The early years

We lived on a small cul-de-sac in Chico. Our neighbors, the Wycoffs, had a white camper with orange and brown stripes that ran horizontally along the large shell. It was nearly always parked in front of their house, its large wheels, seemed to me, at five, to have been the size of the Monster Truck wheels. I remember obscure things, sitting around in the afternoon, wondering if Big Foot or Grave Digger would be able to fly across the mound of cars faster. Grave Digger, who was, both by its name, and painting, black with a green skull and flames emblazoned on the side, was without a doubt the coolest monster truck. The announcers were always excited about Grave Digger and intoned the name with a gravelly kind of sound that you’d associate with a monster truck rally or a revved up auctioneer. The trucks made a small sem-circle as they approached the cars, while ESPN, ran a line of stats on the bottom screen showing how many times they’d won certain events. 

It’s interesting to think of when our understanding of cool or aesthetics begins. Why was I as a child of seven or so, so intrigued by Grave Digger? The announcers always intoned the name of Big Foot, the blue monster truck who won almost every time with the sort of reverence that one might intone for a Greek God. And yet, despite the feeling of awe that I got when I watched Big Foot roll around in that semi-circle, I knew he wasn’t cool. Grave Digger that piece of shit truck that was broken down as often as it was running was a more aesthetically pleasing vehicle. I understood, even then that aesthetics mattered. To paint your truck black and to give it a skull with green flames on it was to signify something in a way that a cobalt blue could never accomplish. 

And yes, Grave Digger was a piece of shit truck. It was constantly breaking down, missing main events while the mechanics or the owners worked on fixing the chassis, or the struts, or whatever combustible part of the engine was smoking because Grave Digger was almost always bellowing smoke from its engine, pulled off to the side, its driver, wearing a green helmet with a skull, skinny and pathetic beside the vehicle, standing with his hands on his hips as frustrated as the rest of us that Grave Digger was an inferior vehicle. 

The monster truck shows took place under bright lights, probably trucked in by ESPN for the occasion, lights that flickered and dazzled off the contours of Grave Digger like moonlight on water. Big Foot’s cab caught the light more subtly, muting it, taking the light into its deep blue and holding onto it. But to see the skull and cross bones of Grave Digger illuminated, the green flames dazzling by the lights, the brief moment when the driver hit the gas, and the blue exhaust pumped out, the truck accelerating across the dirt in some out of the way race ground on the outskirts of town, my heart pumped furiously. And then the truck, the monster truck of obscene size and weight, suddenly air borne over a row of cars, a ridiculous bird in flight, before it came crashing down, smashing the windows of every car on its way down, and my heart would stop beating so fast, and I’d wait for them to post a time, or for the driver to run out of Grave Digger to avoid catching fire. 

Are aesthetics learned or conferred? The answer to most questions with two supposed divergent poles is, almost uninterestingly, a bit of both. And yet, I cannot know if other children watched Grave Digger with the same degree of fascination, or whether they were enamored with Big Foot. Certainly, even at a young age I understood that life had something intimately tied to beauty. And though I’d have been unable to elucidate it then, what was exciting about Grave Digger is that its design was an attempt at beauty and that for me, even as a failure, the attempt was more meaningful than anything that Big Foot could have ever achieved. 

If the Bible or some geneticists are to be believed, we’re all related in one way or another. The Wycoff’s turned out to be distant cousins of my mother’s, related some generations back, a fact which was discovered at some point in my childhood, a feat made more impressive by the fact that ancestry.com and obsession with genealogies had been out of style for a few hundred years before there recent rise of discovering your past, which I don’t understand. There is only the present, brief and flickering as a candle’s flame. 

At the end of the cul-de sac was a large weeping willow tree, who’s long limbs stretched down over the street, draping that part of the street in shade and silence. The property also had a Norwegian Maple, large, or so it seemed to me then, as the sky itself, towering like Notre Dame in the small six house space that marked the boundaries of my universe. We never knew the people at the house with the willow tree and the shade. They kept to themselves, whoever lived there, in their own little universe apart from the rest of us, and who can blame them, who can blame anyone for anything?

The year before kindergarten my mother and I used to walk my older sister, Jill to and from school. The walk was less than a mile, and she’d hold my hand, stopping briefly, to explore the pine cones in front of the green house that was owned by the Voth’s. The pine cones were special, prickly and fresh smelling. They fell from a pine that was planted in a thin strip of landscaping that bounded the rectangular strip of grass in their front yard. The tree dropped a thick coating of pine needles, brittle and brown along the strip of landscape. I held up the pine cones like treasures, and my mother and I would talk about them, feel their prickly edges, she, marveling each time anew at the same damn pine cone. My mother was patient and kind. 

It is strange now, to be remembering those walks when I was three and four on the way to school, conscious as I am of my own four year old who will no doubt remember our own harried drives to and from school, blasting music on the good mornings to pass the time. I am not as patient as my mother. But that’s not really what I’m thinking of right now, what I’m thinking of is my mother’s hand, soft and white, clutching mine, and saying goodbye to my daughter, standing at the car door, and what I hear inside those moments is the soft tolling of a bell in the distance, death. 

The next year I started kindergarten at Sierra View elementary school. A collection of squat buildings close enough to walk from our rental house, with a large fierce looking eagle painted on the front in a dramatic blue circle. The parking lot was backed by a large square of grass, but the overall feeling of the school was heat. The low slung buildings, painted white and grey reminded you of the valley and the heat, of the sun radiating down in the valley, below the foothills painted brown, the live oaks a dusty green, and down into the valley where it would lie like a cat in a window sill, pressing down on us. 

The desks in kindergarten were set in five long rows, and we were seated alphabetically by last name. The windows were at least eight feet high and had to be opened and shut using a large dowel with a hook attached at the end. The panes were crisscrossed with black lines that formed a series of very small circles, perhaps designed to reduce the glare of sunlight. I sat in the second row, facing my teacher, Mrs. Marx, her hard features fixed, her breath smelt of coffee, which my mother never drank, and she was severe for a kindergarten teacher, intense. People often describe their kindergarten teachers to me, fresh faced girls just out of teaching college, their bubbly laughter floating through the room. This was not my experience at all. Of course, this was probably not everyone’s experience of Mrs. Marx either. I have to grant that some students probably thrived under that structure, prepared to sit in prescribed sheets, moving briefly to the art table to cut out prescribed shapes. 

The playground at Sierra View was large, typical of a small city in California, where space never seems to be in short supply. Every time I fly back now from the east, I am struck by the long low houses, with large stretches of grass or trees, or highway between them as if space was an infinite quantity. The playground had a large gravel sand box with standard issue black swings and a jungle gym, now probably defunct. Beyond the gravel playground was a large grass field, large enough to play a full game of football or soccer, and a smaller field beyond that, for another group of kids to play their own game. A small line of oak trees stood at the edge of the black top, and you walked beneath their dusty limbs on the way to the field. They were surrounded by red dirt, and they conveyed a feeling of both having always been there and of being very tired. The black top, which was on the opposite side of the gravel area, had tether ball poles, two of them, strung up high, where kids would gather in line to challenge one another, contesting the placement of feet and whether a ball had been completely tethered. It was, like most of kindergarten, large in a way that I was not ready to comprehend. It had more buildings and space than the six house block that had bounded my childhood, more kids than my brief stint in a pre-school and more structure than could have been imagined when I was peeing in the back yard, racing cars down the driveway or listening to the grasshoppers and drinking lemonade on our screen porch.