointer Sisters point out.)

It’ll take him a while, but he won’t regret it, this kind of Lothario, whether his object is a woman or a faucet, you see. Nor will the object of his affections regret it: she (faucet/woman) will be grateful, and then (afterward) she’ll be wistful.

(I know this analogy is odd. Bear with me. It might make more sense if English were a language with gendered nouns, if a faucet, that is, were female. But for the sake of this essayette, this trying out of ideas, let me merely proclaim the femininity of faucets.)

My neighbor Roy saw one swoop down in his back yard and make off with a songbird. (The songbirds, he attests, are making themselves scarce the last few days since the predator has returned.) Roy also saw the same hawk, could be, the same day, jumping up and down on his paver patio, impaling a chipmunk.

Found this red-tailed hawk down, in the grasses, near the Minnesota River a few years ago. It was evidently wounded, looking for cover and its old ascendant place in the heavens.

The next morning, when I opened my garage door, I saw a big bird shape swoop by. What the heck, I thought, is that? A glance up into my neighbor’s oak confirmed the return of the red-tailed hawk  (Buteo jamaicensis). He had something in his talons, but I couldn’t make it out, until the bird began jumping on the branch; then I could see the shape of the chipmunk clearly, caught in the hawk’s talons.

Hurray for the red hawk, efficient bird of prey. There is certainly no lack of chipmunks around here. Au contraire. They overrun the yard, nesting under our deck, squeaking and skedaddling up the downspout every time I walk by, scaring the lights out of me.

Welcome, all red-tails. Plummet, ye avengers of the air, and seize in your fierce talons all small (and obnoxious) rodents that you will. (Even the bunnies are thick these days in these parts.) Cease not from your culling of these little squeakers on account of me. Be my guest. Enjoy your feast. Eat your bloody fill.

At its best, a brochure is begging for someone to judge you. It says, “Assume that because we could hire really good printers and photographers and designers and writers, we are talented [surgeons, real estate developers, whatever].” And more often than not, people [assume] just that.

Aside from the proven effectiveness of his advice — and you can judge for yourself — his polemic reminds me of a meeting I had some years ago when I was soliciting business from an HVAC contractor and commercial plumber.

The crusty old prospect — untutored, unlettered, unimpressed — followed me through my portfolio, grudgingly admitting that certain brochures (including one for a rival HVAC company) were attractive.

But you know what? he said. People are going to just throw them away.

And he took the liberty of demonstrating his contention by tossing one of my pieces into the trash basket.

They’ll remember if they like you, sure. They’ll remember you have a snazzy presentation. But they won’t keep your piece, and it won’t persuade them one way or the other.

Freud saw the deep connection between being civilized and being unhappy. Are brochures just one more way of making us civilized beings unhappy?

Geez, I felt like saying. (Of course, I resisted his real-world illiteracy, his vulgar practicality.) Just ’cause I don’t know anything about your product (plumbing) doesn’t mean I would think it was crap and throw it away!

In fact, there’s a world of difference between the ridiculous bodily aspect of our being, including our bowel necessities, and the sublime pretensions of our art work, whether fine or commercial. Perhaps, it’s all shit. Perhaps we all follow it down the loo.

This may be another case for Dr. Freud, who wrote so eloquently about civilization and its discontents (in the volume called Civilization and Its Discontents). Do we really turn so ardently to our work because we can’t kill each other (as for making insulting comments) or live in filth?

]]> http://youngzeck.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=443 0 http://youngzeck.com/wordpress/?p=438 http://youngzeck.com/wordpress/?p=438#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:01:00 +0000 Greg http://youngzeck.com/wordpress/?p=438 Yesterday, the 4th of July, was filled with exhausting and simple pleasures.

Grandma and I had our granddaughter Ruby Mae with us while her parents drove to Fayetteville, Ark. to scout a new home. As sometimes happens, she kept us up a bit during the night, so we groped through the day groggily.

Ruby and I saw a bit of the annual Richfield July 4 parade, but at less than three years old she didn’t much cotton to the politicians and clowns (politicians as clowns?), the commercial floats, even the music. Instead, we stole away and played on the playground equipment, and Ruby showed she is fast becoming a little monkey, walking her way to the top on a platform up two parallel and curving bars.

In the evening we visited with friend Steve, his girlfriend Beth, and Steve’s menagerie (Beth is too smart and proud to be numbered among the creatures of the menagerie). Ruby was wary of the wagging and waggish Portuguese water dogs, Tarpon and Meghan, even when they joined the feast and chomped down chocolate cupcakes, the surreal blue frosting clinging like something out of a Van Gogh painting, momentarily to their lips.

Boppa and Ruby splash their feet in the gravelly bottom of Minnehaha Creek, near the falls.

On the way home, taking the river road, we stopped at Minnehaha Park and showed Ruby the falls. The park was still full of picnickers (about 7:30 pm), patrons of the fish restaurant, and enjoyers of natural beauty. Once we saw the falls, from several vantages, we walked upstream just a bit and found a gravelly shallows that looked very inviting.

Who needs more than one invitation on such a warm, humid summer’s day?

Ruby and Boppa (that’s me, Grandpa) removed our shoes and wriggled our toes in the gravelly bottom. My, how swift and clear the water was! We avoided the more rapid, treacherous mid-stream, and contented ourselves with the shallows. The pleasure of just walking a few steps, cooling our heels and soles, dipping our bottoms, splashing a bit was too great for words. Grandma stood on the bank of the creek, uttering continual warnings. Don’t step into the middle. It’s too fast. It’s dangerous. You’ll be swept away.

But even in the shallows Ruby and Boppa were swept away by the sheer bliss of the moment. Something so clear, so clean, so keenly flowing. Something so natural and close to town. (It was IN town.) Something we could escape to ease heart’s sorrow and foot’s itch, not to mention the discontents of civilization and excessive, commercial patriotic display, as in the parade and the evening’s fireworks (yes, we attended them also).

Somewhere close to you, I trust, a river runs through. Runs through your town, your heart, your person. It would be a shame not to see it and feel it. It can wash all impurities away.

“Hey!” I called out. “You a Mormon?” (We do have Mormon neighbors, and sure they dress like this, but have not tried to proselytize us.)

“What say?” he said. “Me, a Mormon? No, man, not at all!”

What he had to sell, it seems, was not God but man, that is, a manmade solution of magic liquid soap, a blue solution in a spray bottle that would clean everything that was filthy, whether walls, or floors, or dishes, or fabrics (he examined my filthy tee-shirt with interest: I’d just returned from helping a friends unclog their drain). Why, the magic soap could even get the oil and dirt stains out of my driveway. (He pointed helpfully.) What about my soul? I inquired.

The young man was Leo, and he hailed from the South Side of Chicago. He was 24 years old and had been with this company of traveling duffers for just a month now — in Arizona, and Utah, and now Minnesota. Dropped off in an alien neighborhood, he and his young colleagues would drop a white towel to mark the spot (what they had in lieu of Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs) and then set out to befriend and beleaguer the residents.

Leo didn’t get too far with me, as I pointed out we were about to leave this area (and didn’t point out what a scam I thought the sale was). He didn’t get so far as to mention prices; he gave a halfhearted demo on a picture window on the deck, where I was sitting, and settled down to talk.

He told me how far he and his friends were driven, literally and psychologically, by their manager — a dozen of ‘em in a van speeding all night through the Plains States, staking out territory in no man’s sales land. The manager didn’t seem to know any more than they did. Each city was new and foreign. But they’d drop their towel, not to surrender but to mark their place, and hike out through the territory.

Leo’s biggest conquest seemed to have been a “mountain” in Salt Lake City. When he arrived at the first hausfrau’s door, a swanky place on the mountain top, she stopped him immediately. “I don’t care what you’re selling,” she said. “I’m not interested. But how did you get up here?”

“I walked, ma’am,” he replied.

And the woman shoved him out the door and, at the same time, stuffed his pocket with a twenty dollar bill.

By the time he arrived at the next house, the neighbor already knew the score. She, and then eight more housewives in a row, pushed him down the hill but gave him twenty bucks each time for his aspirations and his climbing pains. Man, he made two hundred bucks by just climbing up the mountain, then coming down.

“Just like Moses!” I asserted.

I’d been fixing to fry some burgers on the grill, and Leo assented to join us. Pretty quickly, we had fresh, tasty burgers and a guacamole salad ready, thanks to Jennifer, and the three of us sat down on the deck table, and Leo devoured his dinner. Mighty fine food, thank you, ma’am, he said to Jen. Were those little red things in the salad tomatoes? (Pointing to cherry tomatoes in the guac.) Why, I only ate ‘em once before in my life, and didn’t like ‘em. But these is good. And this green stuff, too. What’s that?

If he didn’t know tomatoes, he wouldn’t know avocados, for sure. But, as I say, he devoured both burger and salad; checked his watch; and with a cheery wave was off to find the white towel, which he’d thrown down and perhaps, considering the way he’d spent the last hour, thrown in. He would look for his manager, dang it anyway, and maybe, some day, a better, fairer job.

(Yes, if Leo seems shanghaied into a magazine-type selling scheme, it’s no wonder. He’s young, unschooled, moneyless, clueless. But he has a great personality, I think. Keep him out of the ghetto, where he’d been shot at least once — he showed me a couple of long calf scars — and he might have a chance.)