Gray Matters

I was sitting in my car the other day, shaving for the second time in a row in my rear view mirror in the middle of the woods, when I pondered the single threads of white curling through my multi-Fall-colored facial hair. I thought back to October 2000. Nikolai and I were entering the 2nd month and final week of our meandering road trip out of Holden Village and along the 49th parallel of North America. In his native Milwaukee, we had borrowed a compact blue car to drive down to Illinois to see my family. In Chicago, heading for the Shedd Aquarium and therefore stuck in thick traffic, we had time to evaluate our ever-growing mountain manliness. Long beards framed each of our faces, begging for a comb, his a golden blond with white and mine a mysterious hodge-podge. So, on the sunlit gray dashboard of the borrowed blue car, we plucked and placed curly two inch long beard hairs one at a time, arranging them according to their place on the color spectrum. My contribution included midnight black, dark brown, just plain brown, light brown, red, straw blond, and barely-yellowed white. "Cool," we agreed, and moved on with our day.

Now, after two years of grad school, some of those seven colors have decided to usher in a new color. Let's call it ghost-white. And since September, an increasing number of those original colors have kindly given up their original identities and joined the ghost-white team. I'm writing this to show appreciation for my facial hair which has been growing with me since I first shaved it the fall of 1987 just after my 13th birthday. But I'm also writing to celebrate with tongue in cheek (my left cheek, where all the ghost-white friends hang out) and to welcome this eighth and final color. In the end, I'm writing to own my growing age, which up to this point had always been a building-up process and which now stares me in the face every day. It's inevitable, weird, yet a right of passage and therefore worth a write. I love my beard and its eighth color. And for those who know me very well, you won't think that a blog post about hair is weird at all, will you?

here now

The other night I went out the kitchen door and into the little mud room exposed to the elements by a torn screen on the door leading outside. The dog followed me as I closed the door behind us, waited while I placed my hand on the door ledge in the screen and pulled it open, and ran down the outside stairs to sniff at the wooden gate leading to our massive backyard. We both marched into the dark and the ground crunched beneath my feet. The dog ran off to sniff at every icy smell and run toward every sound, falling frozen leaves rattling against icy branches in the cold night. Above us, a million (not yet a billion) stars dotted the black sky in familiar patterns, including our good old friend Orion. And I turned my body north to the Big Mountain a few miles away and saw only a gray milky mass spreading from east to west rolling slowly south to engulf the dark and the stars in its path. A wave of unknown and unannounced weather silently bearing down. If it has even an ounce of moisture in it, there will be snow on the ground in less than an hour. Once inside, as I sat on the couch, I felt like something outside was happening that was glorious and ominous and beyond my understanding. Montana. It's big.

It's been around two months here in Montana. Silent I have been on the blog circuit as I grow accustomed to life in a small town in a big state in the left-middle of North America. I live in a ski town where people have transplanted themselves from other places and loved it so much they couldn't stand to leave even when they tried. The Alps of America, where Costco, Walmart, and Best Buy couldn't build unless they agreed to place their stores far out of town and sink their massive parking lots down below the horizon so as not to obstruct the mountain and countryside view of the cars driving along Highway 93. The best part of shopping in that one stretch of highway between Kalispell and Whitefish is the exiting of each store, where you walk out to view mountains with clouds painted all around them. It's a gentle jarring feeling of city within country, and a sign of change coming to a quiet place.

Moving here was wet and filled with various kinds of cold metal, including a long car trailer and a relative shoebox of a moving truck. Seattle celebrated the week of my departure with non-stop rain. The days before the actual move saw the apartment slowly turn into a mausoleum, with Kelli and the Cats gone ahead to Montana and the Dog off to his auntie's for a week of pampering. With no one there, everything froze while I worked my mornings at the bakery. Returning home to see everything in its exact same place as I had left it, after a menagerie of activity for close to three years... my home became someone else's, and the city seemed to turn off and wait out my leaving. On the final night, after my friend Colm the Moving God had helped me and left, I sat with my newly returned basset/lab in a space on the living room floor we had never sat on before, feeling utterly alien. He must have felt far worse than me, having left his home a week before with it full of everything he knew, and returning to a post-apocalyptic void of all except his Dad. There was some tail wagging for me. As for the trip the following day, I'm sure he hopes I'll just knock him out next time I want him to ride shotgun across two mountain ranges for sixteen hours in a truck with no CD player.

Whitefish put its holiday decorations up around its streets, and the lamp post at the end of our gravel driveway is bedecked with a large blue lighted snowflake on it that never turns off, and since we live on the road north out of town and on the way to the Big Mountain (that's really what it's called, Google it), and if you decide to visit, we live at the eleventh snowflake on the right after you pass the intersection across the railroad tracks. But downtown, the twelve square blocks that constitute 90% of all commercial activity in town (and all in two-storied old, mostly wood buildings to boot) now looks like an Alpine village in non-stop holiday celebration. You expect sausages and bread and mulled wine to be sold on each corner, but you'll have to settle for one of our dozen or more restaurants and bars where everyone knows your name or at least pretends to.

So, there it is,
and here I am.
... and here's Coal,
awaiting your visit.

We have room for you in the house
and for at least three RVs on the front lawn.
The deer will keep us company till you arrive. :)

Nice one, Vancouver 2010

As the Olympics end just up the road and over the border from my Seattle home, I'm thankful once more for nights spent doing everything with the television constantly on, staying up late to watch it all again, and having a large portion of my days occupied with thoughts of hundreds of people hanging out together from all around the world for a precious short amount of time. I love the thought of all of us embracing a single moment together and then releasing it together, and that flame lit from the sun and swung around the world to rest in their midst and extinguished when it's all done. Every four years I make a little promise to continue my Olympic vibe for a sport or follow an athlete's story or career once the Games end. It rarely happens. But tonight, with the Closing Ceremonies beginning, I'm writing in appreciation of realizing what I really always do keep with me between each of the Games: the athletes, just folks, mingling together the way it should be, simply being together. Thanks again, Canada. That was a hoot.

... and three hours later, I know I won't get that floating moose and those inflatable beavers hauled by waving lumberjacks I just saw out of my head. Oh Canada...

Whoah...

... I mean, I just noticed that this here writin' treehouse blog never opened its doors once in 2009. Not a single post? That's bloody awful!

It's the 5th of January now, twenty ten, I have four papers to write in one month before starting a teaching internship in a NE Seattle middle school where 6th graders will tilt their heads up and ask me English and Social Studies questions on a daily basis for about 5 months. Also, I just made tuna mac n' cheese with no milk in it, because I like it thick, with some sriracha. Lastly, I'm watching Snakes on the Plane ambiently as I try to get some story ideas on paper intently, and I'm thinking they should have just bleeped out Sam Jackson's swear words rather than overdub it with dreck like "I'm tired of these monkey-fightin' snakes on this monday-to-friday plane!" PS: The dog needs a walk, but it's wet and cold, like always here in Seattle.

So I'm thinking there is a lot more going on in the world for 2010 than there was in 2009, and I best be gettin' to writin' about it. There it is. It's a start.