That Time I went on my first date #2

We sat next to each other at school that year, her hands folded in her lap, blue eyes vaguely turning towards mine, her broad ruddy face smiling at our conversation.

“How was class?”

“Class was good. It was interesting. “

“Really?”

“No. Actually, now that I think of it, it wasn’t all that interesting.”

She wasn’t the prettiest girl, but she fascinated me. She fascinated me because she was the first girl who wasn’t currently dating one of my friend’s with whom I could have a conversation that lasted more than a sentence or two. I had, since puberty, been horrified of speaking to the opposite sex. Though like everyone else who had passed through puberty I found them endlessly riveting, eyes, hair, thighs, chest, all.

Around Bidwell Park the Sycamaores start to arrive, their white bark, peeling like a sun burn, mixed with maples, Scrub Oak, Canyon Live Oak, and California Black Oak. When I was a child, I used to skip small stones across the water at odd bits of detritus, mostly soda cans, their aluminum rims reflecting back the sunlight that skimmed through the leaves of mostly oak, their cantankerous roots, exposed by the park’s river. The water in Big Chico Creek, mostly shallow, breaking at slight collections of rocks, pooling outward in ripples that are caught by the light, washing towards shore like waves from a boat, and some of the sycamores and oaks leaning down by the water, with large vines that stretch across the water, such that at many points the Creek has an awning of green. The green underside of leaves, the flickers of pale blue water, and the perfectly shaped stones made for skipping across the water that looked like sunlight. One, two, three, four, five, six skips, and up out of the water, if I’d gotten the right arm angle, pinging into a plastic cup with a satisfying sound, or, if everything had gone perfectly, dislodging the cup and sending it down the creek, bobbing and weaving through the rocks like a boxer on ESPN Friday night fights, like Mike Tyson, who haunted my childhood with is malevolent wink.

We finished driving down Mangrove and turned into the park, my mind whirring, here in this familiar place where I’d been to camp, skipped stones while my brother played baseball, swam countless times as a child, my feet slipping on the mossy underside of One Mile, a small portion of the creek cordoned off for public swimming, who’s banks were full of young families or college students passing beers and throwing Frisbees. A hippie town. A college town.

I drove through the park, kicking up bits of dust, through the small paved roads through corridors of oaks, ringed by dried grass, golden, and brittle bits of star thistle, who’s burrs got stuck in your socks and had to be removed from inside the shoe, their spiny shapes affixed to the top of my ankle.

Some years we’d hear a story about a mountain lion that had killed a jogger in Upper Bidwell Park. A large swath of land, rimmed by the rising foothills on either side, a thin line of water dotted by swimming holes, Alligator Hole, Bear Hole, where occasionally someone would wander out and get sucked down a chute of water, or get their leg trapped and drown, and it’s all we’d read about for a week in the Chico Enterprise Record, such that Bear Hole, without my ever having been there, took on the specter of some kind of person gobbling bit of water, when really it was just a swimming hole.

As a child, when I used to be driving across town to my best friend Brandon’s house, we’d sometimes see charred ashes along the side of the road where someone had tossed a cigarette into the dried grass, which must have lit like tinder, scorching the underside of the Live Oaks, sometimes raging for a few acres before the fires were put out. I was scared of fire too. Of course, I was scared of nearly everything but mostly girls.

My car chugged won the lane and eventually we reached a small stand of trees, a brown bench or two, chained in place around a solid cement block, and, off to the right, a standard issue park grill, black with long metal grates . We got out of the car, I almost made a brief run to open her door, but I couldn’t quite make it, so I got out the sandwiches, two Cold-Cut Trios that I paid for hesitantly, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t sure that she wanted me to, reaching back in my wallet, an awkward catching of her eye.

“I got this,” I said, pulling two fives from my black leather wallet.

“Are you sure?” she said. “I have money.” And I almost took it, hesitating, waiting, for her. “It’s fine, Andy.”

I got it, I said, flushing scarlet, as I’d done since kindergarten when presented with any situation that involved me talking in class or worse yet, talking to a girl. In those cases, I could feel the pin pricks rising up my neck and the flush reaching my cheeks, so I always kept my answers short, often cutting my thoughts off, staring at the ground and waiting for someone else to pick up the conversation.

“I got it,” I said, sliding the five dollars across the table to the college aged girl working behind the counter, dark hair in a pony tail, and a name tag that said Amy, her shirt, slightly stained by some of the oils, but standard issue black with a white apron. I got change for the ten and slipped the coins into my pocket. My father carried a change purse, but he was from another generation. I considered change useless and let it slip from my pocket all the time, collecting dust on the floor or showing up in the bottom of my underwear drawer next to old G.I. Joe’s with whom I’d staged vast and involved wars with as a child, outfitting my whole room in blankets and pitting them against an array of cars, a few Transformers because they were too expensive for our single parent home and a few stray dinosaurs who were led by a large black T-Rex with a green belly.

I took the change and the bag of sandwiches and we headed back towards the car. I walked around to her side and opened the door, and she smiled at me. 

That Time I went on my first date

That summer I asked a girl out on a date for the first time. I was 17 and hadn’t gotten past laying down a sacrifice bunt, which is to say, once a girl had put her hand on my arm to explain something to me in a Health Science class. The state of affairs was embarrassing yes, but I’d spent the last few months talking to her on a large square bench after school. She called me Andy, as everyone called me Andy back then, though I hated the name and won’t let anyone call me it to this day.

We bought sandwiches from Subway. The conversation on the way over was stilted.

“What have you been doing this summer?”

“Oh, not much, a few odd jobs, here and there for people from church.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

The sun was hot that day, beating down on the asphalt as we drove across town on Mangrove, past Mountain Mike’s where I’d had countless soccer parties as a child and past Blockbuster and La Comida, the cheap Mexican restaurant where my family had occasionally gone out to dinner when we wanted to be at a sit down place that wasn’t McDonald’s.

She was working odd jobs as well, and I could tell, in the car that something between us was off, but I imagined that it was just that this was it felt like to be on a date. I assumed that you felt nervous, didn’t make eye contact, suffered through rather long swaths of silence, in large part because a date was making the implicit explicit. I’d wanted to be with a girl since around the end of seventh grade, which meant four years had passed without that desire ever being made explicit. And now we were driving through long arcs of sunlight that pounded the black pavement and reflected the heat back. On that day, you could smell the tar starting to melt, a strong scent. We drove past the Baskin Robbins and Safeway parking lot, a long line of non-descript bushes, lined the road side with some small bits of red gravel on the ground around them. Down and down we drove.

I had a horrible sense of direction and was trying to focus on the conversation, which wasn’t going well. I was very aware of the positioning of her knee, which was, though not close at all to mine, sort of close to my hand, which was resting occasionally on the automatic clutch, which was a nervous gesture I had, and I’d sort of tap the top of my fingers on the clutch before removing it, adjusting my body, leaning back into the seat, taking my left hand off the wheel and sliding the right hand underneath, driving with my bottom two fingers, though I wasn’t doing the latter on this particular drive. On this drive, I tapped the automatic clutch, nervously moved my hand back to the wheel and then down again to the clutch. 

Ninth Grade

In ninth grade I transitioned over to the high school, twelve hundred students and solid brick buildings, connected by covered walkways and small piazzas, a minor miracle of intelligent building design in CA, which tends to specialize in low squat buildings, space on space on space, without any sort of design towards public spaces.

 In ninth grade my friends started playing football, waking up for practice at 5 AM to beat the sweltering August heat that pounded into the northern CA valley. I’d been playing football since I was a kid, throwing the football to friends and my brother, flooding our back yard with a hose and playing punt return tackle football for years. And yet, when it came time to actually play football I decided it wasn’t for me. Back then, I’d have said that it was because I didn’t want to and was an independent sort who didn’t want to wake up in the morning, but preferred waking late in the last weaning weeks of summer, playing video games all afternoon, searching for the Trident or Dragon Spear on long gridded maps of Dark Wizard as opposed to learning how to run a proper slant route.

The truth of the matter, if such things can be gotten at decades later, is that I was scared because I am scared of nearly everything, plane flights, roller coasters, speaking in class, any sort of wild animal, a task that I don’t immediately feel like I excel at. And it was precisely this fear, which dogs me today, that lead me to stay indoors, wrapped in a blanket, wearing a pair of shorts and trying to decide if my HP was enough to engage the War Lord perched atop the castle. And this fear of not being excellent and therefore avoiding things runs through me like a subterranean river carving out a hole in a bit of rock, such that I appear as though I am confident and sure of myself, when precisely the opposite is true—I doubt myself and wonder if I’m really good at anything beyond pleasing people, which isn’t a skill so much as it is an adaptation. And, to be honest, I also wasn’t too keen on getting hit. I had to work myself into a rage in order to run the football or tackle someone aggressively, and I didn’t want, or couldn’t imagine, walking around in a blind rage all the time just to be good at football.

On one of the first day of classes I was walking in to school with a friend, long hair, parted down the middle, tall and skinny with a pair of front teeth that were not entirely straight. I was wearing a red flannel and jeans, walking down one of the long shaded corridors, behind the gym and just beyond the cafeteria, which wasn’t really used, when I was stopped by a pair of girls, bounding along arm in arm as girls were wont to walk through the halls. “What’s your name?” the girl on the right asked. She had long dark brown hair, her body was rail thin, almost bird like, and she had a quick and easy smile. “Me,” I asked, incredulously. She had her arm looped through another girl’s who’s face and name I don’t remember at all, Jessica maybe? “Andrew,” I said, and then she smiled at me, turned, still arm in arm, and walked down the hallway.

“What was that?” my friend asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

My heart was racing, as I watched them walk quickly down the hallway. Those moments in life, they pass. You are only young enough for a short time to be surprised by a girl walking down the hall and asking for your name. All that day, I wondered what her name was, and whether I’d given her my correct name, whether I should have. Whether she was pretty. Whether I was handsome. What it meant that she had asked me what my name was.

“She likes you, dude,” my friend said, which didn’t seem like a totally unreasonable conclusion. Except that I didn’t remember ever seeing or meeting this girl before, which put our budding relationship on fairly unsteady grounds. What if I’d had a ridiculous named like Philip? I was only a couple of weeks away from getting braces and what would she think of me then?

                I don’t remember most of my classes that year, but I do remember having Mrs. Smith. I think I remember her because she had unusually short hair and perhaps because she occasionally wore a beret. We read plays, so many plays. Why are English classes endlessly reading plays? Is it because there is an assumption that they are meant to be read in large groups? That the only way to read Romeo and Juliet, (and oh, god, there it is, another memory. The actress who played Juliet in the old version we watched, set in Italy, leaning over the window sill, her breasts, so full. My friends telling me before the class that I should watch closely that there was a moment when she is completely topless—the stuff of dreams—the tense moment, a fleeting glimpse of her breast, someone somehow knowing that the actress who played her was only 15 at the time of the filming and all the strangeness and wonder of being an adolescent boy, watching intently to see if Juliet was going to fall out of her dress).

                But you see I have been side tracked by the memory of a woman, born in 1951, playing Juliet in a movie when she was fifteen. What strange times we live in, yes? 

I Song of the twenty first century

I woke up this morning feeling like Whitman. I-song and such, though the sky is low and spitting rain. Outside the kitchen window the maple has turned red, and the ivy that climbs the back fence. Everything is changing again, and I see, in the lines in my face, in the slight bits of grey at my temples that I too, am changing. Downstairs, the children are asking for breakfast, and it is somewhere between receiving the grocery list and the people to call about the gutter that I forget about Whitman, about reshaping the contours of the world, or even this day. I button a coat. I fix a sandwich. I wrangle and hector until they are sitting in the car. 

In Trader Joe’s, I buy a box of dark chocolate covered oreos that I love. Perhaps this is the I song of the twenty first century, buying a box of cookies, taking it home, and sitting on the couch, eating one after another, in the dim light given off by the lights of the tree. Soon the box will be gone. Then the tree. Then the whole season itself. I can feel it in my bones that things are always changing. 

Ice Fishing

Just the other day I was talking to a strange girl, one who's answers are occasionally non-sequiturs. We were talking about California, about the desert, and about the cold. Then we were speaking of cities in the south. I could see you in Austin, she said. I've been there. And so we talked for a while about the bars there, the warmth of the streets at night, people pouring out into the blockaded streets and dancing to music from a roof top, and then she said I should go ice fishing.

I went ice fishing once, a decade or so ago. We awoke early, put on boots, gloves, hats, scarves. The key to ice fishing is layering. Though I've also been told that the key to ice fishing is drinking, and I've also been told the key is finding a good space heater.

You cut a hole in the ice using something called an ice augur, which really just resembles a very large hand crank that corkscrews around and around, cutting a solid hole in the thick ice. Once you have a hole in the ice you drop a fishing line in and wait. And while you wait you talk of your wives, of the cold, of the disappointment of the latest football season.

We didn't have much use for ice augurs in California. The first time I witnessed snow I was ten or so, and I walked outside into the dusted bits of grass, my pants still wet from last night's urine.

That whole morning, whenever my line went taut, I pulled up in a hurry, banging the fish's head against the block of ice, so that they'd drop off the line and then back off into the depths of the canal to do whatever it is that fish do all winter, perhaps read Proust. After a while, I gave up on pulling up fish, on doing anything but banging their heads against bits of ice.

One more failure amongst many, but you should have heard the fish speak French. God, what a morning.

In Winter

In winter, I get cold. And when I get cold I am constantly reminding people that I am cold. When they say, "How are you?" I say, without fail, "Well, I am cold. This damn cold." I am deeply uninteresting in the winter. Though sometimes, truth be told, I'll be caught off guard and instead I'll say, "I'm fine. What I love about winter is the way all that sunlight blazes through the trees, come summer we'll have gained warmth, but we'll have shed ourselves of so much light." Or perhaps I'll tell them a story about the day, nap time, or what I'm working on in school. The fact of the matter is, which I've stated above, I am deeply uninteresting in winter.

In the fall I am also deeply uninteresting, but the contours are different. I'll say things like, "We should enjoy these days before winter comes." Or, "Look at the rusted color of those leaves, and the way the late autumnal light cloaks those trees in gold and look at all the clouds scuttling across that piercing blue sky." Though usually I'll just say that I'm not ready for the winter. I'll say, "I'm from CA, so I don't do the cold." Deep down, I suspect everyone knows I am deeply uninteresting.

Many winters ago I traveled up north when we were living in Michigan. We went cross country skiing, which turns out to just be working very hard at pulling oneself along with poles in the snow. If there is joy in it, like many things in life, it escapes me. After a few miles the group stopped to self-assess and talk about the plans for the day. Someone saw a cardinal, a splash of red on the white quilt of the afternoon. My eyes were so dry that my contacts froze to death.

We skiied back across the tracks of white land, pulling ourselves along with thin black poles, like stars passing across some great white sky. But of course, like the stars, it meant nothing. Back in the cabin, I pulled my contacts out and eventually threw them away. I spent the last few hours of the trip wandering around with everything around me in a haze. It was a pleasant way to spend a winter's afternoon, for once not talking, just trying to discern the shape of things to come. Is that a friend crossing the room to talk to me or just a chair? Who knows how long it will be until someone sidles up, and we start talking once again, of the oncoming cold.

The high dive

The summer camp, like every summer camp that has ever existed in the Platonic ideal of childhood, had a high dive. The high dive was terrifying. A long slab of concrete, a ladder that seemed to climb like a bean stalk into the sky.

I knew, as most children know, that climbing to the top of the board was a rite of passage. And yet, not every rite of passage was or has been useful. And so I stood all summer on the hot concrete, in the small puddles of water, watching girls and boys ascend the ladder and then plummet to the earth.

As a very young child I'd been obsessed with dinosaurs, and I had a blue book, which spelled out the names across eons and posited fights between Triceratops and T-Rex. It was the eighties then, so it's likely that most of the information is now wrong that the dinosaurs they posited all had feathers or turned out to be vegetarians. However, it made an impact on me, pun intended. Because the last page of the book shows a pair of dinosaurs lying in the green grass and posits their extinction at the hands of a meteor.

Up above, a girl, years and years older, walks to the edge of the high dive. She pauses, hair and red swimsuit catching the light, and then she falls towards the water like a meteor, like a cannon ball, like an extinction event waiting to happen. She parted the waters and rose up like Christie Brinkley in the Vacation movie, and I watched her from the edge of the pool, toes resting in the water, waiting for things to change.

Some Brief Thoughts on Democracy and health care

I don't know if anyone was paying attention to the elections the other day, I know I was only tangentially. It turns out that a democracy doesn't require its citizens to vote. It just needs to give them the option. Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the gobenatorial races and Senate seats went to people who are eager to cut portions of the Care act that help people who fall into the Medicaid gap. 

I don't really understand our countries fascination with disenfranchising or blaming the poor for their predicament. In fact, it makes as much sense as blaming an otter for being cute. He doesn't really have any control over it, just look at his face? And yet, in our country, there is a large portion and a disturbingly large portion of self-identified Christians, who seem to think that paying higher taxes to help people who's lives are, beyond any reasonable doubt, fundamentally shittier on a day to day basis, is a ridiculous or somehow unAmerican thought. 

At no time in our history has an ideal America existed. Those people eager to get back to the Constitution should remember that it was pretty much written by and for white male landowners. It is not some inviolate or particularly enlightened document by the standards of 2015. And yet, it's often held up as some sort of sinecure for all that ails us. I am troubled in many ways though and so I fear this piece of writing is about to go off the proverbial deep end, but stick with me. 

Firstly, what standard of life is the American electorate so desperately clinging to? I'll submit that I'm not particularly happy with the state of life, but that particular predicament is existential more than anything else. My life is, by and large, pretty good. However, it is not so fundamentally wonderful that I am fearful of having some of "my" money given in tax dollars to help people who are in need. But perhaps my take on life is mistaken, and everyone else around me, on say, this plane, where an older woman has been scrolling through old text messages for the duration of this two hour flight, or perhaps the woman reading a Danielle Steele novel are fundamentally ecstatic about the state of their lives and perhaps, by extension, this fine country brought into being under the noblest of possible circumstances, getting rid of Native Peoples. If so, then I can see the resistance to proto-European models of government, higher taxes, affordable health care, kind of trades. If however, their life is as fundamentally rote, boring, and, in any sort of grand scale, as small as mine is, then who the fuck cares about giving up some small sliver of it? 

I suppose I'd understand the motivation if the most important decision that people ever make in their life is choosing their parents. It is likely, that if you're born rich that you'll stay rich, and if you're born poor that you'll stay poor Imagining a world, which we kind of do, where every man can rise from being a shepherd to the King of Israel is a fantasy. But it's also a fantasy, and a deeply rooted one that people's hard work is what has brought them to a certain standard of life. I don't want to entirely dismiss the role of hard work, but I'd counter that the hoops people jump through in order to attain their goals are almost always already drawn for them. Yes. I went to college. Guess what? So did my parents, which makes me infinitely more likely to have done so. It's damn near impossible to climb the social ladder and just as hard to fall off it. In large part because we've structured our society around money, which is really best, in our current instantiation, at making more money. Cutting benefits, health care, food stamps, etc. is, without stretching your imagination, morally reprehensible. 

Hey Boy. It's Peak Fall. Let's go pick apples and mull some cider

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall.

Let’s put on our flannels over some layers and walk out among the rust colored leaves. We don’t have to talk a lot because the beauty of the place is going to do the talking on its own. But if you want to, we can talk about our parents or Thanksgiving plans or whatever. I’ll listen. But wait, is that the sound of a pileated woodpecker? Did you hear that? It's the sound of peak fall.

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall.

Do you play a wind instrument? I’m putting together a band called wood smoke and winter, but I think we’re going to practice this fall and maybe hole up in a cabin come winter and sing about all the things we’ve lost. Did you lose something sometime? Maybe your childhood or a piece of yourself? Let's go sing about it and write song lyrics.

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall

We can put on our scarves and sneak by Starbucks to get a pumpkin spice latte. Even though neither one of us really likes the synthetic taste. It’s a right of passage, pouring our drink out over the crumpled yellow leaves on the street two blocks from my house.Afterwards, we can walk by trees and look at bits of deep blue sky between barren branches. It's peak fall.

 

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall.

Let’s go apple picking somewhere out in the country, with green rolling hills, and homemade pies and apple cider doughnuts. It’s so easy to pick a lot of apples very quickly, but I know you like to stick around and try and get as many non-conventional varieties as possible. We can use one of those apple pickers or maybe just climb the trees like when we were children.Later, we can make some pies and apple crisps and lie around and talk about our favorite romantic movies.

 

 

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall.

We can just stay in and read our books today underneath our blankets. Because it’s nice to finally be in a season where it’s okay to get underneath blankets and just be cozy, and we can talk about the blanket forts we built as children, or just watch light cloak the trees. And maybe we can read out loud to each other when we get to good parts and use strange voices for different characters.

 

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall.

Let’s go for a hike somewhere with a view. We can hear the leaves crunch beneath our feet and feel the warmth of the sun as it gets through the trees. It’ll take a while for us to get warm, when we can only see our breath, but in the meantime we can keep our hands in our pockets and mumble things to one another until we feel warm. Maybe we'll hike up to a waterfall and listen to it patter down on the rocks and we'll tell each other about our grandmothers.

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall.

Why don’t you come over and do some baking? I have two aprons. We can just keep the heat low and warm ourselves by the oven while the pumpkin muffins are cooking. It’s okay to stand close to the oven. It’ll keep us warm, and we can listen to Bon Iver and talk about how good baked goods smell. And maybe later we can move into the living room and have a piece of something pumpkiny and laugh for a while.

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall. 

Let’s go for a drive just to see the foliage. We can look at a map to see just how far we should go. On the way, we can roll down the windows and smell the leaves decay. And when we arrive we can marvel over the shades of yellow and orange and red. And on the way back, it'll be too cold to roll the windows down, but we'll do it anyway because we're wearing enough layers that no cold can touch us.

Hey boy, 

It’s peak fall. 

Let’s head out to a pumpkin patch and find something good. Later, we’ll come back and carve out some great jack-o-lantern faces and maybe roast some pumpkin seeds and wait for the cider to mull and nap in the afternoon, our faces, for once, not creased by worry.

Hey boy,

It’s peak fall. 

We can dress up in scary costumes and go to one of those parties where all of our friends are drinking beer and handing out candy to little kids. And we can sit and talk about how we both dressed up as ninjas while we drink craft pumpkin ales and take pictures beneath the fake spider webs. Or maybe we can just go out to some colonial spot where George Washington took a bath and maybe talk about our shared love of American history. It's peak fall.