Midnight on the Night of Nights

Got tears? Your brain, did it feel released from tension tonight? Tonight, did you visualize a wave/beam/sphere of interconnectedness radiate from you to others, from others to you? 'Round about 8pm Pacific Standard Time? Hope feels amazing after years of helplessness.

What's up with my hair

My hair is a mess of greatness. It's a beautiful bit of God's handiwork. And what fills my brain has a direct effect on the appearance of my hair. That is of course scientifically totally wrong, but I really would like it to be fact.

My grandmother, Else Christensen, told my mother while I was in the womb that she wanted a blond curly-headed boy. I heard her. The being that eventually would be known as MDA emerged from said womb, bummer, as a flat-haired blob with red streaks on his face, so the anticipation was prolonged. But of course in a few years I had indeed become a frilly-red-haired kid with spacious teeth and the whitest skin a mother would ever dare to expose to the sun. I heard stories of my grandmother's giddy pride at being quite the prognosticator, but she was also just giddy because I was, really, so damn curly with all that curliness. Slowly my head grew out those short curls into long curlicues and my country-grandma loved to see my head get disheveled and strewn with dirt when we visited her up north to pick blackberries, apples, pears and figs on our family's farm. It was the late 70s, you could let your hair go long, and grandma was a very cool lady much younger in mind than her body actually was. And she had curly hair.

But when I became a choirboy, my hair was lopped off at the horizon of a starched neckline on a white collared shirt. Any sign of curling in the coif was quickly lanced at the hands of Rick the Barber, who manned the hair of all who perused Noriega Street in the Sunset district of San Francisco and who was seriously rooted in the '50s well into the '90s. This hair was documented in its manicured state in yearbook after yearbook, in choir photos taken one after another all around the world for years... the clean-cut boy with the really-way-too-oval glasses in front of ____________ with a tie on or those long red white and blue tube socks that now would go for legwarmers in yoga classes. It's a time period involving massive couture changes and garment bags and awkwardness. But the hair stood still, and the air was ripe with the delicious apple scents of Salon Selectives.

Then came the Great Graduation from the choir and the emergence of the college life years, a long extension of high school when I dabbled in slovenliness within the constraining default settings of my choirboy haircut, my head trapped in one world and yet the hair knowingly free to ramble. The result was... poofy. Poofy hair, like a halo circling my bearded face, each hair awakening from it's trimmed hibernation and venturing toward the light, grouping together for safety and companionship, wanting independence but afraid to wander and become lost. Or perhaps trimmed again. A poof. It didn't know what to do, and it probably had to do with the fact that I didn't know what to with it, or with anything else at that point.

It wasn't until the turn of the century when I finally Let My Hair Git Down With Its Badself for a year and a half. Changing climates, attitudes and wardrobes, I worked among mad-new amounts of people turned family as my head followed my body into the snow-covered Cascade Mountains of Washington to be an intentional wanderer in an intentional community. Sun-bleached hair follicles found new life, the brain exploring and thereby extolling the dermal tendrils to leap from my head and sprout, then bounce, frolic, spring and twirl for inches and inches, and more inches. Women would braid it. Children would use it as reins when I was employed as their horse. It danced underwater and clung tight to my back when I broke the surface. And whatever it did wherever I was, for the first time since I even knew I had hair, I didn't even notice or care about it. And the hair was cool with that. And I was cool with the hair. It was burned often in campfires because of this yet nary a peep was heard save a sizzle. It even developed an untangle-able tangle, which I guess could only be one thing, a dreadlock. And that name, dreadlock, me not being a rasta and all, it just wasn't me.

So, a good year later, after moving once again to another culture that prided itself on Salon Selectivized doo's stuck somewhere between West Side Story and Devo and in which I simply tried just to not look like someone who might deserve to get arrested, I shaved the whole damn thing, damn near. One fateful St. Patrick's Day in Munich I let my friend, who was one fewer weisbier into the day than I was (and it was his weisbier too), grab a pair of electric barber sheers just like Rick the Barber used and put them to my scalp on the very generous 5mm setting. What followed were some of the coldest mornings my brain can remember. And I liked it. I did it again in the summer. And never, ever did I walk out the door fully dressed without an absolute perfect picture in my head of how I looked above the shoulders. I had the carefree freedom without the cultural stigma of slovenliness, and I didn't have to use any product. Life was good.

But no, it wasn't, really. The follicles called, reminding me of just how damn boring it was to hold back the possibilities for the sake of convenience. And they were right, the hair follicles were when they said that to me. So the hair, it grew back, mightily, and was cut, and grew back and was cut badly and then grew out hopefully and quickly cut better. And so on. Today, my hair is longer than it has been in a long time, but now, a kind of clearing has been made around the crown of my head and all that long hair falls like wheat away from the cleared circle. The resulting look is what may be mistaken someday for a monk's cut, at which point I will so-hopefully-not be a monk and therefore just do the Bruce Willis thing and once and for all hibernate the story of my hair. You may think I am vain, and you are probably right, no you are definitely right. But I hope I am just thankful, and aware, and present, and thinking that perhaps, for a guy who has very few places where his hair is actually in recession, I might offer a living memorial. The hair can't speak. But it's had a good life, I'll tell you.

My Life as a Doughboy

Even as the flour is licked off my leg by the dog, you will never really get the dough out of my head. The many facets of life shining each week since Halloween 2007 come down to one prescient fact - my dog loves leftover flour on his dad and our family loves slicing into the many three pound loaves of potato, wheat, sourdough and olive bread which gather on our baker's rack every day. Consider this blog post dusted with flour flecklets, just like my bed, my laundry bin, my car, my journal, my bookbag, etc...

I began as a former, not the opposite of latter, but rather as one who forms dough. It came out of tubs having risen over time and was spread out on a thick wood table, floured, and then cut and weighed on a scale. And then the little parcels of wet dough were thrown in front of me, one every 5 seconds, piling up as I quickly rolled each into football-like shapes, balls (or boules), and loaves (like really large burritos) or pulled out like a massive floured flattened square to be later divided into rolls. Variety after variety of dough was slung in my direction, kneaded into these forms with my hands, a calculated dusting of flour following each one as it was placed into a little basket or onto a canvas sheet, then onto wooden boards 5-6-8-10 per board, the boards going onto racks, each rack holding 10-20 boards, each style of bread requiring 1-10 racks. In the end, you have cut/formed/stored nearly 3500 pieces of bread in a smattering of hours, flouring yourself silly in the process.

I would talk to the dough, asking it why it was cut in a way that would make it harder for me to make it the shape it was destined to be. What's your problem dough? And the background music... when people bring their iPods to work and plug them into one of the three flour-tarred boomboxes, it's bliss. But when the radio comes on, you are left to chance, and when the AM ethnic music station plays... well, you are guaranteed to hear the same dozen songs at least 10 times per shift (that's once an hour at least), making you feel that either you are simply not capable of knowing how good those 12 songs are for obvious reasons, or there are only 12 really good songs in that genre. Because I heard them so often, and even after 4 years of high school training in that language, I swear that one of them has a verse that goes "Dijonaaaaaaaaise for Emperor Hirohitoooooo... oh dijona-a-a-a-aaaaaise for Emperor Hirohito-oh-oh-oh-ooooo!" There's one, called Estos Celos, and it's become one of my favorite songs. I have an entirely different music video for it in my head.

So, after you've racked all that potential bread into its varied receptacles to all kinds of music, you must let it rise before it gets baked, what they/we call proofing. You take the racks and pull plastic sheets over them for a spell. No one ever told me the science behind this, so I would take a plastic cover and hold it over a rack as if to ask Y or N?, and would then put it on or toss the bag depending on the answer. It took a month before I really understood why we did this, but then it all became clear quickly once I was moved from the "bench" into the starting lineup, becoming one of the chief bakers of all this bread. Watcher of rising dough, maker of golden caramelized crust, waylayer of burning and blackened badness.

Hot weather makes dough rise faster, and colder weather makes it rise slower. But rise it will, over time. So, based on the temperature of the flour and the water in the mix, the resulting dough has a built-in speed to its rising, and you control the gas and brake pedal with the use of plastic covers (to create humidity and heat) or refrigerators (to cool the proofing down to a crawl) - all in the hands of the baker. So, bakers "visit" the dough every hour or so, checking on its rise, its acceptance of air and fermentation, asking it to rise faster or please slow down, cursing it like the living thing it is.

Also in the hands of the baker: razor blades. And if you don't know yet, I have (since Y2K, and unintentionally) sliced my thumb to the bone carving sugar cane, folded a blade over my right forefinger carving a wooden spoon in the middle of nowhere, and sliced off the side of my pinkie cutting an apple... and I now wield a razor blade for a living making 1, 3, 6, or 8 slices across the tops of hundreds of loaves each night? I proudly tell you, there is no hemoglobin in my bread - nope, only long beautiful slices (bakers call them "scores") atop each loaf, giving the expanding dough room to grow in 460 degree heat for 30 minutes or so and thus creating those crisp little half circles on the crust that you know and love. Oh ye of little faith.

Truth is, the baker really is the president of bread, in the I'm-George-Bush-The-Decider version of president. You have the mixer making the dough, the formers forming it, hours and hours of prep getting the dough ready just to be baked, and then you, the doofy baker who forgets to check on the dough, simply lets it proof too long and destroys all that work. Overproofed dough, when baked, is more rock-like than buoyant and less dark since the yeast had all that time to eat the sugars (which are what caramelize to make the dark crust), and it's also harder to score neatly with those aforementioned razor blades, resulting instead in ill-shaped lines resembling chainsaw slices rather than neat Sweeney Todd scalpel nicks. And, like everyone knows, things forgotten in ovens burn and become basura, Spanish for garbage. All of this is in the bakers' hands, and set, again, to the backdrop of sweet iPod music (perhaps some Bob Marley or Portishead or Beethoven), good radio (the oldies station loves Led, the Stones and Queen), or bad radio ("Emperor Hirohito"), ushering you into the early morning hours when you finally get to drag out the oven vacuum, sweep the day's flour into the garbage and head out the back door, picking up a few loaves of extra bread for home on your way out.

This is how Seattle gets its bread, day into night after day into night, and this is how a doughboy was born and raised for almost a year now. The dog gets his licks in even as I've cut down to part-time, and we continue to make the best sandwiches on the block with bread I kept around perfection during its journey from the mixer to our cutting board. And if you ever mention the word "bread" to my mother for the rest of her life, she will tell you that her son once made the most amazing bread, that he gave her all these loaves when they drove 1500 miles to visit, that she tried to share the goodness with her friends at church but her husband wouldn't let her, and that they still have some in the deep freeze... you wanna try some?

Conehead

It's all over now, all fine, but for a week or so we had a conehead. The night before his surgery, I didn't know that neutering was what it was... I was expecting a more human-like vasectomy, but we found photos online and realized that "extirpating" the testicles was what awaited him the next morning. (It was a very good idea by the way, and he doesn't even know what he lost, he doesn't seem sad or even interested in what once was there...no seriously, I'm not just rationalizing!) He trotted into the vet's office and watched his leash pass into the hands of a nurse and he trotted off with her at the same pace, totally excited at what treasure awaited him through that door. Needless to say, his dad couldn't help but feel a little sick.

When we took him from the vet that morning, though, we tried to keep from laughing at him from above his cone (or behind his back) because he walked and moved just like his old happy self, except the cone hid his entire head so that our big beautiful dog was attached to a satellite dish that swayed and sashayed with the bounce of his basset steps. It dragged on the cement and picked up dirt and pushed down the grass. And to add a bit more insult, it was tied around his neck by a soft white satin little ribbon in a bow. Once inside, his cone regularly got stuck on a shelf as he passed by or against a doorjamb below him, and he stopped dead in his tracks. Unable to see the obstacle but feeling its pressure against him, he froze like Robert Deniro near the end of the movie Awakenings, and likewise, if you gave him a push, he just continued on his projected way. Conehead would greet me when I came home from work at 2am with a thud and a whack down the hallway, scraping the walls as he turned to follow me, and giving a full-plastic shake as he tried to wake up a bit. The cats just thought he was a semi-truck barreling down at them and ran away from him, which made him run even faster after them as his cone whacked everything along the way.

But, after just five days...

Cease the Dearth! New news...

Oh the times they are a-changin'. Buddies with girlfriends becoming husbands with pets and now becoming fathers with blooming babies. Around here, the plum tree in the backyard, whose leaves once gave lovely shade to the hanging chair till it dropped them all so that the garden looked like a warm lava pit, now is gaining stubble again in the rising afternoon sun. It's been over six months since we moved into our brand-new bungalow, and it's pushing 10 months since we left San Francisco with two full cars and slowly made our way camping up the coast to make a go of it here in Seattle.

There is too much to report in a single, monolithic diatribe you most likely don't have time to read in one sitting: no digs and new digs, road trips into mountains, my car woes, a growing family, graduate school for two, Craigslist purchases, to have fish or not to have fish, the evolution of this house, the devolution of my sublet, the democrats, the bakery, the hospital, the Seattle Freeze, cooking triumphs, wildflowers, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, sweet anniversaries, and many more... so, let's just begin with an introduction to the newest inclusion in the Barber-Avanzino household, and no, it's not the Ikea shelf... though the shelf is pretty sweet...

"...with ears that sweep away the morning dew."
- Shakespeare on Basset Hounds

"Roll away.... the dew."
- Franklin's Tower, the Grateful Dead on, uh... something else

When we first visited the litter of 6 coon hound/basset hound/labrador pups in Olympia, immediately this mid-sized, brown-streaked-footed one loped into Kelli's lap and fell asleep. Amid the chaos of his brothers and sisters meandering and peeing everywhere, this one seemed content to just stay by our side. When the litter bounded around me, this one alone came to gnaw on my beard. We didn't expect to be chosen like that, but considering the lovely qualities of all the pups including the shy one who liked to hide under the table, we felt like we needed a little help choosing. The window of opportunity to raise a puppy between winter grad school applications and summer grad school beginnings was perfect... but seriously...a puppy? I had had ducks when I was a kid, but... "It takes HOW long to potty-train a basset? Babe... are we uhh... we are are ready, aren't we? Cool, so let's name him. We ARE getting him right? What are you thinking about? Me, too... But wait..."

We rode this wave of excitement for a week, coupled with a slow realization of how quickly we decided to get totally into this, and the following weekend we took one more drive to see if this was for real. They were all much bigger. And after taking The One and his little bundle of potential energy outside, seeing the way his long black body forced his rear half to fishtail like a semi truck on a slippery road when he ran, and after conducting a series of tests on him prescribed by some smiling monks and continually nodding to one another over and over again, we indeed re-upped our yes-ness at the thought of missing out on a rare mix held in one cool dog who loved us, and drove home to prepare the way. And to warn the cats.

So it came a week later, with Kelli's applications to UW done and mine to WWU nearly complete, and with Franklin's Tower indeed randomly playing on the car tape deck, that we brought Franklin Coal Johnson Barbazino home with us in the chill frost of a January weekend morning. Kelli cooed at him like Diane Fossey to her mountain gorillas and assured him everything would be fine while showing him the world outside Olympia and along the interstate as he lay under a towel watching the drizzle run across the windows. I turned around periodically in disbelief from the driver's seat to look and say, both to myself and outloud, "Holy #@*& we have a dog."

The value of our yard immediately shot through the roof as our lives entwined with young Coal's excretion system. The balance of the universe lay in him assuming one of the two positions, to the point that even waking up at 2am to walk him gave us a strange sense of victory. I admit... I didn't help things when I would watch with fatherly pride as he sat there staring coyly into open space or in my direction while he involuntarily created a yellow puddle on the floor, then stepped in it as he turned to sniff it, then ran trailing wet footprints over to me as I came to scold him with a helpless smile on my face. Those were precious times. That's all I'm gonna say about excretion for now. It's an ongoing subject that deserves a good thesis and perhaps a children's book one day.

His first outing that week was to a big puppy play afternoon, where the huge expanse of extra skin behind his neck became the ultimate chew toy for the other puppies. Large or small, Coal met each dog with licking kisses and they all took turns being enamored with him and obsessed with trying to eat him up, literally. Since then he's become a regular at PetSmart puppy classes where he constantly gets props for being the coolest and most indescribable dog. He's a total hippie, his ears hanging well low off the top of his head like sweet curls, reminiscent of the great tennis star Bjorn Borg in his heyday. See? Yeah, totally. He's just not quite as athletic. Though his legs are longer than the average basset hound, they still kept him in those first weeks from comfortably jumping the 9 inches up onto the deck. So, he just made constant appearances at the edges of everything, teetering on his hind legs as he peered over the couch, chair, garbage can, baby gate and coffee table, whining.

In those first nights at our bedside he introduced us to his whine. It's like a sonar to start, with a timbre bordering on microphone feedback, breaking quickly into a downward siren, and this repeats over and over until you speak to him, and then it pauses to allow for the sound of his harrumphing old-man-like breathing, only to begin again if you do not appease him. He wants only to have both of us there and neither of us to ever dare to leave when he is looking. For if one or both of us do leave him, whether it be in the car to go shopping or in the backyard to do the recycling, or (shudder) in his crate so that we can actually go to work, then we get hit with the trademark basset howl, the great extent of his consternation, and the cutest thing you could ever ask to hear.

Before Coal joined our family, Kelli drew up a color-coded daily schedule for us and the pup, and we spent a ton of time in preparation to add him to our own busy lives. We haven't looked at the schedule since that first day. We quickly realized that your life becomes a devotion to him till the puppy is appeased, then you move forward with this new, unexpected version of your life. That's why we call him The One. Our existence is all about offering him food and drink, rearranging the universe to keep our floors clean and his bowels empty, and training him in the language of obedience. We constantly get giddy at the thought of things to put in his mouth other than our clothes and the furniture, and we're delighted with ourselves when he is happy and even more pleased when he poops and pees, wondering what we did wrong when he isn't or he doesn't. But what amazes me is how, in such a short period of time and after all that wonder and trepidation, I have become completely devoted to the well-being and good life of this little lump of Coal. Kelli was right from the start... we really were ready.
So prepare the way for a new little beacon of light emanating from the Treehouse, because the menagerie just grew by a big One. The cats, by the way, let Coal know all the time that they are not dogs. Because even when this little dude becomes a sixty pound hound chasing ducks across Washington, he'll need to remember that cats rule the earth and were born knowing how and where to pee. This is just the Coal intro. Enjoy our stories to come.