A Post About My Roadhuggers

Having had only a pair of cars, I'm naturally quite fond of each of them.  And now, on the eve of my last week as a bachelor, one Chevy Lumina decided I would enter married life without it.  So with all the sentimentality found in other blog posts focused on my graying hair and lost articles of childhood, for example, this is a blog about the Olds and the Chevy, a pair of white road beasts I pampered as I drove them into the ground.

I owe it all to my dad, who treated his cars with great respect and passed them on to me to do the same.

Olds at Field's Point Landing, waiting for hippies, c. 2000

The Olds rolled me to college and waited patiently every day in parking lots during the seven years I chose to take to graduate, upon which it merrily pranced north into the Cascade mountains and life at Holden Village. It gained freckles of oxidization from sun exposure, its blue interior reverse-tanning.  Olds rested on the banks of Lake Chelan, absorbing snow piles on its vinyl cover and taking on its first real winters, waiting for passengers.  When they arrived on the boat, they were lovely dirty new friends who borrowed it to drive the heck out of it on logging roads, bringing dirt and mountain funk to Olds' floorboards and seats.  Olds and me saw our first Big Wu show together, then our first Phish show together.  It carried around my first girlfriends and parked in many romantic spots along the West Coast.  The Olds ran across the country at least a half dozen times, including hauling family to Montana for the first time.  When I decided to move to Germany, and when my sister's family's "Suburban"  turned into a "Subground-level" it moved down to Fresno.  After that, it seemed to breathe its last, having up to then survived all those drives but suddenly (of course because of my absence) gave up on all its parts. Without an Advanced Directive, 300,000 miles after it was born, it apparently broke down, and then was broken into while abandoned, then hauled away to the car morgue to be cremated.  Gone but with a very present spirit, that Olds is still running up and down Highway 101 and across 90, looking very unlike your typical "Father's Oldsmobile."  

Chevy's dimple, with cover-ups,
minus outdated Hillary sticker, since she lost.
The sticker's subtitle stated: "Democrats put
on rear bumper, Republicans put on front!"
I put it on the side 'cause I voted for Obama.
Ok, this is a long caption.

Meanwhile, my parents' Chevy Lumina had become older than they liked and they purchased an Impala (not an Ibex), and after I returned from writing my Bavarian story, I inherited Chevy and its dimple. The dimple came courtesy of some aggressive punk who kicked the front in when he thought my dad had followed him too closely on one of San Francisco's slopes. Upon receiving Chevy, I immediately started courting my fiance who promptly bought me a political bumper sticker ('Run, Hillary, Run') to cover the dimple, to which I later added a Northern Exposure sticker of Fleishman's office and a GNP (Glacier National Park) sticker.  The political sticker plus the GNP sticker prompted someone to honestly ask if it stood for Gay National Party.  

The Chevy took me to Kelli's side and our first meeting at the Sequoia National Park where I accidentally left the keys in the car, prompting me to mangle the driver window parts as well as the passenger door lock, breaking them for the rest of Chevy's life (this would be very ironic because I wouldn't be able to open the door for my new woman again nor be able to roll down my window to order her Taco Bell meals...classy). Chevy carried me up and down California to woo her, and finally led/trailed her red Ford Ranger as we trekked north to start a life together in Seattle. After living in the Chevy a few weeks, I found a home and then a job hauling lovely dirty Democrat activists around Seattle knocking on doors during the 2008 political season.  Chevy brought home two crazy feral cats and a warm new bassador who have become our most precious resources. It then hauled a flour child back and forth from Grand Central Bakery to graduate school. Chevy signaled the presence of a new teaching intern to an urban middle school and trekked across the country several times to catch glimpses of its future Montanan home.

Not one of Chevy's greatest moments, but it was totally not
its fault!  (somewhere along the Seeley/Swan, c. 2011

After experiencing a few cold but snowless winters, Chevy began to show its signature: the Big Peel. It began at the dimple, then on the hood, a likely place given all the frontal driving hits it took for a few years.  But soon it spread conspicuously to the doors and to the roof, an illogical pattern. I chalked it up to rain frozen by Seattle gray weather, which blistered the paint and caused it to break off.  Flying down Seattle highways, large chunks of Chevy skin would flake off and flutter behind like snow, in July.  A significant amount of door paint had peeled to resemble a SHERIFF or POLICE decal, providing me and Chevy with ample respect from other cars that would suddenly brake when seeing us.  By the time we moved to Montana, Chevy acquired a gray bald spot and became more recognizable than me among my students, several of whom daily ran up to me and said "Were you at _______?  Cuz I saw your car and I was all HEY MR. A!"  It also became a conversation piece among my students who used it to bond with me after I reprimanded them. They would saunter up to me later and after a minute of awkward silence and almost like an apology, say "You sure have a cool car, Mr. A."  I'd say thanks, and all would be normal again.  And that's how I like it.  I am my cars.  

"Coexist my ass!" - some guy outside
a  gas station in Montana...

Chevy, at 260,000 miles old and balder than its owner, saw me safely through bachelorhood, picking up where Olds left off.  Chevy cranked its last in Polson, Montana, two weeks before my wedding.  Its final successful start came after my thwarted attempt to find the Glacier Brewing Company on a hot day.  Chevy kicked butt in everything it did despite all its problems, just like its bachelor owner.  It will donate its organs to other deserving Chevies and live on.  We'll say goodbye to each other on Monday July 23, with my parents and my fiancee in attendance.  We'll hug one more time, and no doubt a large swath of paint will peel off as we part.  Thanks, Chevy.  You done real good.

Git On Board Lil' Chil'ren, There's Room for Many'a More

Deep in the recesses of my lexicon, I seem to stumble spelling words like recesses and lexicon.  Since when did being an English teacher mean I spend less time than ever writing?  How on Earth can life in a trailer be so full (and full of what?) that there's no time for practicing music?  These and other questions abound as we step on board the Gospel train, it's rollin' down the track and it's time to testify.  Enough of the silence, the train is full of steam and needs to sound its barbaric, leaden YAWP.

On the face of it, being a teacher is a rewarding and privileged job.  Like a very natural-looking ordinary rock or stump, when you pull back  the face of it you find that the real business going on underneath is cacophonous, murky, endlessly absorbing, and too alive for comfort most of the time.  So, it's best to replace it and get back to admiring the face of it.  Well, in the Treehouse, faces last only so long.  

My first year of teaching has been akin to walking into my classroom, ramming my head into a brick wall repeatedly for seven hours, driving home, nursing my bloody head, and falling asleep afraid of the next day's beating. So, why do I do this?  Well, there are the callouses.  They deaden the pain with repetition.  Perhaps I hope to see the callouses through the wounds, but I'm not quite there yet.  Certain shocking realizations about students' learning habits and abilities become norms you face each day, which may sound like a recipe for lowering one's expectations, but really it's about adjusting your internal compass to match your point on Earth on a daily basis, which I think tends to keep the brain pliant yet exhausted.  As for the wall, teaching so far has been all about adjusting how you actually hit the wall, learning to ricochet, to absorb a hit, to find the most forgiving spot, and then over time to finally realize that the only wall is the one you yourself have been putting up between you and your students.  Duh, you might say.  Indeed, I say.  

In education school, you learn about all types of sorcery and you practice them on your fellow masters' degree students.  Yeah.  They don't tell you that you need to first know alchemy to be a successful sorcerer.  More importantly, your students must come with the same raw materials readily available and the motivation to help you make the magic happen.  The magic tricks themselves are predicated on the fact that those students actually have been trained to know the same basics you expected them to have and, most importantly, they must have a desire to achieve what you want to achieve with those basics.  In the end, compliance or motivation?  What are you going to teach for?  (and does it still matter whether or not you end a sentence with a preposition?  Does the word 'preposition' even matter now?)??  So many question marks.  

I guess that's the sign I'm in the right profession. All those question marks keep coming. When you are sitting in the muck, or the wall rubble, or deep in the pit with no escape route... are your gears still turning?  I think back on when I was working at Munich International School, surrounded by International Baccalaureate whiz kids with three languages under their belts and dreams of not just university but the Oxfords and Princetons and Stanfords, who conducted themselves like the budding and critically-thinking adults we want all our students to be, but who could and would still screw up like any kid.  That was about the time I knew I wanted to teach, to be a part of that level of thinking and that culture, though I hadn't stepped foot into any one of their classrooms to see how or what they were being taught.  I counted all their teachers as my friends and role models of wisdom and still do.  I sat in steam baths and saunas and biergartens with them, through four hour dinners and episodes of Lost and on long train rides across borders with them; but I never really dallied into their pedagogy or the theory behind how or what they were teaching.  Now, I feel this great disconnect between that community and my present.  Even after I went through my education program and ran off with my masters, I hadn't really stepped into a classroom.  Now, I think I'm living more of the reality and that Munich was the dream.  The struggles are the norm, and we have to be prepared for the non-idealized, value-scattered, social media-mimicking microcosm to be the standard, all without lowering our high expectations and not getting in the way of those bound for greatness because, really, there are far more paths to a good life than the few I've known in my life.  

Perhaps I'm too idealistic to be theorizing, too young a teacher to be trying to put it all together into a neat idea, too hard on myself to recognize my strengths and my successes, too hyper-analytical to be musing in public and airing my laundry for all to see (then again, this is my treehouse).  But I will end with this:  I have mentioned all of this, all that I've bared to you here, to my students at some point.  When things are mucked up, I stop and have them weigh-in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of their first-year teacher's role in their education.  Thankfully, they are very forgiving, receptive to honesty, and are fully capable of discussing some of the systemic problems than we may give them credit for.  That gives me hope.  My deep desire is that they take a role in crafting their education and learn to have some significant responsibility for themselves and for each other.  Even deeper, I hope I never forget to listen, to always keep my gears turning, and to encourage and help others do the same.  

Meanwhile, I could really use a sauna and a four-hour dinner and a chinwag with some colleagues, like, on a daily basis.  

Back to the Treehouse

I've been writing on the side of life (smatterings and bits, really) for a long time, with nothing being thrown into the treehouse.  Lots of changes recorded in many facebook status updates, but for now I thought I'd share a pair of the smatterings that were singularly important to me for a while.  Like, when my Apple Powerbook G4 died:

... I'm comforted to have known a computer to old age.  Not elderly.  In laptop years, I'm thinking seven and a half is probably more like retirement.  Retirement itself could be lounging on a shelf with a view or, perhaps, housing all the old games along with some early Adobe and Office software, and a place to stick a flash drive and escape to your outside office.  Cell phones may have become sleek fighter jets compared to their early propeller-run models, but they all share a two year average lifespan anyway.  So, how rarefied can it be that a laptop hits old age or maybe just retirement?  My own magnificent titanium swiss army knife of a Powerbook caved its lil heart in, eyes still working but the ticker toasted...

Then, there was this small town I wrote about for a while and all of a sudden left.  I love to romanticize my memories of places in order to give the past a frame I can return to over and over again and perhaps also in fear of memories being pruned far too quickly.  So, I set to writing about Whitefish and our cabin abode there for two years:

...Weird that a small town can be hard to say goodbye to.  Especially when you’re moving to a smaller one.  

Another town begins to slide beneath my feet.  I know it’s the old story of a town and a person bumping into one another and parting, and it repeats itself across the world each minute.   This particular one’s from the eyes of a city boy who has counted vulture carrion roadside feasts among the expected sights on a 60 mile daily work commute and whose preferred office space is the wrought-iron table in the backyard shaded by a Spaten umbrella with a soundtrack of hummingbird buzzes and crow wings flapping over five dialects of bird calls.  When I told my father two years ago that we were moving here, the ensuing phone conversations  for weeks after usually consisted of a) worries surrounding some aspect of small town life and b) Dad asking quickly and loudly “Now where is it you are moving to again?  WhiteWhat?”  Whitefish.  “Whitefish... whitefish...” he trailed off, and  I could imagine him tapping his index finger against his oval shaped mouth, wondering, as he let out another “Whitefish... Whitefish.... Huh...Hmm!....” raising his bushy eyebrows as his brain searched the many road maps in his head and came up empty.   To this day I still wonder about Montana, myself.

Montana’s residents speak of it like a friend or a family member, to you.  Let’s begin at the homestead, and specifically in this afterthought of a backyard of ours, because chicken wire nailed to posts around a field of dandelioned grass seems to give more of a suggestion of defined space than any working boundary.   With a small forest to the North, a glade of cottonwoods to the East, and a hedge of wild berries next to a small stand of young aspen to the South, our deer friends can attest to it being a hot spot for escaping the main road in front of us and the backroads behind, and a nice place to eat crabapples.  Magpies land on thin bare birch branches and wild turkeys strut under cottonwoods. Squirrels run full speed along their arboreal interstate from branch to branch to tree to tree and stop only to scream at the top of their lungs yepyepyepyepyepyepyep.  Yellow jackets search slowly and carefully for something to latch a new hive to, ignoring me completely and spending many days surveying a certain bump on the gray paint under the roof edge. Then there’s  the 9-foot tall moose I saw in the backyard through the kitchen window: me holding a pair of chickens ready for roasting, staring dumbstruck at a Northern Exposure moment literally playing out before me, and her playing hopscotch with the backyard fence as she meandered through town on her way into the northern forests.  

In my backyard alone, I get Montana.  

There was more to write about Whitefish, like the commute among the mountains to and from work, or Glacier National Park being in our backyard, to name two of hundreds of writing-worthy experiences. But most of all, I realize now after moving from that small town to an even smaller town that I was only starting to 'get' Montana back a few months ago, that new and important layers of the term 'diversity' are unfolding before me in ways I couldn't have anticipated. And there was more writing than just those thoughts and more thoughts now to add to them, but right now I have to go take my garbage to the dump a few miles away and then shop for eight things at four different stores in two different towns. So, more to come.

Gray Matters, Part 2

Listening to a recording of Bela Fleck strumming banjo rhythms to a soaring woman's voice, and I'm awash in sentimentality. I was thinking today of the homestead in San Francisco, a place many of you have visited many times. My, how that home has collected some things, and my, how that house has eaten up some of those collected things without a trace, akin to the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, here's the start of a growing list of things I wish I knew the location of:

My 3" square (non-bendy) floppy disks that I used with my LCII and Quadra Macs. Does anyone use the word Macintosh anymore? Included in that set will be the New Haven/San Francisco Connection disk containing many-paged Word docs between me and Kevin Fox when we were in college. We sent the disk back and forth, and priceless Top Tens, side-splitting stories and some things we wish would remain buried would emerge... would be priceless, if found. (update in 2023: FOUND!!)

My View Master disks and the projector (as well as the red hand-held viewer) through which my 3-10 year old self would gaze at 3D versions of movies I had never seen, including Herbie the Love Bug, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, random Flintstones episodes and about thirty other lovelies all on little disks with gear-like teeth on the edges. Even if most of them were Disney, they were a big part of my childhood and may (literally) be priceless, if found.  (update in 2022: Projector lost.  Discs FOUND!)

This one old, small, pinkish 33RPM record player, with some detachable speakers that may have been more like ginormous echo chambers. With it, in a box, should be a record collection of stories with booklets accompanying them, the kind where you listen to the record and follow the story and you'd turn the page when you heard the sound (usually Tinkerbell's magic wand) brrriiNGGGGG! Classic Disney tales plus Chicken Soup with Rice, Where the Wild Things Are, and some others that bounce around my memory. Then there was GI Joe, but not the modern GI Joe, just a guy named Joe who was a GI. He'd go on crazy adventures all around the world, pre-Indiana Jones, and do battle with mysterious cultures while stealing artifacts. My favorite was one involving a mummy, a dune buggy, rock n' roll, and a bunch of warriors yelping.  (update: GI Joe recordings FOUND on YouTube, but record player LOST)

There are more. All of them will have one thing in common: I never thought I'd be without them. Not that I'm dying to watch my Viewmaster right now, but I just never gave the OK for those certain things to disappear. Those 'things' are not unlike memories, and I'm someone who spends a lot of my waking time with my memories. I hoard them by stubbornly refusing to let them go, searching for them in my mind as if to just check in with them, see that they're all there, and go on a rescue mission if they are missing. Memories wallpaper every room in my mind and keeping those memories has been effortless. Every family vacation, every concert tour and camp, every football postseason in the 1980s, every note in every song every year... that's just the start. So, I'm sort of writing to file a complaint with someone, because I'm finding this very new sensation of my memories being pruned to be a little disconcerting. Which is also a reason why I will always write, journal, blog, scribble. To preserve what I know while I know it well.