A weakness for palm trees

  The Vermont photographer Richard Brown confessed a weakness for birch trees.  I seem to have one for palms.  Flipping through my pictures of Southern California, a good number of the better ones seem to have palm trees in them.

   On our last trip to Northridge, in the parking lot outside a mall, I get what seems to me a worthy shot of some tall palms in silhouette against the orange and blue sky of the rising sun.  An hour later, when my older brother sees it on Instagram, he notes that it looks like the album cover for the Eagles’ Hotel California.  And he is right.

   I wonder if I took the picture because it connected in some subliminal way with my memory of the album cover.  Something like the connection that I still have with 70s music – the music of my teens, the music that got stuck in my head before it got too full of adult things.  You leave your teens behind, but part of you is always stuck there, in the time where you first had music of your own, and learned to drive, and fell in love.  The time when you learned that you not only could, but you must, go your own way.

  

Furnace Brook

   Furnace Brook falls sharply down a narrow valley, between great boulders, through deep, cold woods, until it relaxes into the fields of old farms in the meadows outside Proctor.  The brook is named for an old iron furnace, the ruins of which are settling slowly under fallen trees and brush and creeping vegetation at the edge of the woods, across the road from the old Ironmasters Inn.

   In the fall of 1990, my older brother and I went fishing together every day for four days, three of them on Furnace Brook.  My brother said it was teeming with trout, some of them “lunkers.”  On the morning of the last day, before he drove me into Rutland to catch the bus to Boston, my brother caught a trophy brown trout – a beautiful fish of 18 inches, truly a prize for a stream like this these days.  A thrilling, completely pure and satisfying moment that we shared. 

   After three days of mild, frustrating rain, it had become a beautiful fall afternoon.  Golden leaves showered down around us in the stirring wind. 

   As we hiked up through the forest to the road, I thought about how timeless was the fishing that we do, in the old simple way, with worms from the earth, not fussing with our casting or our tackle, only searching for the trout that hide deep in the clear, cold water, hunkered down behind worn rocks, waiting for what food the surging water would bring tumbling into the pool.

It felt as though we could have been two brothers in 1890 or 1790 in this moment, in the woods along Furnace Brook.

Through frozen branches

   

   I want to tell you of a night in January when I was young, when it rained hard just before a quick, deep freeze.  The rain pushed south to Massachusetts.  A full moon rose, pouring its own cold light over the hills, sudden and absolute.  A stunning cold.  It left an even layer of crystal coating on the night.

   We rushed into our jackets and black rubber boots with metal buckles, grabbed our leather mittens from their hanging place behind the kitchen stove, and charged out to skate on the sequined counter-top that was now our front yard.

   I remember most the lilac by the driveway.  Twigs that were soaked in the black night rain, then flash-frozen.  An explosion of sparkling shafts, a bundle of frozen sparklers in the green street light. 

   Thinking at the time that I would remember it always, I slid under the lilac on my back to look up through the frozen branches at the moon.

This brotherhood of man

   Raymond Carver is dead.  He was, is, perhaps my favorite writer.  He died too young.  It must have been the drinking.  He finally had stopped in his later years, but you can't just stop all the damage.

   He wrote one poem about John Gardner, another favorite of mine, who also died too young.  He slid his famous motorcycle under a truck.  Carver's poem captures him on the motorcycle, long white hair flying, racing along, distracted, toward his sudden end.

   A young man from my hometown died in just that way.  Sliding his motorcycle under a truck.  He was on his way to meet his classmates to ride the senior float in the Alumni Day parade.  They got the news but decided to go on and march without him, in his honor.  The girls riding the float cried all the way.

   Aaron Manor was his name and he was the best basketball player our high school ever had.  So when he died they made a trophy with his name on it at the top.  Each year the award goes to the most valuable player, for about a minute, before they take it away, add his name on a plate at the bottom, and put it back in the case outside the principal’s office.

   I went back home for my 25^th reunion and wandered into the high school for a look around with some of my friends.  I found the trophy in a different case down near the gym, tucked among the other trophies and team photos and basketballs that accumulate in such a place. 

   I found my name on the plate at the bottom, with a few new names coming after it.  Something they stopped doing twenty years ago.

   I remember the awards ceremony in the high school auditorium when Aaron Manor was recognized for scoring over a thousand points in his high school career.  I was probably in the eighth grade at the time, and found it thrilling.

   And then my own turn came – not to score a thousand points, I didn’t come close – but to be the star of our team for a year.  To be the last one in the line we formed at the base of the stairs below the locker room before we ran out to take the court.  Hopping up and down a bit to get loose and burn off a little of the excitement.  Waiting for the cheerleaders to start singing “When the Chiefs Come Marching In.”  And then the song would start and the crowd would cheer and the line would start to move.

   So now I’ve been back to see the trophy and the gym.  And in my house I have a bookshelf half-full of Carver and Gardner that I need to visit again, too.

Sofas, end tables and bowls

   My father, like a lot of fathers I suppose, had his particular place in the living room, on the right side of the sofa, next to an end table which had a good lamp for reading Time or the Rutland Herald, and which had room enough to put down the bowl from a late snack – ice cream or maybe cereal.  He was that sort of man, with that sort of life, who looked forward to something in the evening in a bowl, instead of a glass. 

Slow dancing

   Rachel lacks the enzyme.  Turns bright red and warm when she has the least bit to drink.  Like her mother.

   It takes me back to college dances.  Slow-dancing with a woman who has had something to drink, whose body is flushed and damp from the alcohol and the not-so-slow-dancing.  A hot cheek pressed against yours.  You move your hand to another spot on her back.  And you think, among other things, play another slow song.

Bars with pool tables

      So Meg has just passed the mid-way point of her junior year of college.  So what was I doing then, thirty-some years ago?

   I remember going up to visit Bob, one of my roommates, who was at Middlebury for a semester that fall.  I got home to Vermont for one of our breaks a day or two before he got out for his.  I drove up to see him with my high school friend Kevin.  One of Bob's friends from Hotchkiss also was there, the infamous Henri LaBaum.

   We drank long-neck Budweisers at a little bar outside of town.  Bob wanted to go there because it had a pool table.  We put our quarters on the side of the table and drank two beers each while we waited our turn.  

   Bob and I played as a team.  We held the table for an hour.  Bob was pretty good.  I was occasionally lucky.  I made only the easiest shots, usually doing nothing more than whacking the balls around the table, or scratching, or both.  Except for the final shot of each game.  For three games in a row, after Bob had done all the work, I found myself in a position to sink the eight-ball for the win.  I made them all, including the final, impossible shot off two banks and into the side pocket.  Called and executed like I did it every day.  One of those moments when the buzz lifts, like a sudden pocket in the fog, and you see more clearly than you ever did when you were sober.  And you do the one, fine, perfectly elegant thing.  And smile casually as the fog settles in again.

   We sped back to town, cruised two of the college-crowd bars, drank more beer, pissed giddily into the gorge, and hit the Grand Union to buy a midnight feast of crusty bread and cheddar cheese and a box of chocolate chip cookies before collapsing back at Bob’s dorm.

   I have thought about that night from time to time.  I remember thinking that someday I would have kids who go off to college.  Kids who will find themselves in bars with pool tables and wake in the morning in the midst of empty bottles and the remnants of cookies and cheese.  

Blue spacemen in parachutes

   I am not the kind to go knock on the door, say I used to live there, and hope I am invited to come in and take a look around.  I think that would be too much.

   If I did, the place I would like to sit is not in any room, but at the top of the stairs.  That's where my room was, if you could call it a room.  It was more an old hallway, of sorts.

   I used to tie my shoes at the top of the stairs.  It was a good place for it.  Sitting comfortably with my feet one step below, reaching down twice perform the little magic trick.

   I remember standing at the top of the stairs tossing a blue spaceman with a parachute, watching him shoot quickly to the floor below and land with a hard, plastic knock.  Wishing he had fallen more slowly.

   I remember, when I was older, climbing the stairs on game nights, slowly, tiredly, feeling the floor-burns on my knees sting against the inside of my jeans.

  I remember climbing the stairs slowly, stealthily, when I came home late, after everyone was asleep, staying to the side instead of stepping in the middle of the stair, where it would creak.

  The house is out of the family now.  But I've got my own staircase.  A good place to tie my shoes.   I'd like to think the blue spaceman is lying tangled in a shoebox somewhere, waiting patiently.  But I don't think so.  The house that I grew up in belongs to someone else.  People I don't know. 

Liking this

     I am working away on a brief when a small box appears on my computer screen with this notification from Facebook:

Fred Mikkelsen To all the doubters and nay-Sayers -- Red Sox won! Julie Lefebvre and 5 others like this.

      How much I like that Julie likes Fred's post is hard for me to say.  These are people I went to school with from kindergarten all the way through high school, the way you do in a small town.

   Julie was Julie Houghton, a cute girl with nice clothes whom all of the boys fell in love with at one point or another, including Fred, a perpetually awkward kid who never stood a chance with girls like her.

   After high school Julie went off to the Bauder School of Fashion, or something like that, in Atlanta, where she quickly fell in with a sorority and acquired both a southern accent and an engineer from Georgia Tech, who soon married her and just as soon began hitting her, until Julie's dad went down to Atlanta to bring her home

   And then before too long she was Julie Lamb, having married a Brit -- the unfortunately named Graham Lamb -- and spent some time in England where she quickly acquired a British accent.  Julie and Graham had two children, now gone.  Graham, too.

   And now she is Julie Lefebvre, married to an older-looking, heavy-set, goateed coach for the San Francisco Giants baseball team.  Her Facebook page has photos of her in a Giants jersey, drinking beer, not so thin as she always used to be.

   I met the first two husbands, but not this Joe Lefebvre.  I wonder what he's like.  And what he thinks the odds are that this love of theirs will last.  Who knows, maybe the third time is a charm.  Or maybe Joe is husband three of four, or five, or six.

   The husbands may come and go.  But Julie and Fred, who met when they were five or six years old, in 1967 or '68, are friends on Facebook.

     Daryl likes this.  

After ours

   The last high school basketball game that I played ended the way that most of them did for me.  Spent, and losing.  I got fouled with two minutes left.  As I went to the line for my free throws, Coach Collins pulled someone off the bench to sub in for me when I was done.  Perhaps he was giving me a chance to be applauded by the home crowd in my last game.  Perhaps he was just knew that I had emptied the tank and was ready, finally, to sit down.  Either way, I knew these two foul shots would be my last.  I made them both.  This happened over thirty years ago.  But I remember how it felt to sit down at the end of the bench -- tired, sore, sweating freely, my face buried in a white towel.  

   I always said that I would not care, and then, when the time came, that in fact I did not care, if my kids were athletes, as long as they did something -- music, dance, art, whatever.  And that was true.  But I have also said that I was happy my girls were athletes.  And that is also true.  

   Rachel's last high school volleyball game was this past week.  She doesn't plan on playing club volleyball this season, so this was the end of the road -- the last real game, in a real league, with uniforms and coaches and officials, the score of which will end up in a newspaper.  Her team was up two games in a best-of-five match with Weston.  Her turn to serve arrived when the score was 16-15.  You play to 25 and up by two.  I wasn't taking pictures this day, just enjoying her last match.  But this was the last time she ever would serve -- the signature part of her game.  So I took a couple shots of her in the ready position -- focused, calm, looking like she is ready to shoot an arrow through the heart of something.  She makes three serves in a row, with an ace.  The other coach calls time-out to stop the momentum.  Rachel comes back with more, and another ace.  Another time-out.  And now we're thinking, could she really serve this thing out?  It means not just making nine serves in a row, but of course having your team win all those points to keep serving.  Why yes, she can, and they can, and so this is how her volleyball career ends -- running the table.  

   These are, I know, small moments on small stages.  But ours.

Spring training

     They pay a tall, skinny guy with a beer belly to come out between games with a hose to spray down the infield and then rake the mound.  The infield has nice, thick grass.  The outfield, where I patrol, is mostly sand and weeds. 

     Your spikes push small craters into the sand as you jog out to your position, slowing to a walk and then stopping when you know it is far enough.  You take a few kicks at the weeds that lay flat against the ground, then turn to start throwing with the center fielder.

     It is hot.  So much hotter in the sun, even for the morning games, than it was just a moment ago in the shade of the battered green dugout.  You are sweating already and wipe your forehead between throws with the terrycloth band on your forearm.  You squint up at the sun, rising high above the palm trees that line the field on the first base side.

     The catcher yells, “Comin’ down!”  The second baseman and shortstop line up for the throw, which invariably skips in the dirt ahead of the bag. 

     You take a final throw from the center fielder and lob the ball in a long arc toward the dugout.  One of the lanky pitchers leaning on the corner takes a casual step out to snag the ball on its fourth hop, tuck it into his back pocket and step back again into the shade.

     The starting pitcher finishes scuffing a hole in front of the rubber. 

     You bend over, settling in with your glove and your bare right hand firmly planted on your knees.  Without standing up you swing your weight around and look back over your shoulder at the fence.  Always the fence.  This one has narrow wooden slats, three feet high, strung together an inch or two apart with stiff rusted wire.  Half falling down, but sturdy enough to really hurt you if you forget it’s there and run into it.  And so you don’t forget.

     You look in to the pitcher, who is sweating freely and swiping at his face with the back of his glove, waiting for the leadoff man to finish digging his own hole.

     We are all set, now.  The pitcher takes the ball from his glove. 

     You take your hands from your knees, and lean forward on your toes, feeling the sand give slightly. 

     As the pitcher winds, and you breathe in and tense your legs.

     It is about to start, right now, this thing that is so repetitive and familiar but also, with each pitch, is fresh and clean before you.  Anything can happen next.

     And with every pitch, every single pitch, you think, “Come on, hit it here.”

First to third

   I played my first organized baseball as a sophomore in high school on the JV team.  We had baggy white uniforms with dark green pinstripes – hand-me-downs from the varsity team, which had gotten spectacular new green and gold uniforms that looked like the Oakland A’s. 

    I ran fast but didn’t hit well, so mostly I hoped for walks and a chance to steal second base.  Or to try the play that Donnie Webster came up with, when we played up in Woodstock. 

    I led off.  Donnie hit second, not because he hit well, but because he could bunt.  And he was clever.  He told me that if I got on first, he would bunt down the third base line, and when the third baseman came in to field the ball I should round second hard and just keep going all the way to third if, as happened in JV ball, the shortstop forgot to cover. 

    I think it actually worked once.

    We drive by the baseball field in Woodstock, right off Route 4, whenever we go up to Rutland by way of 93 and 89.  Some day I’ll stop and walk over to the field.  Maybe stand in the batter’s box.  Who knows, maybe even go stand on first base.  And then, if nobody’s covering, run like hell all the way from first to third. 

  

Things keep changing.

I don’t remember much about law school.  I think that I am not repressing those three years – but rather that not much good or interesting happened then.  My “existence period,” as Richard Ford called it, or something like it, in Independence Day.

I arrived in Chicago on an overnight train from Springfield, Massachusetts, because I could not afford a plane ticket.  I came with a big suitcase and a footlocker which held all the clothes I had and the small white alarm clock and desk lamp from my old room at home and the new radio/tape-player my parents had given me to celebrate my graduation from college.  And both my baseball gloves.  I brought, in short, everything I owned in the world, except for my bike and my books. 

I took a cab from the train station to the law school, which I was seeing for the first time, and checked in, whatever that involved.  And then I went looking for lunch.

I told myself that I was a sophisticated, mature graduate of maybe the best small college in the country, ready to take on whatever this Midwestern city, and its second-best law school, had to offer.  What I actually was was homesick, not for my parents’ home in Vermont, but for the home that college and my college friends had become.  And I felt poor, figuring and re-figuring the reserves in my modest checking account that would have to last until next summer against every out-of-pocket – the books for two semesters, each newspaper, each beer, each meal or snack that wasn’t on the dining card.  Including this first lunch, as the dining hall would not open until tomorrow. 

So I had walked west, away from the lake, a couple of blocks, until I saw an Italian restaurant advertising an all-you-could eat pasta and pizza buffet.  It cost more than I wanted to spend for lunch, but I thought I could eat a lot and then not eat much, or maybe at all, for dinner.  So I went in and ate bad pasta, bad pizza and bad salad, by myself, stuffing my face and feeling bad about all of it. 

Ten years later I had a chance to go back and wander around the law school neighborhood for the first time since I had graduated.  I looked for the Italian restaurant.  Not to eat there, but to stand outside and look at it and know that I wasn’t going back there – or how it felt there – any more.  But it was gone.

I went into Gino’s East first, the deep-dish pizza place, which had been a real treat during law school.   The black, graffiti-covered interior did not amuse, as it used to.  It looked stupid. 

The hostess asked me if I wanted to sit at the little bar, which was “not non-smoking, but nobody is smoking now,” she said. 

I said I preferred a table, please. 

A supervisor of some sort cruised by and told the hostess, as if I wasn’t standing right there, to offer me a table in the smoking section.  And so the hostess did, telling me again that no one was smoking now and showing me to an absurd little table with a single booth-style seat on one side and a small wooden chair on the other, in front of a curtain.  A man sat smoking at a table not five feet away. 

I told the hostess that I would go somewhere else for lunch.  And I left.

No big deal.  But something I would not have done until well into my thirties.  For way too long I would have sat in the pitiful chair, breathing the rancid smoke, and rationalizing the decision not to leave on some vague notion of not wanting to be discourteous to the waitress I did not know who worked for people who treated their customers like shit. 

And so I did not sit down at the sad little table in front of the stupid curtain in the smoking section where people in fact were smoking but instead walked a short distance to a place called the Red Rock Grill, where the host showed me to a big booth raised above the floor (which somehow makes the booth seem like a special place), over which hangs a terrific stuffed boar’s head, where I consume a local brew, half a barbecued chicken, coleslaw and spicy baked beans and it is fucking great.

The Red Rock Grill wasn’t there when I was in law school.  Things keep changing.  All the time.

31st and P

   The better part of three days in Washington, full of work, but also restoration.

   Despite two summers here, and many trips back since then, I had no idea Washington could be like this, especially in August -- sunny, breezy, dry and clear, almost cool in the evening.  It feels like San Diego.

   And I find myself remembering things.  How enjoyable it can be to jog here in the morning.  What a pleasure it is to browse in a really good used bookstore, like Books for America at 22d and N.  How important it is to have a good book in your bag and by your bed, like John Keegan's Fields of Battles (procured at the above for a neat four dollars) and how fine it is, good book at hand, to spend two nights in a hotel and never once turn on the television.  How pleasing it is to get off of M and Wisconsin and wander up and down the residential streets of Georgetown.

   I head up to the grand townhouse at 1415 31st Street, between N and P, where, in the summer of 1982, at the ripe young age of twenty, I lived for a summer with J.A.  It was full of rich, old furnishings, heavy drapes, and fine art.  It was owned by J.A.’s grandmother, the mysterious “Lady Jameison,” who was going to be away for the summer, and who was happy to have J.A. and three of his college friends occupy the place during their summer internships in Washington.  But then her summer travels were curtailed – some problem or other related to her heavy consumption of gin – and she came home.  It was only at this point that she learned J.A.’s friends were not just all preppy young boys like him but also a hick from Vermont, which may have been disappointing but was not disqualifying, but also two Japanese girls, K.C. and Nina, who had to go, and which made Lady J. the first real, live, out-of-the-bunker racist I had ever met. 

   The girls had to scramble to find a place to live.  They find some rooms with a divorced woman who lived around the corner, who was happy to rent the rooms but not to grant any access to her kitchen.  So when we all got home from work I would cook one of the few simple meals that I knew how to make and would travel in one big pot – fettucini al fredo, hamburger and cabbage – and carry it around the corner to eat with the girls at a coffee table, sitting on the floor, in their “apartment.”  Then we’d go out for a walk and get ice cream.  

   Actually, Lady J. was the second racist I encountered that summer.  The first was Julie Bolz.  A preppy girl J.A. brought home along with some other interns he had met at one of the innumerable “receptions” that go on in D.C. in the summertime.  He had told these folks about the friends he was living with during the summer – this was before Lady J. came home – and when I came downstairs and was introduced all around, Julie Bolz, well into her gin and tonic, said, “So where are the slope sisters.” 

   Nice. 

   I was young then, and unfailingly polite.  Which is to say passive.  Before I became middle-aged and edgy.  Before so much of my fuse was gone and I became able – if that is the word - to say to people such things as I now say, from time to time, like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and “You are a fucking asshole, is what you are.”

  Three short years later Julie Bolz ended up in my class at Northwestern Law School, where I was still not yet ready to call her out and just avoided her instead.  As if she wanted anything to do with me. 

   As people like me do, I fantasized from time to time about what I would say, and how I would say it, if I ran into her again.  Which made me wonder what became of her.  Which, now that some nice folks have invented the Internet and Google, takes less about 10 seconds to find out. 

   Julia Bolz is a social justice advocate and co-founder of the Journey with an Afghan School program, a project in partnership with the American Friendship Foundation. A former Seattle attorney, in 1998 she left her law firm to serve as an adviser in developing countries for humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. She has volunteered with dozens of nonprofits across six continents. Since 2002, she has focused on educating girls in Afghanistan, where her team has built and supplied 10 new primary schools and assisted 12 others, serving some 20,000 children. She is also an activist with RESULTS, a grassroots citizen lobby creating the political will to end the worst aspects of poverty.

   Well, how about that.  I bet she doesn’t say “slope sisters” anymore.  Still, I would like to run into her somewhere.  It’s been a long time.  But not too long.

Miss Bellows Falls

    The American diner is much in style these days. The great ones are celebrated in magazines and newspapers with regularity. New restaurants emerge that try to capture the diner’s spirit and appeal, but with more seats and higher prices.

     And so it was, bathed in all of this diner romance, that I steered my family to the Miss Bellows Falls for a meal on our way back from Vermont. It is old and very small. And that is the best that can be said of it. 

     The air inside is a greasy haze. Our poor waitress misses most of her teeth.

     As we wolf down our food, as quickly as we can, in walk Keith and Carl Amidon – the twins who led my elementary school basketball team to undefeated glory, but who, by high school, had faded away from sports or anything else that seemed to matter.  

     We didn’t acknowledge each other. I don’t know if they recognized me. 

     I wished at the time, and still do, I could think of the right thing to say.