The Desolation of Hair

I once met a bearded woman. Not a circus freak mind you, nor a Grimm’s fairy tale crone, but an ordinary young woman sitting in the same library-quiet room as myself. She wore faded jeans, a clean blouse, women’s loafers, wire-rimmed glasses. Her brown hair fell long and straight as sails in a calm. She had a calm honest smile and carried herself as a woman might, meaning she did not overtly stare at others, laugh loudly, or spread her legs apart when sitting the way a man might. Overall she gave the impression of a woman who expended the minimal amount of effort necessary to present herself as female in our society so she could live her life unperturbed by other people’s expectations. Except that she had a beard.

Her cheeks were bare, but from her chin hung a goatish beard about eight inches long. The hairs were soft and wispy, not quite thick enough to hide the contour of her face underneath. When she was thoughtful, she would run a finger idly through those hairs and twirl them around into curls, much like a younger girl might have done with a ponytail. She looked like the fresh-faced model from a 1950’s beauty cream poster, blissfully unaware that some graffiti artist had scribbled a beard on her.

Shocked may be too strong a word for how I reacted. I was certainly perturbed. I know I flushed with embarrassment. Exactly why I was embarrassed and for whom wasn’t clear, but that is what it means to be young, and I was quite young at the time, not yet twenty-five. This woman was not doing anything, she was merely sitting and thinking with the confidence of one whom presumes, without question, her right to sit and think in public. But her very existence, now that it was known to me, required an adjustment on my part. It required my brain to expand its understanding of the world. I now lived in a slightly bigger, more diverse world, a world where a woman could not only grow a beard, but choose to keep it.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. I wasn’t at peace with it. It felt wrong in that vague, undefined way that pineapple on pizza feels wrong. At the same time I was keenly aware that “how I felt about it” really didn’t matter to anyone but me. It was my burden to carry or drop as I chose, though if I wanted to be a jerk about it, I could try to make it other people’s burden too. I did not choose to do so.

Aside: This is supposed to be a frivolous little blog post, but I’m going to stick a little moral here in the middle, so you can all feel like this is time well spent and not simply another distraction from those responsibilities you are currently shirking.

I know people who are racist or sexist or homophobic. They have ideas of what the world should be like that don’t mesh with the way the world actually is. I’m OK with their personal cognitive dissonance as long as they accept it as their problem. But unfortunately most of them don’t. They decide that the world has to change, not them, and that is what causes all the trouble in the world. End aside.

It took me about an hour, more or less, to get over it. I even think I was able to do it without too much staring. OK, I decided. My world now contains woman who can and do grow beards. Cool. Different. Personally, I find it unattractive, but I feel the same way about nose rings and plucked eyebrows. To each their own. By the end of the hour, I was feeling pretty mellow about the whole thing except for one lingering dissatisfaction. I felt like I ought to shave off my own beard.

It was a thick, untrimmed, bristly thing which rounded out my “missed-the-hippies-by-a-decade-or-two” fashion statement. I have no pictures at hand, but it was a horrible beard. I grew it in high school and let is grow feral. I’m sure it delayed my first kiss for years. I’m also sure my Mom begged me to get rid of it. It seems like the kind of thing she would beg me to do, but I did not pay a lot of attention to what my Mom said back then. Even when she was reading me the riot act in her best rattle-the-windows voice, I had learned to cringe convincingly without actually paying attention to the words. Which must be a genetic trait, because my own pre-adolescent children have already mastered it.

I was too insufferably proud of my beard to consider shaving it off. Most of my high school friends could not grow a full beard, whereas mine had appeared virtually overnight. [For those of you born after the internet: “virtually” here means my beard grew very quickly. I do not mean it grew in a computer simulation.] Yet I’m not sure where the pride came from. It wasn’t as if there was any effort or sacrifice involved. Most of the “work” of growing it happened while I was sleeping, something I could have done just as easily in a coma, though I have never tested this hypothesis. There is a persistent myth that hair cells will continue to grow for hours after death, which I thought was rather cool. Of course, only a teenage boy would find pride in an achievement that a corpse could equal.

But the truth was, I had grown a beard in high school to hide my weak chin and soften my over-large nose. So years later, when I saw this woman confidently sporting a beard, contrary to all modern cultural expectations, it occurred to me that I had no reason to be proud of a beard I had only grown to hide my perceived defects. If I had had half the quiet confidence this woman displayed, I would have shaved my own beard off.

But I did not. I simply stopped being so insufferably proud of it. And from time to time I mowed the hairs down to a uniform length and shaved a neat edge to it on my throat, because everything I knew about personal grooming, I learned from mowing the lawn.

I didn’t actually get around to shaving it off completely for a several years, and when it happened, it was not a planned event, though neither was it the whim of a moment. The circumstances were unforeseeable and out of my control, but once set in motion, unstoppable. It was like watching a car accident from a distance. You know exactly what is going to happen, but you are powerless to stop it. You can only decide whether or not to watch.

I was in my mid-late twenties, and I had a girlfriend. She had very beautiful, long, reddish-blond hair which ensnared me. When she was excited, it would shift like water and reflect light in waves. When she was shy, she would lean her head forward and her hair would fall around her face like a curtain closing, with one eye peaking out coyly. And when she was close to me, her hair smelled exactly the way flowers ought to smell. You may tell me that it was simply the expensive salon shampoo that made her smell this way, but I was convinced it was her personal biological alchemy. She took pains to keep her hair clean and brushed and shiny despite the grueling schedule of an overworked science graduate student with a daily bicycle commute.

And then one day, without warning, she took me to a hairstyle convention in town, so I could watch while her hair was cut by a professional in front of a crowd of hair stylists, fashion writers, and personal care product salespeople.

May the sadistic wench who cut her hair burn in hell.

It has been twenty-plus years since that day, and I cannot express what a relief it is to unburden myself of these words. I can say it now loud and clear. May she burn … in … HELL. (The stylist, not my girlfriend).

I could not have said it then. Our relationship was going through a rocky stage, and any negative comment about her very, very short haircut would have been unappreciated. I believe she was making a statement. Or a plea. Or even a test. Whatever it was, I was expected to understand without having it spelled out for me. But I did not understand. I guess I was not a good speller. The best I could manage was, WTF?

I knew a response was expected, but anything I might have said would not have been honest, supportive, and convincing. Maybe I could have managed two out of three.

So instead, I shaved all the hair from my head. Except my eyebrows. Which turned out to be an acceptable, non-verbal response. At least, it seemed to have a mollifying effect on our relationship. Everyone else, however, began to treat me like a cancer patient, which was not comfortable. It makes one feel fraudulent and despicable. I grew back my beard back as soon as I could (and my girlfriend grew her hair back as well), and I did not think of shaving it off for another twenty years, just in time for my mid-life crisis.

A word about mid-life crisis.

We think that attention-deficit disorder is a condition that some are born with and others are not, but I believe we raise boys to be deficit in attention. We teach them to go out and explore and experiment and achieve. The big, astounding, complex world of possibilities becomes a huge candy shop. We want to be crab fishermen, zamboni drivers, gentlemen pirates, oil drill rig operators, sandwich shop owners, wartime medics, and third world dictators, and we try it all. We take a bite of everything the world has to offer and move on to something else. Eventually we reach an age when the tide of testosterone ebbs, revealing a beach littered with the half-chewed remains of our cupidity. We see all the unrealized potentials we didn’t pursue to any conclusion. The crazy, spinning, kaleidoscope of the world stops spinning, and we realize that it was never spinning to begin with, that it was ourselves spinning in circles, chasing our own tails.

That moment of clarity is what our culture calls “mid-life crisis.”

And what did I see with my new mid-life clarity?

I saw that I was terribly bald.

By which I do not mean completely bald. To be completely bald would not have been as terrible. My head looked like some cow with a particularly rasping tongue had licked me from forehead to crown and then decided that perhaps grass was a better choice after all. I had also lost hair from my shins, of all places, which turns out to be a common aging effect with the awesome name of “anterolateral leg alopecia.” To add insult to injury, certain hairs began over-compensating. I discovered a two-inch silk thread growing from the edge of one ear and there were several small enthusiastic patches on the side of my skull that grew faster than their neighbors, erupting like crab grass as though some ripe thought had fermented just underneath. And my eyebrows became positively feral.

Admittedly baldness can be an attractive trait. I understand it is useful if you are selling ammonia cleaning products or recruiting fascist vandals. ButI was doing neither, and anyway, you have to be completely bald for either of these pursuits. It was time to do what men my age do and take a number one razor to my head.

I expected to return to my cancer patient look but no. Somehow in the years since my angst-ridden twenties, I had grown a chin. My nose had shrunk a little. I had started cleaning my glasses and you could see my blue eyes. I looked younger, healthier, perhaps even intelligent. The ugly duckling finally turned into, not a swan exactly, but let’s say a rare and curious blackbird.

Which leaves me to wonder. Is this how I had looked all along? Was my younger self too lacking in confidence to look in the mirror and see what was actually there? I don’t know the answer, but sometimes, when I’m in a crowd, I like to sit and think about it, my fingers idly stroking my clean-shaven chin.

Book Review: The Death of the Necromancer

Synopsis: Nicolas Valiarde has a complicated life. To the world he presents himself as a high society recluse and art dealer. In reality, he is the mastermind thief, Donatien, who has stolen several priceless objects while staying barely one step ahead of the formidable Inspector Ronsarde and his companion Dr. Halle. Nicolas manages this by being very smart, very careful, and very rich in compatriots: his lover Madeline, an actress of no mean talent; his friend Reynard, a former cavalry officer who disgraceful exit from service was arranged by a mutual enemy; the powerful wizard Arisilde, whose opium addiction has reduced him to a shade of his former glory; and a crew of loyal criminals in his employ.

The story opens with Nicolas and his crew stealing a vault of gold from the cellars of a noble household while a large ball is taking place over their heads. The gold is meant to be planted elsewhere to incriminate his enemy, the lord framed Nicolas’ patron, Edouard, years earlier on the charge of necromancy. And though Edouard was exonerated of the charge, it is a posthumous exoneration after his execution. The lord who arranged these events is never convicted nor publicly suspected. Which is why Nicolas wants him so badly. 

But it turns out Nicolas is not the only thief prowling the cellars that same evening, and his path unfortunately crosses with that of a very powerful foe who cannot be ignored.

Review: Martha Wells writes fantasy action/adventure novels in the style of her accidental namesake H. G. Wells, but she does so with the sensibilities of a modern author writing to a modern audience.

The Death of the Necromancer takes place in a city something like 19th century London – the resemblances between Inspector Ronsarde and Sherlock Holmes are hardly accidental, and the very strong, independent character of Madeline must work within the limitations of societal gender roles – and yet it is also a world in which wizardry and fayre combine with gaslights, revolvers, and horse-drawn carriages to create the perfect fantasy milieu. Not quite steam punk, not quite Victorian or Gothic romance, not at all LARP thief epic or zombie horror tale, this story borrows from all to create something new and unique.

When the book opens, Nicolas is in the middle of a complicated plot to bring down his nemesis, but this motive must be set aside to fulfill a more compelling filial duty. His new opponent is using a device, invented by his patron, to commit unspeakable crimes, and Nicolas must stop him. It is not so much that Nicolas possesses moral scruples (or so he believes) as that he is greatly angered by this foul appropriation of his patron’s great work. Nicolas is the iconic gentleman thief, but he possesses no predilection for magic, which puts him at a severe disadvantage. He will need all his considerable talents not only to combat this dark magician, but merely to stay alive. It won’t be enough. He will require the help of his friends, especially his partner Madeline, and a few unexpected allies who show up from time to time.

There book is pure adventure story with humor, suspense, and several surprises that you will not see coming. I would recommend it for any lover of speculative fantasy fiction. While there are shades of romance, there is no explicit sex, though parents be warned before giving this your child. As the title suggests, there are reanimated dead people and just enough gore that I would think twice from recommending the book to a child. This is not a horror book by any means, and the author wisely refrains as much as possible from lurid, grotesque detail. You will not likely get nightmares from The Death of the Necromancer, but you can expect several sleepless nights staying up late reading.

Movie Review: Earth To Echo

Synopsis: Three 13-year olds, misfits at school, are about to have their tight friendship broken up. The neighborhood is slated for demolition for a new highway and everyone is moving away. The day before they all move, weird things start happening to their cell phones, and they figure out that the images on their phones are a map to a location 20 miles away in the Nevada desert. They decide to spend a final evening together, following the map on their bikes. They discover a piece of metallic junk under a high-voltage transmission wire which turns out to house an alien (fortunately small, benign, cute, resembling a small owl) in need of help. They spend the entire night on a quest to help this tiny creature, never quite sure if they are good Samaritans helping a lost traveler or unwitting accomplices to a potential disaster that could kill everyone in their neighborhood. Along the way they pick up a fourth companion, the pretty girl from school who lives in another world from them and yet isn’t really so different. They also have to avoid sinister construction workers who are not whom they appear to be.

Review: I spent the good part of an hour looking for a movie that my family could watch together. My children are 12 and 9 years old, and it is becoming more and more difficult to find good quality movies that meet everyone’s differing needs and tastes. We did not want nightmare-inducing graphic images, nor cloying feel-good family flics, nor overdone or underdone animation, nor inferior 20th century special effects that my jaded children already despise. We picked this one because it interested the children and we knew nothing about it except some cool CGI in the previews. However my hopes weren’t high. Movie buffs will recognize many of the familiar tropes in the above synopsis that I recognized, and I expected something very derivative. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised.

The plot sounds like a mash up of Spielberg alien movies – Close Encounters and E.T., with a touch of cinema verité (ala Blair Witch Project). The main device of the movie is that it is a self-narrated video project made by one of the 13-year-old boys. I fully expected ninety minutes of bizarre camera angles, blurring racing shots, poor film editing, and voice-over explications for whatever could not be shown visually at an objective angle. But none of that happens. The device works, in part because modern camera technology has evolved to the point that it is entirely believable a thirteen year old could have several mountable, high-quality cameras including a Google Glass type contraption. It also works because the story is never forced to fit this device, nor made to take a back seat to special effects.

The plot is kept simple so the filmmakers could focus on telling an adventure story and growing the characters with detail. There are no special effects in the first ten or twenty minutes of the movie; we simply get to know these quirky, charming, flawed, and very real children with little or no impending sense of science fiction on the horizon. By the time the adventure takes off, you care about them and don’t need the action or the CGI to keep you hooked. In fact, the special effects are generally underdone, and slowly ramped up, which prevents the film from breaking out of its hyper-real, documentary quality. Even as machines come apart, float through the air, and piece together again, you have the sense that it is real.

Thematically the film deals with children on the cusp of adolescence wanting some power over their lives, which admittedly is not everyone’s cup of tea. However the movie is never boring or tiresome, and the pace keeps you distracted from questions like, “Why haven’t the camera batteries run out?”or “Why don’t these kids look like they’ve been up all night long?” It was suspenseful without being stressful (important for my children), emotional without being maudlin, and often unexpectedly funny, all of which is supported, rather than hindered, by the device of self-filming.

Most refreshing to me is that the children act their age at all times, and the story is told entirely from their vantage point. Perhaps having a 12 year old in my house helped, but the movie brought back memories of that raging hormonal, emotional, scary time of life. The adults are real adults who talk down to children, indulge them, worry about them, dismiss them, and constantly underestimate them.

This is not a work of literature. It is a fun romp, and the writers did a great job of fleshing out the story while cutting out any fat. At ninety minutes, it won’t take up your entire evening, and my only criticism is that it will certainly raise my daughter’s expectations of getting her own cell phone sometime soon.

Wishing well

When anyone in the family has a problem, sooner or later it will appear on my desk where even my myopic eye cannot miss it. It will sit there waiting for resolution, or at least judgment, from Papa who is somehow the last hope of all things broken. Springs and screws, bits of plastic, receipts for unbudgeted expenses, fund raising flyers, notes from the teacher, small vibrating toys lacking batteries. Like coins in a wishing well, such valuable items are sacrificed to the bottomless well of my To Do list in the hopes that something good and deserving may result.

Don’t You Dare

In some dark hour of the night, I woke to the creepy sensation of fingers gently stroking the hairs on my forearm. I twitched and weakly pushed the hand away while whining a four note, “Nnnnhhh.”

This four-note phrase is a secret marital passkey code meaning, “you are doing something very irritating that is waking me up, and I insist on returning the favor.” I use it mostly for those times when my sleeping wife manages to dig her big toenails into my plantar fascia. Involuntarily, of course, or so she insists.

“Papa?”

Ah. Not the wife. Rose, the sleep walking child. The wife must be deeply asleep because normally Rose wakes her first.

Now her brother Samuel, he can wake the whole house just opening a door. I don’t know what it is about that boy, but he manages to do just about everything louder than his sister – talking, walking, hugging, eating. He makes more noise just breathing than she does, and she has asthma. About the only thing she does louder is drinking. She gulps water with a rhythmic, gulping and sucking sound, like large stones dropping into a pond, like a malfunctioning suction pump, like Gollum clearing his throat.

“Papa?”

Ah. Still there. Did I fall asleep again? I must be having trouble waking up. If she would only remember to pee before going to bed this wouldn’t happen.

“Papa,” and she brushed my arm hairs again. Did I mention that’s really annoying when you’re trying to sleep? I must not have to her, because she keeps doing it. “Papa, I had a really, really bad dream.”

Wait a minute.

That was a complete, grammatically-correct sentence. Perhaps she is not sleep walking after all?

“And … and I don’t feel so good.”

Nothing says, “Wake up, now!” to a parent like a sick child hovering over your unprotected face. Suddenly I was bolt upright in bed. So was Dawn (the faker).

“Uh, how’s your tummy, sweetie?”

“Fine. But my head hurts. And I feel cold.”

Soon she was in bed, nestled up against her Mama, or “Mama Llama” when she’s playful, or “Emmy” when she is feeling loving , which then branched off into “Your Emmynence,” when she has been asked to fetch something. At first, we were all drifting back to sleep, but Dawn decided Rose felt warm. I got the thermometer.

A hundred point eight.

“Congratulations, Rose. No school tomorrow. Er … I mean, today. Whatever.”

“But Papa,” and her lament was a sleepy drawl. “We have dance practice tomorrow, and I was told I can’t miss any between now and competition. It’s only a week away.”

“I’m pretty sure they’ll give you an exception. But I’ll call the studio in the morning and leave a message.”

In the morning, Rose slept in while Samuel grumbled about the unfairness of having to go to school when “she” got to stay home. We all knew which “she” he was referring to. When Rose woke up, she made a nest of fleece blankets, pillows, and library books on her floor and then spent nine of the next ten hours there.

I called the dance studio and left a message.

“Hello, this is Rose’s father calling. She has a sore throat and a 100.8 fever, but she’s worried that if she misses practice she won’t get to compete next week. Can you give us a call back and reassure her?”

They don’t open until 3:00 PM. At 3:05 PM, my phone rang.

“Mr. Rose’s Dad? This is Darcy at the studio. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but we have a hundred girls getting ready for dance competition next week. Don’t you dare bring Rose to class tonight.”

“What? You don’t want us driving through the tornado watch zone so she can infect the entire studio?”

“Bless her heart and tell her we hope she gets better soon.”

I tell Rose she’s officially blessed, at least her heart is, and she should just focus on getting well.

She smiles. “Papa, can you wake me when its time for dinner?” But even though she grunts at me when I shake her arm, Rose doesn’t appear at dinner until it is almost over, and then she doesn’t eat much. More tylenol, a cool bath for her fever, some reading out loud (“Harry Potter”) and cuddling in bed with Emmy. She is not a teenager quite yet.

Fairy Tale

Two nights ago at dinner, my children asked me to tell them a story from my childhood:

Once upon a time, in the ancient days of the last millennium [about 1980], your father was a young scholar and an adviser in the court of King Grandpa and Queen Grandma. This was long before the advent of The Home Depot and King Grandpa, the wise and powerful ruler of the kingdom of Our House, sat smoking his pipe and gazing at the lands beyond his castle window where the evil Wood Lot, and its legions of Saplings, had been staging forays against the back yard lawn, slowly and imperceptibly encroaching on his sovereign demesne. He decided to make war on the Saplings, before the Queen his wife could find him and give him something useful to do. He called two of his sons, selecting them from his brood of princes for their lack of self-preservation and exceptional nearness to hand.

First they ransacked the royal armory and soon rode forth to battle with a ladder, an extension cord, and a rusty hack saw. King Grandpa propped his ladder against a twenty foot tall Sapling and, hoisting his coil of extension cord, he mounted the ladder halfway up the slender trunk. He made one end of it fast to the tree and, tossing the other end to your Uncle, he directed him to pull with all his might and slacketh not. He then incited your other Uncle, commanding him to attack the base of the trunk with the rusty hack saw forthwith. Then King Grandpa, hurling invective from the top of the ladder, pushed against the trunk from the top of the ladder with might and main.

The ensuing and colorful invective, floating through the loopholes of the keep, attracted the attention of Her Majesty the Queen. From her perch in the royal tower, Queen Grandma looked forth and witnessed the battle from a window, whereupon she immediately summoned her royal adviser [your father] to her side.

“You called, Your Majesty,” said the brown-nosing adviser.

“Adviser,” she said, “my eyesight is not what it once was. Cast your glance out the window and pray tell me who are yonder stooges in the back yard?”

“Why, your majesty … it is, er, the King, your husband … and my brothers.”

The Queen pursed her lips and frowned. “I thought as much. And what are yonder addle-pates attempting to do? Slay themselves and bankrupt the kingdom with hospital bills?”

“Verily, madam, it would seem so. However,” said the adviser, taking a more careful look, “I have knowledge of that particular hack saw, dulled from years of quarrying garden bricks in the carport. It is my considered opinion that yon hacksawing is far more likely to start a friction fire than to make that Spaling deviate one inch from its angle of ascent.”

“Ah,” said the royal queen, “I didst wonder which of my faithful servants had been vandalizing the garden bricks and trodding red dust into the house. Be certain, adviser, we shall speak of this another time. For now, please sally forth and say to yonder idiots that the Queen commands they cease and desist before our neighbors spy them and we become a source of mirth in Glen Court, and their minstrels make mockery of us.”

King Grandpa and his vassals returned  from battle, having failed to fell a single enemy, and yet strangely ebullient. When asked, the king made it known that it had never been his purpose to decimate a single tree, but rather to impart wisdom to his princes by his fine example. And it became a saying in the kingdom thereafter, that you should always tackle a job by yourself first, to truly understand the value of the professional you later hired to fix the mess you made.

Why I No Longer Eat “Organic”

My wife is a tea drinker. More than that, she is a tea enthusiast, having collected teapots, infusers, cozies, sweeteners, and boxes and boxes of bagged and loose tea. Black tea, white tea, green tea, leaded and unleaded. It is from her that I learned that “herbal tea” is an oxymoron. If it doesn’t contain Camellia sinensis then it is not properly tea, but rather a tisane. Which she also drinks.

The responsibilities of parenthood have curtailed her various hobbies – long leisurely baths, margaritas with Mexican food, and, inevitably, tea chats with the girls. Our tea stock has dwindled to a mere two dozen boxes, and most of the teapots are still lovingly bubble-wrapped inside cardboard boxes from the last move. Abandoned mugs of once-hot tea, gone cold with neglect, litter the house. She is philosophic about this change in her life. Isn’t this why God created microwave ovens?

She does not mention it, but I am certainly a disappointment to her. I have always found tea to be a pointless exercise. What is the purpose of a beverage whose unadulterated taste ranges from weak to bitter?

Linus: How do you like the chocolate tea I made for you?
Lucy: It’s terrible! It’s too weak! It tastes like some warm water that has had a brown crayon dipped in it!
Linus: You’re right. I’ll go put in another crayon.

Not many days ago, she was complaining that her recent favorite – Good Earth(R) Original Sweet & Spicy(TM) Herbal Tea Blend – had fallen drastically in her esteem. Instead of inflating the sinuses with a pleasant, aromatic cloud, this tea developed an insipidity beyond the saving grace of any number of crayons. She went through three boxes of it to affirm that it wasn’t the unlucky chance of a bad batch.

Perhaps they had tinkered with the formula in an attempt to make it “new and improved?” She read the package label carefully and found no such evidence of formula tampering. On the other hand, she did discover a fascinating new magic trick!

Observe, side one (note the area circled in red):

 

Sounds pretty good, right? Now watch the magic trick. Flip the box over and …

Presto! Instant artificial flavor. Just add hot water.

I must have some youthful idealism left, because I am still astonished when someone lies directly in my face like this.

What is the socially appropriate thing to do? My social conscience says to call them on it. There was even a phone number right on the box. Customer service representatives were standing by waiting to wish me a nice day.

I dialed the number and a plummy English butler seated me in a virtual receiving room. “The Good Earth guide will be with you shortly,” I was politely informed, thought I was not offered any tea, real or virtual.

The guide did not keep me waiting long. His greeting was only slightly less civil than the butler, marred by an early morning stupor that flattened his intonation to a dull, metallic monotone. Perhaps Good Earth does not offer tea to its employees, either.

I stated the purpose of my visit, to wit, that his packaging contained a blatant prevarication upon the label. His stiff-backed and unhesitating admittance of guilt indicated that I was not the first to ask. Yes, there was a “misprint” on the packaging. The product did contain artificial flavor, in particular, a proprietary blend of spices.

“But wait. Spices are natural, aren’t they?” I asked. “Why ‘artificial flavor’ instead of ‘natural flavor?'”

Well, he was not at liberty to divulge the proprietary ingredients in the proprietary spice blend, but if there was a concern about a specific ingredient, I could have a doctor call to discuss it with them. And I should be “sure to have a nice day.”

---

My title promised a fascinating lecture on organics. Why on earth am I talking about tea?

To me, the story of Good Earth is a representative tale. The company started importing tea in 1972 in California. They sold organic blends, but not exclusively. It was a successful company with a popular product, and so it grew. A lot. Good Earth Tea is now available in Walmarts and Costcos across the country. A modern business fairytale. Like Cinderella, they soundly trounced the step-sister competition and won a prince, in this case, Tetley US Holdings Limited, a subsidiary of Tata Global Beverages, who owns them heart and soul.

This is now the de facto state of organics in America. What started as a boiling Movement now simmers on the back burner as a Consumer Option. Who turned down the heat on the stove? It’s an interesting story I’ve been trying to piece together.

We tend to forget that for the majority of human history, all agriculture  was organic, though it wasn’t called that. The term “organic” was popularized by J. I. Rodale in the 1930’s. It was a new name for the old way of farming, before petroleum, herbicides, pesticides, preservatives, patented flavors, international shipping, chemistry and industry rewrote the rules and forced us to come up with a separate name for “that thing we did for thousands of years and which we are no longer doing.”

By the time I  got involved in the 1980’s, the organic movement had been bicycling along the back roads of American agriculture for fifty years, while industrial farming took off on the Eisenhower interstate highway system. At that time, there were organic co-ops selling local produce and adding color to artsy midtowns and college campuses around the nation, but they were hardly a blip on the economic radar.

Except perhaps for tourism. Locals would bring their visiting relatives by the co-op to gawk at our fruit smoothies, our kale and bean burritos, and whatever it was we smoked back then. Most of us don’t remember. We were “the granola people” – fruits, nuts, and flakes – on display for the masses.

But about the time the world population tipped 5 billion, our quietly asserted message of health and environmental sustainability hit a chord. Articles were written suggesting links between chemical agriculture and a whole hosts of health and environmental ills. Word spread on the internet, itself a nascent, democratic means of communication. Sales of organic products began to take off. And we caught the attention of the global food industry.

To a certain extent, I mean that literally. We (some of us anyway) went looking for them.

Why? My understanding is that some organic growers wanted to grow bigger. It wasn’t enough to save the family farm anymore. They needed to save the world. What if we could convert a million acres of industrial farmland to organic production? How much less pesticides and herbicides would ends up in our lakes, streams, and air?

And they needed to make money. They were tired grubbing in the dirt for miniscule profits.

But in either case, the economic reality was, and is, if you want to grow, you need capital investment. So they began to court investors. But there was a problem. Up until this point, the organic movement was a loose confederation of local, home grown communities linking farmer, grocer, and consumer. Each region had its own organic standard and its own certification agency and process. This worked just fine for the growers, sellers, and consumers, most of whom were happy to get whatever was locally available. But an entrepreneur who wanted to sell a product nationally couldn’t reasonably meet hundreds of different organic standards.

So, along with some national food companies, who wanted a piece of the pie themselves, they lobbied the USDA for a national organic standard.

INTERLUDE: BEING A PARABLE OF GLOBAL FOOD INDUSTRY VS. ORGANIC AGRICULTURE

Imagine you are the general manager of large grocery store and you are always looking for ways to increase your income. Nostalgia brings to mind the idyllic lemonade stands of your youth, long before the Facebook, Ipods, and computer games saved our children from the dangerous streets. You decide to add a new revenue stream to your business – vending machines that sells cans of manufactured lemonade. It’s a steady profit, not huge, but requiring little effort and time on your part. You put your son in charge of the machines, hoping the lure of making money rubs off on him.

Then one morning as you are parking your Hummer in your store’s parking lot, you notice across the six lanes of traffic a real, honest-to-God, lemonade stand. A woman in colorful, retro, peasant garb fusses over the pitchers. She has bags of lemons, sacks of sugar, drums of fresh rain water, and she squeezes the lemons by hand with a cheerful intensity of purpose. The inefficiency boggles your mind and you think she is really a little too old to be playing games. You shake your head and walk into work.

Later in the day, once the sun and heat have cranked up, you hear the familiar sound of someone banging on the drinks machine trying to get some free change out of it. You yell for your son to shoo them off (this is part of his job), but he does not answer. Grumbling, you head outside to do it yourself but your attention is diverted by a large crowd of people across the street waiting to buy lemonade.

It takes the faux-peasant woman five minutes to make a glass of lemonade mostly because she chats with every customer. People don’t seem to mind the wait; they are smiling.

And then out of the crowd of people emerges your son. He is also smiling, and he is wiping the corner of his mouth with his index finger and licking it. He looks up and sees your thundering, disapproving glare, and meekly crosses the street (at the traffic light. He is a safety conscious lad).

“What are you doing, son?” you ask when he returns.

“It’s a new brand of lemonade,” he answers. “I thought I’d try it out. Check out the competition. She calls it ‘Homemade.’ It’s a subsidiary of …”

“So you bought a glass?”

“No, you only give me a dollar for an allowance, and it costs $4 a glass.”

“Four dollars!” You are astounded.

“Yeah. But she gave me a free sample. Oh, and also a brochure.”

He rummages in his pockets and pulls out a crumpled ditto-sheet, the sticky-sweet smell of sugar and lemons rising from it. Although it doesn’t mention your business or the lemonade brand by name, it references several scientific studies showing how the artificial ingredients in canned lemonade puts holes in your brain tissue, how the cheap high-fructose corn syrup corrupts your insulin chakras, how the lemon plantations are devastating the rain swamps of Ichupatu and exiling indigenous people to the slums of Porto Barbar, and how the profits are invested in various and nefarious political juntas.

“Well,” you bluster, trying to keep your anger in check, “at that price, she won’t get much business!”

Your son tactfully makes no comment about the growing crowd across the street.

Sweat breaks out on your forehead.  You sputter, “So how long has she been in business, right under our nose?”

“Oh, she’s been around forever. She started the business when she eight years old. Things have just … picked up lately.”

Your stomach hurts. You begin to wring your hands. You mutter, “This is terrible. This could severely damage our profit margin. We will have to do something about this. But what?”

“Well, she did mention that she was dreaming of expanding her business, perhaps a franchise. Maybe we could sell her product?”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? It’s not like she has a trademark on the name or anything.”

Your hands cease wringing. “Trademark?” you repeat. Your eyebrows raise knowingly. A light bulb has gone off above your head. You nod and smile deliciously. “Son, I think you may be on to something there.”

“Thanks Dad. Hey, could I borrow three dollars?”

---

The USDA, who is a friend to Big Ag if nothing else, was most obliging. It not only proposed a national organic standard, it included language that made it a crime to label a product “organic” unless it met the federal standard AND had been certified organic by one of the expensive, government-approved certification agencies.

Ta-da: trademark is now ours.

Overnight, thousands of organic farmers became just plain farmers. The only ones who got to use the word “organic” were the ones lucky or smart enough to have named their business, “Bob’s Organic Produce.”

Do I sound like I’m verging on some anti-government, Tea Party platform? “Why is the Federal Guv’ment regulating these small businesses to death. This is outrageous. Someone get me Ron Paul’s phone number!” Well, it really isn’t that simple. For example, during this process, the government strove for rather weak standards and the organic industry fought for tougher standards – the only time in American history that an industry has asked for stricter regulation from the government. Why? Two reasons that I can find. The first is because consumers wouldn’t buy it. No one was going to pay a premium for organic food that wasn’t organic. Second, most of the organic entrepreneurs pushing for standards hadn’t sold out their values.

However most of these entrepreneurs have since sold out their businesses. The organic brands I knew twenty years ago are now all owned by international food companies. It is nearly impossible to find organic products today that are not owned by national or international companies who also produce and sell industrial food. And they sell a lot more industrial than organic.

Unsurprisingly, these companies play down any superiority that might damage their non-organic product lines. For example, they insist that organic food has no nutritional superiority to industrially produced food. In their PR world view, “organic” is merely a deluxe model of what they already sell. Replace the word “organic” with “blue,” and it would hardly matter. If people decided they wanted blue food, these companies would create genetically modified blue bacon and color their milk and oranges with patented blue food dye. They would demand a national standard of “blue” to control competition. And they would insist that blue food is really no more or less healthy than any other product they sell.

Go ahead. Ask it. You know you want to.

SO WHAT?

What’s the problem with this, really? If the product is USDA certified organic and people buy it, aren’t we putting less chemicals into the ground, water, and air as a result? Isn’t that a good thing?

Definitely, yes.

I don’t want to argue that point. My point is something different. I’ve hinted at it already (have a cup of tea?).

The organic movement championed an ethic that embraced broader values and concerns than just chemicals and nutrition. It included stewardship of the environment, ethical treatment of animals, and building relationships in communities. Unsurprisingly, the modern USDA organic certification program doesn’t address these issues. Quite the opposite. By stacking the deck for large-scale agriculture, which is the current USDA priority, it actively works against these values.

Some examples. In today’s world, those organic tomatoes you bought in December were probably shipped from Argentina using plenty of crude oil. That organic lettuce from California was packed in non-recyclable plastic bags inflated with greenhouse gases (CO2) to keep it fresh. The organic milk you drink came from cows that never walked in pasture or stood in daylight, and their manure, rather than being composted and recycled into the soil, is sluiced into pits where the pathogens can float down into the water supply when it rains.

Meanwhile, the small scale organic farmers, who were miraculously saving their family farms in the 1980’s and 1990’s, are now going bankrupt. They cannot compete against price-gouging agribusinesses who can undercut prices with slimmer margins and afford to pay the inflated certification fees demanded by USDA approved certifiers. And the farm animals that were grazing in fields are now back in confined “organic” feedlots, and being butchered in cruel “disassembly” lines that we are not allowed to see for fear we might choose to stop buying meat if we knew.

When’s the last time you saw a farm animal (for meat, not a pet) grazing in a field?

So while I would love to eat only organic, the best most of us we can do is USDA Organic (R). And the cherry on top? The USDA organic label only ensures that 95% of the ingredients in a package are organic. What about the other 5%? Who knows? There is a separate “100% USDA organic” label for purists, but I have yet to see it on any product in a grocery.

There are still farmers out there who raise their food “old school organic,” grown and sold locally without chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, pollution, erosion, tilling, petroleum, or cruelty. More than half of my family’s food budget goes to them. I would like to say we are doing our small part to save the water, the air, and the soil, that we are helping to provide jobs in our community rather than line the pockets of CEOs and investors. That’s all true, but the real reason? Homegrown, fresh, organic food tastes SOOO much better. We are eating like kings.

Shh. It’s our little secret.

Mortality strikes again

Samuel is going to die. We don’t know when or exactly how, but it won’t be anytime soon, we hope. He is, after all, just weeks shy of his sixth birthday, and full of the frenetic vitality of a moth before the flame. But on our recent trip to visit his grandparents, his understanding of mortality cemented, and not just mortality in general, but specifically his mortality. He would have rather stayed ignorant.

The grandparents live in Deep South Texas, which, if you ask any Texan, is not to be confused with North, South, Central or West Texas. Deep South is just an hour from where the Rio Grande anemically trickles into the Gulf of Mexico. More people in this patch of America speak Spanish than don’t, and the grandparents, known to the Mexicans as Q-Tips for their white hair and shoes, are part of the aging retirement community that don’t. The wind there blows more or less all the time, a blessing in March and a scourge of sandy grit in August. Shaggy, ornamental palm trees, inconsistently shaved, swagger on the sides of the roads like wealthy drunks. Birds of unusual colors and sizes dot the skies. Instead of crows in the country and pigeons in the cities, they have plagues of grackles – medium-sized birds with black iridescent feathers, alien eyes, and an astoundingly large vocabulary. They can chirp, wolf whistle, and scream in an eerily human fashion, but the most interesting noise they make is an odd crinkly sound like aluminum foil being chewed and swallowed.

This is where the grandparents have come to retire, for the warmth and the bird watching. Their home is the smallest permanent dwelling I have ever slept in. Inside, from one end to the other, is a ship’s bathroom, a bedroom just large enough for the king bed, a clean and serviceable kitchen, and the sitting room. The rest of the house is en plein air. The side door opens to an enclosed courtyard with a sun-drenched, ten by ten foot plot of grass and a paved concrete patio shaded with an overhang. You don’t play handball here, not merely because you might break a flowering cactus, but because one wall of the courtyard is the exterior wall of the neighboring house. This efficient building pattern continues down the line of homes, so that a squirrel with asbestos claws could scamper over the asphalt shingles from one end of the block to the other. The entire gated community is four long streets forming a military square that surrounds a golf course, with a few short cul-de-sacs to pad out the lots. And despite the promises made by the developer to covenant signers, the golf course is a private, pay-per-use course and the original clubhouse swimming pool has now been filled with cement due to fear of liability.

We had visited several times over the years, but this was our first visit since Granddaddy’s quarantine. For a man who has never admitted to being sick a day in his life, he spent an extended and unplanned detour last summer in a Jefferson, Missouri hospital during an RV vacation, and then weeks at home with an oxygen tank under quarantine.

Slowly he recovered. I knew him to be a tough old bird, warm, generous, and opinionated by nature, who neither the navy nor his first wife could subdue. It was reassuring on this visit to see him puttering around with the table saw, rasps, and nail gun in the garage, building a toy boat for Samuel, while his wife worked with Rose sewing a cape for her stuffed snuggle bunny, but it was clear that they both operated in a lower gear than our last. A grandparent can crow over a grandchild’s growth rings every year, but one doesn’t mention the relentless erosion of vigor in the grandparent. Not directly. You might note the large number of pills in the pill box, or listen to how the neighbors rebuilt Granddaddy’s back fence while he was on medical quarantine, and you connect the dots.

They could still play tour guide for us. We visited the USS Lexington museum in dry dock up at Corpus Christi one day and spent hours on the beach at South Padre Island another day. On the off days we read, and cooked, watched the children play pretend while we played cards. These trips are hard on my mid-life crisis, and I found it hard to relax and play cards. Card playing has often struck me as something one does to pass the time while waiting for Death. At least it did in that slow, sunny environment.

No, I lie. I enjoy cards, but I supposed my mortality has lately become like another child in the family, vying for my attention, increasingly insistent as the day progresses.

Thursday night, too tired to cook, we held hands together around two boxes of Pizza Hut pizza, one cheese, one half sausage/half veggie while Granddaddy led the blessing.

“heavenly father,” Granddaddy mumbled in gruff baritone, “we thank you for the bounty of this meal the glorious weather that we’ve enjoyed today the many blessings you bestow upon us and the gift of our grandchildren …” The words ran together, rising and falling in long waves, pausing only to catch breath rather than punctuate. I watched the children silently adapt to this unfamiliar ritual, and I cringed inwardly waiting for the awkward punch line to which we were careening. “… we ask you to look over us and give us your blessing in all things as we pray in jesus’ name amen.”

“Amen,” Granny repeated, and the rest of us smiled politely without saying a word. Without a pause, Granddaddy said loudly and with a hint of mock disgust, “Now who’s having some of this vegetarian pizza?”

“Me! Me!” cries Rose.

Samuel is usually a Greek Chorus to his older sister in these situations, but instead he leaned over to whisper into Mama’s ear, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

“Granny and Granddaddy are Christian,” he said, stating a fact.

Mama nodded at him.

“And we’re Jewish, right?”

“Right,” Mama whispered back, relieved that, not only had he figured this out, but he knew to say it out loud would make awkward dinner conversation. Unfortunately, his sister was not so savvy.

“What?” cried Rose. “What is Samuel saying?”

“None of your bees wax, missy,” Mama answered, and served her a slice of pizza.

Rose and Granny made angel food cake for dessert, with strawberries from Mexico and Cool Whip. Cool Whip is not something we would normally eat at home, and as the plastic container went round, I thought to myself, “Water, Corn Syrup, Hydrogenated Vegetable Shortening,” but I served it to my children anyway and dropped a large spoonful on my strawberries, thanking our hosts. Time, age, and many visits have eroded the edges of our differences. It is not so difficult anymore to bend where possible.

After dinner, we sat in chairs around a table on the breezeway patio, Granny shawl-wrapped against the cooler night air. She was playing Gin Rummy with Dawn, but it was time for the evening’s treat – popcorn and mini chocolate chips. Rose served, spilling only one bowl of popcorn. I cut the children’s chocolate chip servings in half – Granny may want to spoil them, but I have to live with the hyperactive consequences before bed. Rose mixed her popcorn and chips together in a single bowl and then picked them out and ate them separately. She asked me for funny family stories and gross ones too, so I recalled some incidents from a teenage trip to Israel. The grandparents listened, with polite, expressionless faces, and I became conscious of their quiet presence, afraid of what they might be thinking, of saying anything that might offend them. Half way through our bowls, Samuel picked up something in the conversation and his mind motored along with it quietly. I thought he was merely eating. Had I been listening I might have heard the timer in his head ping. During a pause, he said in an alarmed, mouse-quiet voice, “Papa.”

I looked over and his eyes had filled up with tears.

“Sam,” I say putting down my bowl. “What’s wrong?”

“Papa, I just had a thought… A scary thought.”

“What is it?”

“I just thought that someday I’m going to die. And I’m going to be there, like sleeping but not dreaming, for how long and not ever going to wake up again.” The tears began to flow freely now.

Do you remember when you first learned you were going to die? I do, and like most of the traumatic experiences of my childhood, it was instigated by my oldest brother. I was six years old, and my father was in the back yard raking leaves, and my oldest brother said to me while we were under an ancient sour cherry tree, “Well of course you are going to die. Everybody dies someday.” He was perhaps impatient or disgusted with my naiveté, but either way a tsunami of panic chemicals bathed my cerebral cortex and bleached away my memory of anything that had happened before that moment, and I mean anything in my entire six years. I really have very few memories of life before this incident. I remember that moment though, the corrugated cherry trunk weeping with sap, the smell of moldering leaves, the weak autumn sunlight, and the hot tears turning to slivers of ice on my face as I went running to my father.

Somehow through the blubbering, my father understood. He held me and told me that I wasn’t going to die, not for a very long, long time. His words and touch soon calmed me down. OK, I thought to myself. Get a grip. It’s not like it’s going to happen tomorrow. I get a long reprieve. Maybe I can figure some way out of this. An exemption or dispensation or something.

Forty years later, I picked Sam up and bundled him in my arms. For a moment I said nothing, just rocked him and let the wave of tears run its course, remembering the cherry tree and my father’s words. When he was calm enough, I repeated those words to him.

“Samuel, you’re scared of dying?”

“Y…y…yes.”

“Buddy, you aren’t going to die for a very long, long time.”

“When?”

“When?”

“When am I going to die?”

Wait. This isn’t part of the script.

“Well, uh … not for maybe eighty years or so. I don’t know exactly. But you’ve got a long full life ahead of you.”

“But what happens after that?”

“What do you mean?”

Actually, I know what he means, but I’m stalling. My son, at six years old, is already way smarter than I was at six years old. I had never asked my Dad such a question.

I am thankful for Granny and Granddaddy’s respectful and tacit silence on the subject, though I know they are listening. God bless them, they wouldn’t dare interfere here, even though they have very certain and solid answers that guide their life. Their refrigerator used to have a magnet that read, “Don’t ask God for favors. Just report for duty.”

But I have no sure answers. I don’t mean that I’m agnostic or skeptical or undecided in my beliefs. Indeed, I believe rather certainly that what happens after we die is not something that our Maker intended us to know. Whatever God expects of us, he expects it without the promise of reward or the threat of punishment. He expects that we should do it out of love simply because He created us. I don’t know if other people think this way. It is certainly similar to the attitude I take toward parenting, and so far it has worked remarkably well. But I recognize that this is not reassuring to a six year old, and perhaps not something the Grandparents would approve of either. I wish I did not have to have this conversation in front of them. At that moment, I would have happily lied to Sam if I thought it would cheer him up and keep the family peace. But he can smell a lie a mile away, and he remembers them.

“Samuel,” I started, “I don’t know. Some people believe that when you die, you go to sleep without dreams for a long time, until someday God wakes you up again, and we all get to live in another world. A better world.”

He was not reassured, bravely trying to hold in the tears, and his words were thick. “How long?”

“How long?”

“How long do I sleep?”

“A long time.”

“Like, a hundred days? Papa, I don’t want to sleep that long. I’ll be all alone!”

“Well, it doesn’t feel like a hundred days. It feels like almost no time at all.”

“What? Really? Wait… How?”

“I don’t know the ‘how.’ And anyway, that’s only what some people believe. Other people believe other things. No one really knows for sure.”

I was not doing a good job of this. I actually had something I wanted to say to him, something specific and reassuring, but I was caught unprepared, tongue-tied, and unpleasantly aware of four other pairs of eyes on me. I was looking for the right words that would be honest, reassuring, and not upset the grandparents, but his brain was three steps ahead of me asking new questions.

“Papa,” he said before I could continue, “I don’t want to believe something if it isn’t true.”

That stopped me cold. Somewhere on the other side of the back fence, the wail of an ambulance passed by. A tiny moth fluttered by my face, and then things were quite quiet. I heard another mouse-like voice say, “Papa?” but this time it was Rose, sitting in her chair with her knees bunched up to belly, absently rubbing her lip with a piece of popcorn. “Can we please talk about something else? This is making me really uncomfortable.”

We changed the conversation for Rose. Samuel, remembering his popcorn and chocolate, trundled back to his chair. He ate his snack in small bites like he usually does, half-listening to everyone around him. Eventually, everyone else finished and went inside to get ready for bed, but I waited as Samuel nibbled, last to finish as always. He still wasn’t half done with his chocolate when Dawn popped her head out the door. She had been getting Rose ready for bed, and she wondered what was keeping Samuel, who was now sitting in my lap again, his back to the door. I told her we’d be in after he was done eating. She closed the door.

“Are you ready for me to answer your question? About what happens after you die?”

He finished his bite and said, “Yes.” Nervous. Expectant. Waiting for bad news, hoping for good news.

“The answer really is, I don’t know. Nobody knows. Dying is like going through a door and never coming back. No one comes back to tell us what’s on the other side, so no one knows for sure.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed, a little scared, the tears starting to fall.

“Wait. I’m not done. There’s something more. Something that I believe to be true.” I paused to make sure he was still with me, that I hadn’t upset him too badly. He began to eat again, tiny bites, but he was watching me.

“You have a soul. You know what a soul is? It’s a part of you, but it isn’t a part of your body like a liver or heart or brain or skin or even a cell. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell it. But it feels, and loves, and maybe wants and dreams. And the older you get, the more you’ll feel it, if you can learn to be quiet with it – like lying under the stars at night with nothing to do or think about. And after you die, Sam, this soul of yours is still there, and it still feels, and loves, and wants.”

Surprisingly, this worked. At least, he didn’t start crying immediately. He thought about it. He thought of other questions, other fears. Part of him was still focused on the idea that, after he died, he wouldn’t ever get his body back, and this is a Bad Thing. More tears and confusion and scary parts, not least of which was that he would have nightmares about this (ever the practical boy), but he was past the hysteria. He liked this idea of a soul. It was hopeful and believable. Papa believes it, anyway.

Dawn popped her head out again, but her impatience vanished when she saw the tears on Samuel’s face. No screams or wails, just quiet tears dropping down. She came out and sat holding him in her lap while I brought her up to speed on the salient points. She added a few ideas of her own that meshed with mine, but it was the warm smell of her sweat that calmed him.

He looked tired. It had been a hard night. I took him inside to brush his teeth and asked him if he felt any better. The words come slowly, with pauses. He was so ready for bed.

“Yes… But Papa… I’m thirsty… And I’m still a little scared… And I’m bored.”

“Bored?”

“Yeah. I’m thirsty, and I’m scared of having nightmares. And I’m bored.”

“Well, let’s brush your teeth and get you to bed.”

An Artistic Movement

I don’t spend a lot of time sitting in coffee shops or bars, but what’s wonderful about both is that you can blatantly eavesdrop in either. You buy your mug or glass, and that is the ticket that reserves you a seat at a corner table. You place your ticket on the table and take one sip and magically your seat is reserved. No one can budge you. Then you hold your notebook at an oblique angle so no one can see inside, and you write in your most illegible scrawl, just in case, and you begin to record the intimate, embarrassing words of perfect strangers. No one seems to mind or even notice. It’s the same whether you are in a bar, a coffee shop, or a McDonalds. The only difference between venues that I have been able to discover is the acceptable vocabulary for the male reproductive organ and how it may be used in context.

“I’m teaching a class about the history of the white, artistic, penis-dominated culture that existed in Paris between the world wars.”

Not something you often hear in bars.

I’m in a coffee shop this morning. The difficulty with these university people is that you can never tell from age, dress, habit, or language, who is a teacher and who is a student. I had three of them sitting at the table next to me, and one man was holding forth. Someone had asked him whether it was possible to be part of an artistic movement.

“Well, certainly not in Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne is a corpse. That’s why artists went to places like Paris.”

“To be with other artists?”

“Certainly to be with other artists. But also, to be in Paris. I mean, nothing ever happens here. People hole up and there’s no life. Christ, I was in Cairo and I walked out of my apartment one day, and there was a dead donkey, lying right there in the gutter. I mean, Christ, I walk out of my home and nearly step onto a … Dead  … Donkey! Nothing like that ever happens here. You can’t have an artistic movement in Fort Wayne.”

The wonderful thing about eavesdropping in coffee shops is you sit there totally open to everything until your mind fixates on something and starts to become judgmental. You plant a seed and it grows and you water it with thoughts, impressions, and prejudices. And you wait. Will it be a weed, a flower, a nourishing vegetable?

This morning I planted the question of whether the pedant was right about Fort Wayne. There was certainly Truth in what he said. One does not generally find dead donkeys outside One’s apartment here, even if One is the second coming of Our Savior. And there is a certain bland normality that doesn’t change day to day. People definitely hole up. At least in the winter they do.

I thought about this while I walked the half mile home from the coffee shop, rubbing my burnt tongue gingerly on the roof of my mouth. Too old to learn from mistakes, I always order something very hot, and drink it too quickly. My way home was slowed by the crusting mounds of last weeks snow heaved off the roads by the snow plows and covering the sidewalks two feet deep. Someone before had walked this path, and someone else had followed their footsteps, and so on, so that by the time I came along, each footprint was size fifteen and my leg dropped through the crust to the knee.

I thought about Cairo, home of the dead donkey, and the thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square. I have never been to Cairo, though, technically, I have spent some time in Egypt. It was a trip to Israel, and we visited the mountain which is thought to be Mount Sinai. This was back when the peace treaty with Egypt had been signed and much of the Sinai desert, including this mountain, had been returned to Egypt. It was there I saw my first working camel and glass bottles with “Coca-Cola” written on the outside in Arabic. We were invited into the tent of Bedouins where we drank their bitter, unfiltered coffee followed by a glass of sugar with a little tea added for wetness. It was Rather Different from Fort Wayne.

And then the seed erupted and bloomed. An image came to me, a very strong image. An Egyptian woman visiting Fort Wayne. She finds she can walk about without a burqa and no one stares at her. Or more likely, she keeps her head covered like everyone else here because its friggin’ five degrees today, but no one cares whether she does or she doesn’t. She can speak her mind, and not only don’t they throw stones at her, but people stop to listen, and maybe even encourage her thinking, and to them, it’s no big deal. Then one day, she walks outside her apartment and there is no dead donkey. It smells nice. She sees a towering, ancient, leaf-less oak with a pile of oak leaves stuffed in a fork of the branches and out pops a bristle brush tail of a squirrel. But that’s nothing compared to the paved and curbed road – it seems everyone’s road is paved and curbed here. Today the entire road is covered in a white powder up to her calves.

She pulls off a glove and, without thinking, reaches down to touch it, because after months in this country, she is shedding her fears daily. She sticks her trembling, bare fingers in the powder and it is so cold, it burns. She brings it up to her face, surprised at how light and cottony it is. She inhales it and then prods a tongue into it. It begins to melt in her fingers like her first pistachio ice cream when she was six years old, but it isn’t sticky, and it tastes of fresh coldness without any sweetness, like eating winter air.

And she thinks to herself, Cairo was a corpse, everyone afraid to speak their minds and working like dogs from sun up to sun down. Here, I walk out of my apartment and (she probably would not say “Christ”) the world is covered in snow!

The Devil Plays Uno

In the cul-de-sac, I parked by a snow bunker the street plows had formed on someone’s lawn. The short daylight had faded an hour ago, and the street was lit up by an amber glow from nearby strip malls. I heard the faint thrum of traffic from the highway a mile away. The flat, midwestern landscape hid nothing. I took a deep breath of the chill air, and then got my violin from the trunk.

Playing fiddle is how I keep my sanity in the winter, and after a few years learning by the seat of my pants, I decided to take some classical violin lessons and see what I was capable of. But I was always a little out of sorts in my teacher’s neighborhood. It was a suburban development like so many others, and not unlike the ones I had grown up in, but I hadn’t lived in one for decades. A contractor leveled this patch of unimproved land outside the highway, and a weedy crop of two story houses, built of gypsum and pine and concrete, sprung up overnight with streets named after the few remaining trees left behind. At least, that’s how I imagined it happened, though it would have been ten or twenty years before I arrived to town. I didn’t blame the home owners. They needed a place to live, and there was a limited supply of drafty, expensive eighty year old homes on the market, so what alternative did they have? But the prefabness of the neighborhood, extended over acres and acres of what was once post-glacial woodlands depressed me along with the gun metal winter skies and the paranoid rhetoric of the local papers.

The studio was in a small room at the very front of her house. Through the picture window, I saw a young girl, maybe six, sitting in a small chair and holding a violin in her lap like a baby doll that she was not thinking about but instinctively knew not to let drop.

I was early. Outside on the stoop, I kicked the clinging snow off my shoes, and opened the front door. The house was typical of a young, new parents, the walls pressboard white, the floors a non-descript laminate, and the furniture serviceable, modern, and sparse. At the end of the short hall, Dad was in the kitchen in a suit and tie, washing dishes in the sink, with a toddler holding unsteadily to his leg. I was about to call hello, but the boy’s mouth opened and out came a scream that had been building up for a good ten seconds before I had walked in the door. Dad knelt down and said comforting, apologetic words; he must have dropped something on the boy’s head. I decided to not disturb them.

There was no coat rack, closet, or wall hooks in the hallway, but there was a carpet remnant to keep the slush from spreading. I put my shoes on it next to a pair of Sorrels and, folding my coat and hat, laid them neatly on top. To my left, through the closed door of the studio, I heard the slow, creaky notes of a scale being dragged unwillingly out of a student violin with a student bow. Inwardly I winced, remembering those days and wishing they were farther behind me. I slipped into the living room on the right, thinking to take out my fiddle and warm up, run through  some scales, wondering if that would be too disturbing, when I noticed two people in the living room.

A father and young daughter were sitting on the floor playing cards. The girl was quiet and watchful, waiting for her pink, clean-shaven father to take his turn. It must have been her older sister next door who was pulling out notes like bad teeth. I didn’t know the father, but I recognized the girl right away from my last lesson. I was unlikely to forget her.

Dad smiled and said hello to me, in the friendly, chattering way of young parents who have spent far too much too much time reading popup books and listening to repetitive, electronic, learning toys. He was quite ready to let the game hang for two, five, even ten minutes just to have an adult conversation, sweet manna in the desert of parenting preschoolers. He chatted. He told me about Uno, the game they were playing, about how the manufacturer redesigned the game and made it much worse, and how he had been looking for the original set to buy, and finally they re-introduced it, and Target was selling them for a dollar, and he bought three sets, one for them, one for grandpa, and an extra set, just in case. He spoke to me and to his daughter, but the girl said nothing. She just looked up at her father, patiently waiting, and since I was looking at the girl, he noticed her waiting and played his turn. When he paused, I introduced myself, and he did likewise for himself and his daughter.

“Yes, I know Sophia,” I said. “I met her a couple of weeks ago. She was sitting in that chair in the corner, and she caught my eye, because when I looked at her, despite her innocent, cherubic face, there was something odd and almost sinister about her, and then I realized there was smoke rising up over her head from behind the chair.”

Dad’s eyes opened a little wider, “Oh, I heard about you! You’re the one who stopped the fire.”

“Well, I don’t know about a fire,” I said, warming to my little tale. “There was a little plastic lamp on the floor in the corner, shaped like a bowl, with a halogen bulb inside. I think it was under-lighting for their Christmas tree. The tree was already gone by then, but the lamp was still there. Something plastic inside was burning, maybe something had fallen off the tree. It gave off a tendril of smoke, and it didn’t smell very good. Sophia didn’t seem to notice, so rather than alarm her, I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and reached behind the chair and unplugged the lamp. Then I got Ellen. ‘Sorry to interrupt your lesson,’ I said, ‘but I think your house is on fire.’ Of course it wasn’t really, and when we came back, Sophia was still sitting in the chair, perfectly unperturbed, although the room stunk of burning plastic.”

At the sound of her name, Sophia gave me an attentive look, but when I didn’t say anything more, she turned back and played a card. Then her Dad put a card down and significantly left his finger pointing at it, “You have to pick up four cards now, sweetie,” he said. He repeated “four” while holding up as many fingers. Sophia picked up the first card from the deck.

“What does the name ‘Sophia’ mean?” I asked, while watching her drop the card carelessly on the floor inside her crossed legs.

Dad, was examining his cards. Without looking up, he answered, “Um, I don’t know, actually.”

“I feel like I ought to. It’s familiar.” Sophia looked at her Dad, and then picked up a second card and placed it  in her hand. “Oh, wait,” I said, “Philosophy, or rather philo-Sophia, isn’t that ‘love of learning’ or ‘love of wisdom?’ I think it means ‘wisdom.'”

Dad pulled a one-sided grin. “She’s certainly smart. She’s a wiz at Uno, and I have to think very carefully when I play against her. Of course, well … do you know how she used to play? Tell him, Sophia.” He looked at Sophia, who was studying her cards for the first time since I entered the room. “No? Well, she used to cheat.”

He said it fondly, proud of her precociousness, watching for my reaction.

“Was she any good?”

“At Uno?”

“No, at cheating.”

“Oh, yes, she was very good. She used to arrange the deck ahead of time, and hide a couple of cards in her lap, and if you weren’t looking, she would slip you a card that you didn’t want.” He chuckled at the memory of it. “But she doesn’t cheat anymore. She doesn’t need to. She’s too good even without cheating.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Sophia quietly pick up the card she had dropped earlier in her lap. Her Dad turned back to her, “Did you take your four cards, sweetie?”

She nodded yes, and Dad picked up a card. I said nothing, but shared a meaningful glance with Sophia. Had I known her better, I would have winked. When her sister appeared and I went in for my lesson, I realized I was in better spirits than I had been when I first arrived.