Pink Flamingos

The old lady next door lives alone and has few visitors. She is gray and plump and strong as a Chinese mastiff, with a rounded back and a beautiful open face whose skin bears the stamp of six children and a half century of steelbelt air. Though nimble for her age, her walk evokes images of a pachyderm on stilts, each step a jerky plunge, the integrity of the limbs a miracle. Evenings she can be seen plop-plopping to the garage, which she enters with a button and exits in a four door cream colored sedan which roars off into the rain on errands unknown. She is always smiling, scurrying past.

For a long time I've wanted to engage this woman in a conversation. Perhaps it is her smile, perhaps the fact that I find her presence improbable, a woman in the twilight of her life alone in rented quarters in one of America's grayest cities. Whatever the reason, our interaction seemed fated to exist within the small, dry world of formal hellos and distant waves. But yesterday the good lord sent a sign that it was time to talk: as I was heading out to the garage to get my bike, what should mine wondering eyes behold but a flaming pink flamingo, perched with acrylic calm under the flowering dogwood and gazing with dull nobility over a demi-ring of obeisant petunias. At the heel of the bird squatted the neighbor, grinning like a jackal and packing dirt with her bare hands.

"That should hold 'em" she wheezes as she flails into a standing position, wiping her hands on her trousers. She is smiling, as usual, and there is something girlish in her manner, giddy and nervous, as if she wants to make a good impression (or avoid a bad one.) Following my glance in the direction of the pink monstrosity, she giggles "oh, I just couldn't resist," and goes on to explain that she'd really like a little fountain, too, to make the presence of the bird seem more natural, but that the sort of fountain she has in mind, rock, with a little trickle, would be both very expensive and prohibitively heavy. And the flowers? Ah, yes, well, those are technically unrelated to the bird theme, they just look pretty. They are plunked down without skill in small holes dug directly into the lawn.

And so we talk, about gardening, about birds, about living in Pittsburgh and raising families and traveling to distant, sunny countries. She, it turns out, is the widow of a Pittsburgh Petroleum and Glass man, a naval engineer turned corporate flunky who ended up in Pittsburgh because 'that's where the job was.' They came in 1957, and though the husband apparently had ambitions to transition into international banking (she mentioned the dream of an apartment in Buenos Aires) that era was coming to end, while Petroleum and Glass was the Great New Hope. And though the prospect of hacking away in a corporate cubicle in the slushbelt quickly lost its luster, the husband had the good sense to transfer to the international division, where he was promptly shipped out to Cuba. They were living in Havana on New Year's Day, 1959. She talks about sneaking out to watch the parades, witnessing the buses full of young men converging on the plaza, the long lines of singing barbudos queued for their pistolas and their cuchillos: the arming of the People's Army. She talks about six months of splendid sunshine, rum, poker, hired help, corporate privilege, before the fusilamientos began, and the mood changed, and Fidel smirked as the Americans slunk away. She talks about the death of the unsustainable, the return of the inevitable: sure jobs in ugly places, swelling bellies and growing roots.

The rest, then, was the Burgh, black and smelly in those early days, slowly evolving into something different. She recalls black air days in which she would keep her children inside the house. Curtains were taken down weekly and scrubbed white. When some visiting Uncle made mention of the foulness of the air, their response was yes, well, that's how things are around here. As if it were a fact of nature. As if the conditions in which one lived were imposed by a higher power, and one had no choice but to accept them. And anyway, wait and see: Pittsburgh's day is coming. The fact that Pittsburgh was 20 years behind Boston was, for the husband, a selling point, for it meant space, freedom, room to grow: they could support a big Victorian house adjacent to the park, countless children, a colony of tabby cats. "And we sent our kids to the Catholic school over there by Saint Bede's" she tells me, adding, almost as an afterthought, "at least before the finances went belly up," suggesting a whole layer of suffering I don't have the courage or the tact to investigate. Her youngest boy, apparently, didn't make it out before the drying of the wells. He was taken from his Catholic school and sent to the big public school in Wilkinsburg, the predominantly black neighborhood three blocks down the road. "He had a hard time," she says with the resigned neutrality of someone determined to give setbacks no more than a bit part in the narrative of their life. The boy works for the government now and has "a very stable job," which I surmise is a hallmark of success. I ask about the periodic smell of sulphur that wafts across our neighborhood some mornings in the summers. She nods. "I can't smell it, but Nichole says she can, and we think it must come from the Thomas Edgarton Steelworks down in Braddock." She looks a little sad. "It's unfortunate that it smells bad, but you know, I think it's good that that plant is still going. After all, so many have closed. And it's part of the history of this town...."

The conversation goes on for an hour. Eventually, I wriggle off, making my excuses about being late for work and promising that we should get together soon for a picnic and more stories. On the way to work, I let her stories swish around in my brain, excerpting small segments, blowing them up and letting their narrative implications swell and shrink as they may. I think about how, in the absence of great will, chance defines the main contours of a life. How the difference between conditions imposed by man and by God blur in the daily struggle for sustenance. I think about how one in four people in Braddock have asthma, how nostalgia clouds common sense, and how identity and allegiance coalesce around prominent accidentals.

This woman is an object lesson in adaptation, and I admire her. She has spent 50 years carving out a life in this rough and dirty adopted city. Her fortunes have risen and fallen, her children are long out of the nest, she can no longer smell sulphur in the air but she likes the fact that steel mills continue to churn out their foul product four miles down the river. She is vital and quick, she laughs and she smiles, and at the age of 70 she has finally indulged in the guilty pleasure of buying a pink plastic flamingo for her back lawn. Let us hear it for knowing when to let your hair down.

Co-op care

When our theologian friends first mentioned the possibility of co-op childcare, I was jazzed: not only would it solve the 'don't quite trust the nanny' problem, but it would come at a price well suited to the academic budget (i.e. free.) The theologians illustrated the idea by describing two professorial couples who had decided that each of the four adults would have full childcare responsibilities one day a week, with the fifth day assigned by random draw. Unless you were really in the doghouse with Father Fate, most weeks you would be able to work 4 out of 5 days, a significant improvement over the 2.5 you could get by pooling resources with your spouse alone.

Of course, no one knows better than I that it is one thing for an idea to pencil mathematically, quite another to be worth a damn in real life. For one reason or another, co-op care has been slow to get off the ground. At first we wanted to see how the nanny care went, and felt that in the scientific spirit of 'one variable at a time', co-op care ought to wait until the nanny routine was well established. And of course 'well-established' is a slippery concept: since there was never a day when the nanny reported two perfectly behaved beaming children who had eaten like vikings, laughed like Friar Tuck, and slept like a couple of periwinkles, co-op care had to wait. Even when it became obvious that the kids had developed a certain robustness to the rigors of joint care, we continued to refer to co-op care as a distant possibility, a "yeah, we really ought to..." sort of endeavor that we would get to the same day we cleaned our sock drawer, sorted our files, and organized the garage.

Why such lethargy, when both the product and the price were so tantalizing? The embarrassing truth was that even though we blithely left our children in the hands of an unknown woman whose services we grudgingly valued at $12 an hour, the prospect of doing what she did scared the shit out of us. Two kids at once? You got to be out of your fucking mind.

Unfortunately, sanity is rapidly becoming a luxury we can't afford, as our bank accounts shrivel and our professional duties ooze like caustic mud into every crack and pore of our daily lives. All four of us are thrashing for survival, bugs in a garden fountain, lulled by the sheen of a shifting responsibility whose true treachery wasn't felt until way too late, when wings were already wet and bodies already heavy. Flight is a distant memory, a dim hope: everything hinges on time. And since we don't have the greenbacks to buy it, co-op care it is.

And yesterday, Oh Lucky Day, was my first turn.

Sweet Henry arrives looking like Babybot with a fuse job, his small saucer eyes a pale, vacant blue, his grin toothless and twisted, his long hair skewed left in some simulation of manic genius. He hits the floor at full crawl, attacking first the router, then the cat, then the glass vase, three forbidden objects in exactly as many minutes. He moves quickly, like a cockroach, only with a weird, high-stepping plop-plop motion, as if he were Private Baby First Class on parade, or some unholy Lipizzaner-turtle cross doing dressage. I watch him with dull disbelief. He manages to suck on the phone cable while shredding a book of Byronic poetry; he moves on to a massive gray hairball for dessert. Suddenly it occurs to me that we're all being duped, that no sweet little human baby could be an agent of such terror, and that therefore this writhing albino blob can only be an alien, sent from planet Zorg to systematically investigate the limits of my home network and my sanity. Just as I am about to warn the others, however, Zorgito abruptly abandons the cable, looks me in the eye, and erupts with a smile whose total length is at least double the size of his body. Relax, he seems to be saying, it's just you and me: how bad can it be?

But he's wrong of course: it's not just he and I, and it can be really bad. For there in the highchair is my own son, whom I have forgotten in the terror of the new arrival. Benjamin seems to have been taken over by aliens too. He is perched high in his leather-backed Director's Chair, grinning like Jack the Pumpkin Killer and waving a smoking plastic spoon. Blended peas can be seen on the floor, the stereo, the coffee pot, everywhere, in fact, but his mouth, which is wide open and broadcasting some static-studded message from the mother ship. They are everywhere. I turn to break the news to the Henry's mom, but already she's disappearing, all I catch is her left hand waving goodbye through the open door, ciao, see you in a few. Too late! To the left is Henry, to the right Zoogle, the one crouched and sprung, the other a sprawling corpulence, one spreading pandemonium from below, the other sprinkling chaos from above: it's the Plodding Terror and the Bibbed Avenger tag teaming Carl the Weary Dad sitting slumped in his breakfast chair. The Visiting Lifeforms erupt in simultaneous cackles, and I feel my skin crawl as the alien presence weaves its nets, draws me in, sucks me into its vortex of inhuman experiment....

Birthday resolution: find a job as a banker so I can afford childcare.

El Beso

There are moments (usually at three in the morning when the kid has woken up for the fifth time and is howling like a mountain banshie with a toothache) when one wonders how the human race survived the terrors of its own offspring.

And then there are other moments when the answers are obvious. Click here to see Zoogle reenact the basic, primal gesture that tipped Neandramom's decision from "barbeque the worm" to "give him another week."

Spring!

Today is the second sunny day in a row. For Pittsburgh, this represents a Joe DiMaggio-style streak, a wildly improbable, hold-your-breath-and-hope-it-lasts accumulation of good fortune that defies both hope and the law of large numbers. Even the birds feel it. Newly returned from their winter walk-about, these fair-weather friends are warbling and clucking with shrill urgency, as if the village were erupting in flames and they were the alarm relays, sounding their shrill sirens until, at last, Man the Oblivious Animal raises his slow head, smells smoke, and lumbers into action.

One of the pleasures of having an autumn baby is that by the time Spring rolls around, the child is just getting into full discovery mode. Spring represents not just an end to the much-detested snowsuit, but an introduction to a whole new concept of space. The world is not framed by walls. When I take Zoogle for a walk these days, he looks at the sky, at treetops, rooflines, chimneys and telephone wires, anything high up. His head is tilted at a crazy angle, his brow holds its usual quasi-cranky furrow, and his mouth is wide open, aghast, as if he's blown away by the idea that the world extends beyond the boppy pillow, and that objects can reach even higher than the green-plumed posts on his jumperoo. That's right, kid: the world is a big place. It has clouds and neighbors and the gritty taste of park grass, dogs that will lick you in your stroller, scrofulous wild cats which we will choose to ignore, chill breezes, dogwood blossoms, bright clothes waving on a line. And this is just the tip of the iceberg (wait until you find out about girls.)

Thinking about speaking to Zoogle in these terms is a useful exercise, for it reminds me that I've lost track of some basic principles. By nature and by will, I have always been an Expansionist, a believer in the outward-opening, life-advancing power of new experience. I have staked a good portion of my emotional and intellectual capital on the idea that there is no end to the number of ways in which man can conceive and mold his life, and that the world will yield its treasures to anyone with the faith, heart, and drive to follow his sense of wonder. Yet in the depth of this year's winter, when I hadn't seen the sun for months, when the trees stood dead and leafless in the park, when the boarded up row houses leered at me as I rode to work amid ice and road rage, I forgot about this idea. I forgot that winters end, that birds return, and that new life emerges. I forgot that what I was seeing was a vision framed not by some objective present, but the fact that I had allowed this present to become a stiff, dead thing, an object whose ontological limits began and ended in itself, instead of a dynamic conduit to other modes of thinking, being, and acting.

Spring is a good excuse to revisit those principles. Here it is: eruptive, cacophonous, radiant, demanding. Long oppressed, it riots in the streets, and threatens the old gray order with nothing less than total regime change. It brings beauty and a sense of opening, and as I watch Benjamin rubber neck the tree tops and mouth-trawl for flies, I feel that old, holy sense of motion again, the sense that though the center might not hold, and things will fall, that they can fall together in new and life giving ways. For Kafka it was the Book, for me it is Nature: the ice-axe that breaks the frozen sea within us. Time to start connecting.

Just Another Rabbit in the Road

Every Saturday from 7 to noon Minneapolis public radio plays a show called "Bluegrass Saturday Morning." We got hooked during my postdoctoral years, and continue to enjoy the show via live web-stream now that we have drifted south. We find it reassuring to know that even though many things in our lives have changed (jobs, cities; dinners for two), that announcer Phil Nussbaum's exegetical genius is still sharp as ever, and leveled with all the old fury at the one literary subgenre which admits no interpretive wiggle-room: namely, the bluegrass song.

Rolling in my sweet baby's arms
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms
Laying around the shack
'Till the mailtrain get's back
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms.

Phil would have a lot to say about this song. "Back in the days of the frontier," he would begin, in the crisp, quick tones of a male holding forth within his limited sphere of technical expertise, "mailtrains would pass between Chicago and St. Louis every 4 hours." (This is the same voice you offer hear men use to give directions, or discuss engine mechanics, or describe the precise location of a certain pub in a foreign city they visited ten years ago to a stranger with whom they have nothing else in common but the fact that the stranger is about to visit the same city.) And Phil would go on: discuss the fact that shacks were set up at track intersections, that those shacks needed occupants, that women were scarce. "Occupying those shacks must have been a lonely business" (and here he would give his Minnesota chuckle, a short nasal snort that means he has just said something spicey.) "In this song, the narrator wants to get in and get out before the next train", and with an exhuberant "hang on, here goes!" he would set loose some blazing Bill Monroe mandolin solo whose insistent catchiness would totally erase from our minds the fact that of all the songs in the world, few are in less need of an introduction than the one we are listening to.

This is not to criticize Mr. Nussbaum. I like his style. He seems to be a man who genuinely hopes to find meaning in the words of the songs he plays. Even when those words are Honey let me be your salty dog or I won't be your man at all, honey let me be your salty dog. Like any display of genuine interest, Phil's doomed but endearingly earnest quest for narrative coherence makes me wonder if he's on to something. If perhaps my own sneering ridicule is an artifact of a closed mind and a hard soul.

I should confess that Phil's influence is spreading. Not only do we listen to him every Saturday morning, but we've been edging ever closer to that most ridiculous of entities, the Bluegrass Family Band (think Big Mama Blunderpox in curlers singing harmony with her buck-toothed twin daughters while Pa shakes his scragglebeard over a plywood six-string.) Last Christmas I bought Catalina a mandolin, in the hopes that she would take it up and play the Monroe doodles behind my three chord chunking on the guitar. She hasn't touched it yet, but we've got time: I don't intend to hit the road until Zoogle masters the washtub base, and I probably won't start him on that until he can, say, take a bath (a useful backup skill if he loses interest in the instrument.) But little by little we are being won over, and I must say, I'm glad: Phil preserves some essential, doomed, naive enthusiam that I consider an essential feature of the good life. He is a glacier full of polar bears, with no signs of melting.

Committee Work

Among the many pleasures of being a tenure-track college professor, perhaps the best known are low wages, relentless research pressure, and the need to dupe bad students into giving good teaching evaluations. But there is another one, obscure but fundamental, whose basic odiousness beggars description: namely, the pleasure of doing service work.

"Teaching, scholarship, and service are the three pillars on which the case for tenure is built" intones the venerable, ridiculous Provost Pearson to this auditorium of unsmiling junior faculty. Many years of toeing the party line have worn Pearson's soul to a thin strip of rubber. He is a short, stick-figure of a man, with droopy skin, leaden eyes, and a sartorial flair that evokes molting lizards. His mouth is surrealistically large, an Aladdin's Cave stretching black and mysterious into a granite hillside, and from the gaps in the artificially white stone at the entrance escapes hot steam: the breath of a genie who has lost his cork and is going flat. "And let me tell you this" he continues: "service will not get you tenure."

Which is very interesting, Mr. Provost. For it implies, among other things, that service has only negative value: it can prevent me from getting tenure if I don't do it, but though I build outreach programs, revamp the university curriculum, lead a hiring committee, and forge a new vision for future generations, my efforts as far as the university is concerned are wasted. A fact that leads to the following interesting paradox: namely, that even though 'service' is the part of the professorial job-description that aligns most completely with the institutional mission and goals, the cycles of promotion, ranking, and money have conspired to render it totally superfluous. In other words, even within this value-centric, socially conscious mecca of free thought and liberal morals, the value of service is exactly the value it would have in the rawest of freemarket economies : cheap, disposable labor.

Ugly as it sounds, that happens to be the nature of the game I'm playing, so when my colleague asks if I want to join her as an "adviser" to Lambda Sigma, the Duquesne student service group, and tells me that the position is a total sinecure, I agree to do it. And for the most part, her description was apt: this year, we met with the incoming officers once, for five minutes, at the beginning of the semester, and we didn't hear from them again until two weeks ago, they apparently having been off tending to the needs of the poor, the sick, the gimpy, etc. But two weeks ago I get an email "inviting" me to the annual banquet (university policy requires that at least one faculty adviser attend), and three minutes later I get another email from my colleague telling me she'll be out of town that day. Oh God. It's Toews alone in a roomful of 20 year old service zealots.

What I did not know was that Lambda Sigma is not just a group; it's a mixed gender fraternity. The tip-off came in the form of clothing. I, the math guy, come bursting in late, sweaty from my bike ride, my trousers flecked with chain grease and my untied clod-hoppers caked with mud. And as I plow through the swinging double doors, what should greet my wondering eyes but a line of 40 undergraduates decked out in formal evening wear. There are slacks, collars, and ties for the boys, corsages and debutante dresses for the girls, and everyone is nervous, awkward, expectant, as if they were conscious of some sharp eyed and iniquitous authority in constant watch. Most of the girls are struggling to stay within the bounds of their attire, and they wear their heels like high wire artists on vicodin, while the boys talk conspicuously and furtively among themselves. It suddenly dawns on me that the last time I saw this dynamic was at a frat party I crashed with my boorish sociologist friend back in my tomcatting graduate school days. Oh Jesus. One minute down, 119 to go.

The rest was unexceptionally horrible. Lunch is a lump of laboratory chicken set in a petroleum pepper sauce. The girl next to me (Lambda Sigma's official historian) discusses with missionary zeal the mechanism by which members garner their service hours (in contradistinction to, say, serving.) I listen to names being read in a flat voice by a flat woman in steep shoes: Debbie Heaves, Katelyn Porkrind, Michelle Scaley, Michael Ballin. Is it system shock, or did these kid's parents really have a sick sense of humor? And this we know, reads the poetaster laureate, only through striving can we hope to grow. The president discusses recent activities: soup kitchen, craft night with cancer kids, care packages to veterans in Iraq, harmony singing at the nursing home. Jesus, do they never rest? Candles are used to light other candles, yellow cords are placed around sallow necks, there is a quick and schmaltzy slide show providing documentary evidence of how much fun everyone had. I dimly hear some mention of 'leaving footprints on our hearts', though I am too stoned at this point to know if this is was quite as painful as it sounds. The afternoon ends with tepid applause, a slow shuffling, hasty retreats.

Two hours of torture. One line on a CV. Next time I'm going to bring my kid.

The Magus

Consensus seems to be building that Benjamin has special powers. Armed with only puff, sparkle, and droop, he weaves his wild snares, fly-casting for souls with smile upon wail upon wide-eyed bovine gaze. His nature is sweet, but beneath that lovable, dopey fatboy exterior lies a dour, dyspeptic homunculus, a small George Burns who in his crotchety and opinionated way is forever wondering where he left his cigar. In the chaos of his passage, stewardesses forget their dignity, committed dog-owners consider upgrades, and passers-by stall and gawk. He is, in short, a kind of micro-magus: a wielder of arcane and potentially dangerous power in whose wake madness, passion and black pinfeathers eddy in ominous circles.

The Magus Theory of Benjamin (MTB) did not materialize from nowhere, of course: I have been reading the John Fowles novel of the same name. Actually, I'm not reading The Magus, I'm reading The Magus: A Revised Version, which is not quite the same thing. We (I) tend to think of literary productions, once published, as fixed things: we can decide if they are good or bad, but we don't expect to be asked to adjudicate that question twice. There are notable exceptions to this rule: Whitman's Leaves of Grass grew from a small chapbook into the sprawling compendium of man-love that today we consider the standard edition, and as far as I know, both posterity and coetaneity were cool with that. But there is a basic difference between a collection of poems and a novel. Adding new material to a compendium makes it an expanded compendium, unread portions of which can be quickly flagged by scanning the table of contents. But sharpening up a novel just produces a book you're not sure if you've read at all, and probably don't want to (if you liked it before, you are outraged that it has changed, and if you didn't, you're hardly about to give the author a second chance.)

Fowles, in my opinion, is about as great a novelist as one can be while having no sense of finish. His track record on endings is horrible. The French Lieutenant's Woman was a mesmerizing novel about the pleasures of being a dilettante (a theme dear to my heart), and it had me in its grip until the last page. And then Fowles, horrible Fowles, he dropped the curtain: he started talking about himself, his 'imagined' characters, the ineluctable indeterminacy of formal narrative. How very modern. How very wretched. I either wanted to know what happened, or to be left artfully hanging, but under no circumstances did I wish to be reminded that this was only fiction, and that I was just a reader, and that's how the world works, blah blah, ad vomitum. And now I'm 50 pages into the Magus, and though it's a fine book, I'm nervous. The title betrays a fatal stutter, a basic indecision: a crippling obliviousness to the fact that once a story is in the public domain, it is no longer yours to correct.

This is not just about stories, of course. Can you imagine Jackson Pollock asking the MOMA for one his paintings back so he could add a little more magenta spackle to the upper left hand corner? Or saying to a girl you've been wooing hey, would you mind scratching last night's soliloquy, I've refined the phrasing and would like all your impressions to be based on this new (and much improved) version? There are some productions which, once in the public domain, sever themselves completely from any proprietary relation to their producer.

Interestingly, as much as I curse Fowles when he pulls these stunts, in my dark heart I enjoy them. Perfection is a cold and seamless chamber: flaws open up the world, admit light, suggest change. An aging Leonard Cohen grumbles "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," and I believe him, precisely because of his stripped voice, his cheesy backup, his simple melodies. None of these flaws is essential, just as Fowles' pecadillos don't compromise his basic gifts as a story-teller: knowing he will piss me off, I continue to read his work, and find it great. Nor is this some sick literary co-dependency. Rather, it suggests (to my mind) Art's robustness to cosmetic perturbations. We can polish a piece until it shines or leave it cracked, caked, and grimey, neither has any essential bearing on its status as Expression.

The Magus is the creator, the weaver of pretty illusions. But it is also the creation itself, the Pygmalian pull of a beauty that bears the fortuitous imprint of the self. And the challenge, in art as in parenting, is to know when to cut the bonds. Whitman had only one child and kept it in the house forever. Fowles tries to get his works to comb their hair long after they've left home, married, and reproduced. Toews worries about his kid every time he leaves it alone with the Nanny. All these worriers, these clucking, revising, self-enthralled parents: why can't they just call it done, hang it up, step back and admire?