We drift. I'm ahead, and I see Sharon behind in her red kayak, body bundled against the chill, bill of her cap shading her eyes, paddle resting on the coaming as she oh so slowly brings the binoculars up to her eyes, stalking an eagle or a great blue heron. I steer for the left fork, the deeper channel Everything is so calm, so smooth, but the silence is not quiet; a buzz underpins it, makes it buoyant, like the invisible drafts and currents that hold the gull in a rocky, twisting glide high into the patchy complex of blue mixed with black and gray clouds. You can't identify the source of this non-quiet; is it the buzz of crickets or the hiss of the a gentle breeze through fir? Could it be a distant diesel chugging to power the twin propellers of a trawler out on the bay, or maybe an unseen plane behind that line of trees skimming the mouth of the Willapa River where it empties into the Bay? Or it could be the surf crashing down at the beach, and the wind is blowing all that remains of the sound of the waves' wild revelry all the way to this lazy backwater of a stream, only by chance registered by my ears on this drifting day on Smith Creek. It's so faint and yet so distinct, soft, steady, humming; I wonder if it's in my ears, am I just imagining it, or is it really a sound? Maybe it's the sound of the machinery, the whir of the atoms and molecules that make up this drifting scene. In the stillness, it's all that remains, just that insistent but faint cry like babies and gulls and surf. It could be anything, it could be nothing, maybe both; and my listless mind is willing to let it go, to forgo its usual clinging habits and allow this unknown to stay that way; to just drift, and enjoy the drifting, to watch that patient floating gull way up above, and be satisfied to watch, each of us, the soaring gull and me, where we belong.
Smith Creek opens into Willapa Bay, Willapa Bay opens into the Pacific. The highway crosses Smith Creek at the entrance to Willapa Bay, and there's a boat launch there. Sharon and I like to put the kayaks in and paddle up the creek. Wide calm water, gray, on the muddy bank a dead saltwater fish, a big one half eaten by crows. The mud on the banks sprouts tall grasses, a red-winged blackbird flits through the grass, flashing its orange badge, giving its cutting call. Tall firs, cottonwoods, pines jostle for position up ahead like commuters hoping for a seat on a train. There's a fork, one branch heading off to the right, meandering for awhile and then slinking around a bend. It's impossible to tell if it dead ends or if it continues around the bend. The main channel is to the left, it seems.
We drift. I'm ahead, and I see Sharon behind in her red kayak, body bundled against the chill, bill of her cap shading her eyes, paddle resting on the coaming as she oh so slowly brings the binoculars up to her eyes, stalking an eagle or a great blue heron. I steer for the left fork, the deeper channel Everything is so calm, so smooth, but the silence is not quiet; a buzz underpins it, makes it buoyant, like the invisible drafts and currents that hold the gull in a rocky, twisting glide high into the patchy complex of blue mixed with black and gray clouds. You can't identify the source of this non-quiet; is it the buzz of crickets or the hiss of the a gentle breeze through fir? Could it be a distant diesel chugging to power the twin propellers of a trawler out on the bay, or maybe an unseen plane behind that line of trees skimming the mouth of the Willapa River where it empties into the Bay? Or it could be the surf crashing down at the beach, and the wind is blowing all that remains of the sound of the waves' wild revelry all the way to this lazy backwater of a stream, only by chance registered by my ears on this drifting day on Smith Creek. It's so faint and yet so distinct, soft, steady, humming; I wonder if it's in my ears, am I just imagining it, or is it really a sound? Maybe it's the sound of the machinery, the whir of the atoms and molecules that make up this drifting scene. In the stillness, it's all that remains, just that insistent but faint cry like babies and gulls and surf. It could be anything, it could be nothing, maybe both; and my listless mind is willing to let it go, to forgo its usual clinging habits and allow this unknown to stay that way; to just drift, and enjoy the drifting, to watch that patient floating gull way up above, and be satisfied to watch, each of us, the soaring gull and me, where we belong.
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That's what I thought, and that's in a way what lead me to going to Japan. I remember the time I went down to the Worthington Public Library to look for books on going abroad. What should you do, what should you expect, what was it like to leave the good old U S of A? I was so analytical about it. I thought of going to the library. What about that. And I remember seeing a book that warned that you shouldn't go abroad thinking that living overseas would solve all your problems. If you have problems now, they won't go away simply because you've gone abroad. Uh oh. I thought.
But then, well what have I got to lose? It was when Jim had told me that I could go over there and get a job teaching English with no problem. That really meant something to me. He described his job teaching English at the YMCA. But I don't know anything about teaching English, I said, and besides, I don't know Japanese. How could I ever do that? Why would they pay me to do that. Oh you can do it, Jim assured me. He was living proof. I was so gullible. I was so skeptical. I was trying to be a man's man, I was. Yes indeed. I wanted to not be beholden to anybody. But with women, oh that was different. With women, all bets were off. If a woman was nice to me, and I was attracted to her.... Well not really. There was that period where I experimented with being a cad. Callous and uncaring, insisting only on my own needs. A swashbuckler. Love 'em and leave 'em. There was Snooky Miller, the nurse who was eight or nine years older than me. I met her over a lunch one day at the counter of the Bob Evan's restaurant in Worthington. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I struck up a conversation. She chatted amiably. I asked for her phone number, she gave it to me. I was quivering. But I was determined not to be blinded by my emotions. I won't let her run my life, boy howdy. We started spending lots of time together. I was working at Ohio Thermal, being the young laborer, wearing jeans and steel toed boots, living down on campus with my hard nails rock band friends. It was 1976, and I was a college graduate, English literature, and I considered the degree a scam. Everything seemed a scam in those days, but at the same time I was so goddamn vulnerable, I was so goddamn desperate I was so goddamn in need of some soft touches and a sympathetic ear. I felt all alone, and depended on the people I had known all my life to assure me that I wasn't. Mom, Dad, old friends. But the world seemed to be wearing that idea out, like a favorite shirt that you wear so often you start seeing the weave of the material coming through at the elbows. So Snooky and I played at being in love. She was getting over being divorced a few years before. Her husband had been a physics professor at Ohio State. Imagine that, I thought. When she talked about him, I pictured this fifty year old nerdy professor caricature with thick horn rimmed glasses. Wow, I'm her savior, I thought. I'm what? Passionate, anyway. She was from the exotic wilds of Connecticut. Her mother was dead, and her father commuted to New York City and worked as a writer, writing copy for Time-Life coffee table books. Imagine that. We even went to visit him one time. Only my second time on a commercial airliner. We landed in New York and got the train for Connecticut. This is the big leagues, I thought. A fancy house in the fancy suburbs. He cooked lobster for us, I remember. Am I really here? It felt unreal, as though I were observing this dweeb visiting his nerdy girlfriends parents' home. Is this really me? I guess. I clung to the desperate conviction that I could drop her at any point, boy howdy. I wasn't beholden to nobody, not any more. Not after what happened with my younger loves. No way. That's what I thought. I am what I am, that's what I am, boy howdy. Another time we rode up to Chicago on a snowy February day to visit my sister Becky. I drove Snooky's Volkswagen bug. It had been snowing, but it stopped. It was icier than I thought. I think we were about halfway across Indiana, cruising along across the flat plains on a stretch of interstate with a very wide gently sloping median strip when all of the sudden the left wheel dropped over the edge of the pavement and I lost control. Next thing you know we were spinning in slow motion across the gentle grass slope of the median. Once around we spun, and then twice. I wasn't as scared as I had imagined you would be in that situation. I felt like an observer as the VW gracefully traced a wide spinning arc across the expansive snowy grass strip. At the end of the arc, we were facing the opposite direction on the freeway, heading southeast instead of northwest. "That was weird," I said. Snooky blinked and looked back at me, pushing out breath. The VW had stalled, so I started it back up. It seemed to be undamaged. We found the first exit, got off and got back on heading northwest again. We made it to Chicago, and I don't remember much about our visit with my big sister. I sure thought of myself as brash, artistic, my own man, the workingclass hero, all that stuff. God knows how Becky saw me. Snooky worked as a nurse in a Kidney dialysis center. We saw each other pretty frequently. I held my own, but began to feel twinges of unease. Who is this person, this Snooky. God, she's old. What's the next step? Where do we go from here? It wasn't long after that that my leg shattered. Compound fracture, jagged bone sticking through thin lower leg flesh, covered with blood. Leaning against the trunk of a car and looking down I saw the leg swinging back and forth at a right angle to my knee. Oh shit. How did I get myself into this? It was in the parking lot of a Honda motorcycle dealership. Like my idealized brother, I thought I should without a doubt ride a motorcycle. It would complete the picture I was forming of the misunderstood rebel. Definitely, I needed a motorcycle. So I stopped into the dealership and talked to the man about the Honda, and he handed me a helmet and said, "Take a ride." OK, I thought this will be fun. Five minutes later I was supporting myself by leaning on the hood of brand new Honda car behind the dealership, looking down at my bizarrely swinging leg. The bike had died when I hit the back of the Honda and careened off to the side without me. Broken pieces of plastic amber colored plastic were strewn around. No one saw me wipe out. I was there alone, contemplating my leg as it sung to the left and then to the right, my right foot the ball of a pendulum attached to it. I finally collapsed slowly onto my left side on the asphalt. It took a few minutes for the salesman to figure it out and come around the back of the dealership to find out what had happened. "Are you alright?" "Well, I think I broke my leg." They took me to the hospital in the ambulance after I broke my leg. I remember they asked me if I wanted to make any phone calls from the gurney, and I knew Mom wouldn't be home, so I called my apartment, where I knew Julie would be there. Julie was Bill's sister, who shared the apartment with us. "Uh...Julie? This is Rob. Uh... I'm in the hospital. I broke my leg. Would you call my parents?" "Sure. Are you ok?" "Yeah, I guess so. But they say it's a compound fracture. There going to put me under and operate." "Oh. OK. I'll call your parents." "OK. Thanks, Julie. Bye." "Bye." And that was that. Don't you think it's weird? I guess so. And as I went under, I floated away on dreams, and I was suddenly about ten years old getting an airplane ride with dad, my forehead pressed against the cold plexiglass side window, the plane's high and constant vibrations gently resonating the thin skin of my skull, the bone beneath, and creating a smooth tingling pinpricking sensation in my brain as I stared down through the plexiglas and the patchy snowy squares of farmland a thousand feet below. I could hear nothing, and my visual perspective was limited to what I could see of the snowy and indistinct winter scene below with my head resting on the plexiglas. Then I saw the flashing mirror of the operating room above me as they lifted me, 1, 2, 3, lift ... from the gurney to the operating table. The anesthesiologist was there, placing the mask on my face, count backward, ok, 100, 99, 98....bye bye. When I awoke, I was in my room with a cast on my right leg from toe to hip. My first visitor was from Roush Honda. It was the salesman. He expressed his condolences, and gave me a Roush Honda key chain. Gee thanks, mister. I felt blank, not even much wondering what would happen next. Snooky and I had had a falling out a few weeks before this little accident. I had declared my independence. She was getting too... I didn't know what, but I was damned if I was going to let myself get all tangled up like I had before in college. I'm my own man, that's for sure. Don't Push The River, It Flows by Itself, said the book my brother had recommended to me in my whimpering malaise. Don't Push the River, don't be pushing yourself to do anything you don't want to do. No shoulds, as his wife said. So I declared my independence, struck out on my own, left poor Snooky wondering what had hit her. Who was this kid, anyway? Was he the shy sweet one, or the nasty workingclass hero. She was sort of prim. She wore glasses and had her hair frosted. It was short, and she had a permanent. She was a young thirties nurse, but she seemed like an older woman to me. I wasn't to let her get the best of me, boy howdy. But naturally she came to visit me in the hospital. Hi Snooky. Hi Rob. We made out on the hospital bed with the curtain around the bed drawn. My leg twinged with pain as we grappled. When she would leave, I'd switch on the tv and fall asleep watching it. And the time me and my friend Jim from college and his girlfriend from Rawlings, Wyoming that he had met working as a cook in Yellowstone were driving across the Nevada wasteland, towards sunset one summer evening, and we tried to listen to Nixon's resignation speech on AM radio from a distant station that faded in, faded out that whined and crackled between syllables of Nixon's voice as he so selfservingly announced that he was going away for good this time. We had been driving and chasing the sun that day for an hour and a half. Heading west towards California, the sun would set behind the next low ridge of hills just as we approached it.
We'd crest the ridge, and there would be the sun again up above the horizon, with another crest appearing off a ways at the next horizon. We'd speed along the flats after that, not another car in sight and only the straight blacktop and the faint white dotted line in the middle and solid line on both sides stretching ahead to that next ridge. Like sleep walkers we drove hypnotized by the sound of the wind and the low hum of the engine and the stead vibration of the wheels, and as we approached that next ridge it got darker and darker as the sun disappeared behind it, only to reappear once again when we crested the ridge. We did that three or four times until finally the sun out raced us and the stars began to poke out insistently. That's when we found a state park and decided to stop for the night. Later we sat in a camp site with the jeep door open so we could hear the broadcast. The stars were 0coming out as the sun went down. The plains were dotted with a sage here and there that tossed strange shadows in the deepening starlight. We had a campfire in state park camp ring that crackled as it caught the scrap wood we had left over from previous camps in the wooded high country we had just come from. We sat on the dusty ground around the camp fire, tall Jim with his straight blonde/brown hair and his wide forehead, intelligent eyes and sarcastic and funny bearing on everything, his girlfriend an unknown quantity, cute, desireable, we were taking her to California, she and Jim were going to visit Jim's brother, who lived in San Jose. It was, I guess the summer of 1974. The radio crackled and whined some more, Nixon's voice dripping and dropping into the intervals between the cracks and the whines like strobe light flashes from a plane way up high on a night full of thunder and lightening. The radio became part of the scene, we didn't talk, we just sat on the dusty ground and gazed at the crackling campfire and listended, tried to make out the sense of the speech and to plug the randomness of the Nixon's words and his phoney balony voice into what we knew about our times and the recent past and our own personal histories, and what we could make out of each other there on that cool night in the summer on the plains of the Nevada desert. There was a dog food factory in Marion, Ohio, and Dad and I went there to balance their giant grinder that was used to grind the flesh and bone of horses for dog food. It was a giant heavy steel machine, a ten foot in diameter steel pocket watch shaped machine with a greasy steel grate in front of it and steel steps leading up to it, where Dad stood like the Sistine Chapel painting by Michalangelo, the one where the rapturous muscled man reaches out to heaven to touch God with his fingertips. This is not an unreasonable scene to conger as the giant steel blades whir, out of balance and vibrating the concrete floor where I stood observing as Dad stood on the greasy grate, leaning slightly forward into the wind and roar of the raging blades just inches away, holding out the flickering strobe light that flashed in microsecond bursts of light on the spinning blades, and froze them in front of our eyes, creating an errie and enticing sensation and an that alluring desire to reach out and touch the blades that seemed to be in frozen motion.
It would be safe, our senses told us, it would be safe to touch the solid steel that shone before us in the raging din. So slow so freeze frame slow, so distinct and 3D so frozen in the strobe light was the motion of the giant blades, the frozen chopper in the deceptive strobe, which hid the vicious spinning movement. This movement of the giant rotating blades, these steel cutters designed to grind up bone into meal in nothing flat, the motion of the heavy steel blades spinning at a thousand revolutions a minute, was completely frozen by the strobe light Dad held, tricking our eyes, and making the dangerous seem safe, daring you to touch, daring you to reach your hand out and touch the frozen blades, daring you to feel the solid heavy piece of steel, cold against your pink fingers, daring you to reach that hand out right now to touch the solid piece of steel. All the while your mind is calm, your mind does not detect the raging of the movement, the blurring speed, the roar of the motor incongruously loud as you see the frozen spin of the cold flashing steel of the blades designed to crush horse bones, designed to chop the flesh and hair and sinew of the dead horses in the dog food plant in Marion Ohio. And there stands Dad, leaning forward into the dinny roar, as if suspended merely by the solid sound of heavy steel slashing air, spinning up a blur at thousands of revolutions per minute, and the wind in his face from the ten foot diameter blades cutting through the air right in front of his face, him leaning forward, feet spaced apart for support, aiming the flashing strobe like some space man's laser ray, shining it on the whirling steel as he poses statute-like, ready, receptive, the eye that sees everything and nothing in the flash of the strobe which now freezes the wild winding steel, and displays the motionless blades as thought they were rock still, belying the roar and the wind off the blades that tells the bare naked truth about their dangerous spin. And there stands Dad, he himself all frozen too in a tai chi stance. It seems almost as if some larger thing was shining a big old strobe on everything, as if some giant stood above us, and shining a strobe on me and Dad and the dog food factory and Marion, Ohio, and the farms and fields around it, shining the flashing strobe so that all movement is frozen, all is flashing one-step-at-a-time, silent movie-like, herky jerky slow motion, until the phase is dialed in until the exact phase rate is calculated and the motion is completely frozen, completely stopped, and will not go another step. Dad is being frozen in the motion of freezing, I am being frozen in the process of seeing Dad being frozen in the motion of freezing. Just then, Dad throws the switch, the din comes down, the sound whines down, the blade is unlocked from its frozen motion, we see it spin, and gradually slow down as Dad turns from the spinning steel and leans over to lay down the strobe, and steps down the steel grate steps as the sound goes down down down, and the spinning stops, and I can hear the sound of Dad's steps on the steel grate as he walks down them and looks over at me, and smiles. Outside, the loading dock scene is gray and cold. I notice the bent trash barrels, the darkened brick walls, the concrete floor. Through the big garage door, I see the inside of the massive factory, high ceiling, with big steel ducts, and water pipes and wiring off into infinity. I peer into the gloomy cave of the factory, the scene behind the grinding machine. Guys walk here and there back and forth in stained white uniforms, mixtures of grease and blood on white shirts and white pants, and they wear white baseball caps that say the name of the dog food that they make, and the place smells like grease and blood and rotting meat, and I stand on the loading dock, just looking around, just hanging around and waiting, while Dad has gone to talk to somebody about how he’s fixed the vibration in their grinding machine. Melancholy. This time of year, with the rains pouring down and the short daylight hours, melancholy ruminations float like mist on a gray lake. The lonely sound of your own footsteps echoing in an empty hallway. I remember thinking I was crazy, I must be crazy back when I was a sophomore at Bowling Green State University, because the lonely sound of my own footsteps echoed back to my ears in a strange strange way. And it set off a melancholy disconnection that was scary and kind of neutral at the same time. I felt as if whatever I consisted of was too heavy to carry, that the thing that made me me was a burden too weighty for my fragile frame. I felt like the women in Africa with their heavy loads balanced on their head, but unlike them I could not bear it gracefully, I could not walk with my head erect, a calm matter-of-fact pride in my expression. Unlike those women in Africa, I had no training since childhood, no one had helped me learn how to bear this heavy load on my head for mile after mile, day after day, no one had coached me in the finer points of balance and endurance, and I felt as if this burden had been loaded on my head in the middle of the night in my sleep, that while I slept invisible forces had attached this weight that I could not put down, and as I walked down the empty hall with the cold hard linoleum floor and the 14 foot high ceilings in the gloom of the early winter twilight the weight of it came back to me in sound, the cadence of my own footsteps echoing off the cold linoleum, bouncing off the concrete walls, and back to my ears which reeled at the weight of these heavy sounds, my ears which shrank back at the approach of these heavy echoing sounds of my own slow staccato footsteps bouncing and reverberating in the hall, and even more acutely in my head, until the me I knew was very small, and sat as if on the edge of a very deep and very wide pool, shivering under a gray but featureless sky.
Bowling Green, named after the flat green manicured lawns of a game played by the rich was in fact quite aptly named, a flat green featureless plain with a very long long green horizon that curved back into itself in a bright airless day, conjuring images of rich people casting small wooden croquet balls down wide wide alleys of green cropped grass towards distant pins, while chuckling ironically at their prowess. Bowling Green was the logical place for me to be in 1973, studying English literature, creative writing, and psychology. I remember the beautiful girl from India that was in some of my classes, and leaving class in the crowd of people that filled the hallway afterwards, they would began to disperse as we walked, and I would glance behind me to see the beautiful woman from India. Once in a while, our eyes might even meet, but I would look away, and just imagine what it might be like to walk up to her and say hello, to start a conversation. She had long thick black hair, a proud regal face, a strong Aryan nose, and bronze skin that had a glow unlike any I had seen. Her body was full, with beautiful breasts and a nice a shape. She seemed self-confident, but I never heard her talk to anyone else, I only saw her during and after class, and imagined talking to her, but never did. What do you want outta me, Shakespeare? Shakespeare couldn't spell his own name, they said. At least one book explaining who the hell I am. That's what I was after. Who the hell am I, anyway? Does anybody care? Probably not. Huck Finn. Holden Caufield. the guy in One Flew Over the Cukoo's nest. Get a book by what's his name that wrote catch 22. joseph heller. And so on and so forth. So many fucking books. Discouraging just to look in a bookstore. All the musty paperback tomes that nobody ever reads. I hate collecting books. NO, but, I don't particularly love the dusty old things. I just like to read them. sometimes. Oh what a web we weave. It'll take a while to send that file. Poet. What? The dank dark secrets. The bar. The student hangout. The bric a brac all over the walls. The look in the bartender's face when I didn't know what kind of scotch I wanted. My insecurity. Self-loathing. That's what what's his name called it. My reading. I'm always reading, and then I put myself to sleep in front of the tv. My my. Will it ever be finished? And so forth and so on. What do you think of the ways in which? I don't know. Do you? And so forth. so we went down. Bowling Green OHio. Howards bar. That black-painted box of crowded hormone charged twenty-year-olds drinking watered down beer. Pizzanellos. The tidy little old town streets. The time I got splashed with water fromt the huge puddle in the street. The time my front tooth was absessed. Living in the dorm with Roger. The time I tried to tell roger there was a hole in the ceiling, just to see him try to find it. Mean thing to do. Poe ditch. I used to walk occasionaly out in the country. The time we walked out there along Poe ditch, and we stood on a freeway overpass. Some semi truck driver honked his damn horn just as he was under the bridge. Scared the shit out of us. The time I worked in the garage door factory. Things seemed so weird. I was sort of autistic, was I not? These weird people. There was actually a guy they called hash oil bob. And I was a hanger on a friend of a friend in the house where they did all these drugs. I was a weird kid. I was lonely. I was me, even then. There was some survival in me, something was trying to strike out on my own. Something was trying not to knuckle under. It was and is a struggle. Things are better now, at least in some ways. Sometimes it seems like nothing has changed much from those days. I was depending on some sign that someone was supposed to give me. I was hoping for some knowledge out of the mystical East. The only connection there was was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and I only heard about him from the Beatles and from a posters plastered on campus. Bookishly, I looked up articles about him in the library, and concluded that he was a fake, that I could meditate and find some calm all on my own. Just pick a magic mantra and say it over and over again to yourself. It'll help to quell the compulsive thoughts about how shitty you are and how you'll never amount to much, and how you could be gay, and how you probably not, and how you'll never know, and how you wish you weren't here, and how all you want is someone to comfort you, a woman's voice a soft breast, ah just comfort me, please, and the echoly sound in your brain, and the way you hear your footsteps they sound so loud and echoing in your spiny ear canals, and how you wish it would stop and you just wish there was some way you could know how it would all turn out, and how you wish you could be more withit and people would like you and all that stuff, but how they just see you as a geek, your sure, and you just don't know if you'll ever fit in, and about then it starts to seem like a pretty damn good idea to chant some word over and over again until it all goes away and cancels itself out and you start to feel calm and better and not so compulsive and you don't hate yourself after all, and how long will it take to learn that lesson, and at least I wasn't dumb enough to cough upt he fifty bucks to the Maharishi, you got that caution from john lennon, didn't you, that song where he says they don't need no mahareshi, It was called Sexy Sadie, but it was actually supposed to be about Maharishi… Maharishi… How did you know… you made a fool of us all… The latest and the greatest of them all… You'll get yours yet… However big you think you are… However big you think you are… trying to learn from somebody elses mistakes, so logical, is it not, wanting some credit, I mean after all. It would have been nice to have a guru a teacher a guide a swami, but I couldn't afford one, and I didn't want to make a fool out of myself, so instead, I tried to analyze it and figure it out for myself. Nobody cares about you really, except your family who you know loves you, but who are pretty clueless, can't depend on help from them, that's for sure. That's sort of what I thought as I bumbled along desparate but clinging to my tough view of myself and my little compensations my little ways of calming myself like watching reruns of gomer pyle and the dick van dyke show on tv and like getting into rituals with my friends like roger my few and far between friends, rituals like playing ping pong in the dorm every afternoon and then watching dick van dyke when it comes on and then waiting for it to come around again. Not feeling anything much, but knowing you like your comfort, knowing you like your comfortable little life, like the one back home, but that's a nest you've got kicked out of, even though mom is willing to take you back, but only for a while.
So this guy Billup shows up with this airplane engine in the back of his ‘55 Studebaker station wagon. I’m nine or ten. I see him coming up the drive. I hear the gravel crunching under his tires as I watched Flippo on tv, and get up to look out the screen door. Billup had come to see Dad, because of Dad's reputation as a Helio airplane mechanic. Helios were a special kind of airplane that Dad loved. Billup wanted dad to overhaul the engine, which was in pieces in the back of the Studebaker. He was tall and not quite skinny, and he had these nervous eyes as he looked at Mom and at me. He wore khaki pants, a flannel plaid shirt, and a button down sport cap. Doyouknowwhen he’ll be back, he says, his eyes darting around the floor of our house and then down to his shoes as though he was looking for some little piece he had dropped somewhere.
It was about three thirty on a school day when he showed up. I had just gotten back from school half an hour before. Mom told him that Dad didn't get home from work until about six, usually. Mom looked at Billup nervously through the screen door. Billup fidgeted about, shifting his weight from one foot to another. I just sat on the davenport and watched them out of the corner of my eye while I looked at Flippo the Clown on TV, who was introducing another Popeye cartoon. Billup made me a bit nervous, too with his fidgeting over there at our door, peering in at us through the screen mesh. The sun was behind him, and you couldn’t really make out his face. Chic was back in his room as usual. I didn't know what he was always doing back there. He was always back there. Probably smoking that pipe or something. So the guy says he'll come back later, if that's ok. What's Mom going to say? And he turns around, gets in the Studebaker and drives off. Anyway to make a long story short, the guy came back and asked Dad if he would overhaul his Helio engine, and Dad said sure. I'm always thinking about how I wished for order, I'm always dreaming about neat streets with sidewalks, and wishing we stayed in Worthington, and having this neat suburban setting, and not liking the rough country. The country was where Dad grew up the chaotic country CHAOTIC COUNTRY. No order. No neatness. Ditches, not sidewalks. Septic tanks that clog and you have to dig up in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, not convenient city sewers that you never have to worry about. I'm also always thinking about the 1960 Ohio State Buckeyes national championship[ basketball team. I'm always getting out my scrapbook with the clippings from the Columbus Dispatch sports pages, the feature article in Tab, the Sunday tabloid section with the cover picture of giant size fourteen sneakers, and the headline, "Big Shoes to Fill", and the scenes from the national tournament, and John Havelichec's last second jump shot to win it, and Jerry Lucas' patented hook shot. That put Columbus on the map, didn't it. And I'm always sort of feverishly thinking about that stuff, That's the kind of matrix I was in at the time. I had this sense of wanting to be part of something big, national, international, of wanting to measure up, of wanting Columbus to have a big population, the tallest buildings, major league sports all that stuff. I was obsessed. And I read Motor Trend, which Chic subscribed to, and kept track of what the new Fords were going to look like. And it was in this atmosphere, this matrix that this guy shows up with a Helio engine in pieces in the back of a 1955 Studebaker station wagon. This tall guy with in his button down sports cap. The mythic Helio airplane. Dad's deification of the Helio. What the Helio meant. Dad's reasons for saying yes to the guy? Did I consider it? Dad did what dad did. You didn't spend a lot of time analyzing, you spent your time reacting, trying to put on a good face, to figure out what would be appropriate. To get his approval. He decided I guess that it would be a good project for him and chic. He thought he needed the money. He couldn't say no if somebody asked him to do something. Did the guy give him money for expenses? who knows. but he decided to do it. The airplane sat, he was told at an airport near the Chesapeake bay, engineless. Dad liked to expound on the difference between motors and engines. An internal combustion engine, he'd say, pointedly. Motors are electrical. Engines run on gas. INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE that's the story, right there, isn't it. Enough said. It’s not a motor, you dolt. Don’t you know anything. My Dad knows. So they had this engine stand, a tubular steel framework that made a stand for the engine, and they began to assemble the engine, and chic helped, and I sort of watched, mostly. I'm eleven or twelve, Chc's fifteen or sixteen. Chic's also going with Dick Porter to canada fishing, building a short wave radio from scrap parts that dick porter gave him. Looking at the 1940s guide to getting a ham radio operator's license. Reading the Hardy Boys. Reading the book about alaska. doing a project on Montana, being friends with danny hoover. Thinking about the high point of my entire school experience, which was going to see flippo and the museum with the mummy in Mrs. Zubels's third grade class. Borrowing Aunt Ida’s almost new 1963 Chevy truck to take the engine to Baltimore. Driving to Baltimore with Dad and Chic, with this Helio engine in the bed of the truck. Arriving at the guy’s house on Chesapeake Bay. Going swimming behind his house in the tidal bay. Walking out in the shallow water to the diving platform they had out there. Dad telling me years later how he was worried about me until the guys said it was ok. They put the Helio engine in and flew it. Dad flew it by himself to test hop it. Dad the hero again. The goldfish hung from my handlebar in a plastic bag filled with water. The bag swung back and forth, side to side, and the fish scrambled in the water to maintain its equilibrium. Its days were numbered, it knew. It stared with huge eyes in proportion to it's finny body, and I thought I noticed a grimace, although it's hard to tell whether a fish is grimacing or not. I glanced down at it every now and then. It continued to flit around, hovering and flailing its fins like a slow humingbird that had somehow become trapped within an inexplicable force field in square inches of air. It seemed content enough as far as I could tell; or was it grimacing? Was it already starting to use up all the oxygen in it's transparent cell? Whatever the case, I was following Bill and Bob. We were heading back home. It seemed like it would take forever to get back there. My world consisted of the wobbley white stripe along the edge of the hightway below my bike's tire, the heat of the late afternoon sun, the wire basket attached to the handlebar, the sticky rubber grips on the end of the handlebars, the crunch of the stones on the edge of the highway, and the occasional roar and whoosh as a thunderbird or a semi truck slammed past, making me waver and wobble even more, trying to stay at all times on the white line painted along the edge of US 23. We had made it to the Josephenium. The priest factory. We were on our way. Soon we'd reach Flint Road.
Bill and Bob Campbell where the twins who moved in next door when I was eleven or twelve. They lived with their divorced Mom. That was pretty exotic, divorced mom, even to say it. They were renting the old house, which was like a big house on a plantation, next door to our house. They were identical twins, but I think I knew Bill a bit better than Bob. They were skinny, kind of wiry, and blonde headed. Real All American Boy material. I knew Bill and Bob for around those one or two years, and then they moved away. I don't really have a feel for what it was like to ride a bike down to Graceland with these two kids. I don’t think I ever would have thought of doing it on my own. I'm not sure I told Mom where we were going. Graceland was probably ten miles each way. It seemed like it took forever. You had to go all the way to the end of County Road 10, turn right on County Line Road, then quickly left on Flint Road after crossing under the railroad bridge, and then on Flint Road, which diagonaled up to 23. I was really scared of 23, because it was this four lane highway with big old semis coming along at sixty miles an hour. We went past the Josephinum, and on for another two or three miles until we hit Worthington. That's where 23 changes to High Street. In Worthington, they've got sidewalks along High Street, and we took the sidewalks all the way into Columbus, down past Kanawa where Grandma Britt lived, past the first McDonalds in Columbus, past the Worthington Ford dealership and just before that Selby Boulevard, where we used to live. I probably would have turned back a lot of times, but Bill and Bob kept egging me on to see if we could make it down to Graceland. It was hot, in the middle of summer, proabably July. It must have been around July 1964 or 1965, somewhere in there. We made it to Graceland, and I think we went through the Woolco's discount store, sort of an early day Wallmart, and later we found the pet store, and decided to buy goldfish. The pet store smelled sweaty, poopy and had a familiar humidity. Big tanks near the entrance were crammed with floating gold flakes of flittering fins that stared out of the glass as though pining for some unknown other place. They could not have imagined the tropical reef covering candied coral and gentle warm waves where their ancestors played and risked being devoured by grumpy sea ducks and big mouthed salt water predators. That world was not even a dream to these glittering iterations of tropical genes where of all the pet joints in all the seedy corners of the complicated big finned cold war world they had to end up here in this one, staring at this particular kid who was just about to snag them in this particular net attached to that particular metal handle. Gotcha, said the pet store guy. That's a beaut, isn't it? They put the goldfish in plastic bags, and then put the plastic bags inside paper containers like the ones used by Chinese restaurants. I didn't have a basket on my bike, so I figured I'd tie the the long end of the plastic bag around the handle bar and let it dangle from there. That way I could keep an eye on my fish. I stuck the paper containere in the trash and mounted up. I think each of us bought one fish. We retraced our path, back along High Street, past Worthington Ford, past Kanawa, past Selby Boulevard past downtown Worthington, norh of Worthington where the countryside started, then the end of the sidewalks again, and I remember I said something about being scared to ride on the pavement on 23. I remembered all of Dad's warnings, but Bill and Bob told me it was ok as long as I kept my bike tires on top of the white stripe along the edge of the highway, that we'd be allright, that they couldn't hit us. So the three of us went single file on our bikes down 23, keeping our tires within the white stripe on the shoulder, buffetted by the winds as huge semis slammed past at sixty miles an hour. Finally we got to Flint Road, and turned right onto it, and it seemed we might actually make it back. We checked the fish in their boxes once in a while. They seemed a bit listless. I remember having an argument with Bill and Bob when we pulled off along the side of the road for a rest. We laid our bikes down on the side and sat on some big rocks along a wide place in the berm of Flint Road. Bill was insisting that helicopters were safer than airplanes. I told him he didn't know what he was talking about, because my Dad flies an airplane that's safer than any helicopter. I tried to explain, but they just didn't get it. They didn't get the superiority of the Helio airplane, and I just couldn't make them shut up about helicopters. We pedaled on, and I was starting to get blisters on my hands from holding the handle bars. We got back to County Road 10 by about five or six in the evening, I bet, and pedaled home. When we got there, the fish were dead, floating upside down in their little plastic prisons. We compared them, Bill's fish, Bob's fish, and my fish; all dead, all floating upside down, gold fins swaying limply back and forth as we jiggled the plastic bags. We dumped them on the grass in the ditch in front of my house. The little gold fish lay motionless in the grass and weeds. Mine fell right on one of those spreading prickly weeds with the big stalk in the middle that makes a dandelion, and lay their lifeless in the prickly bowl of the weed as though it were a platter for some exotic meal. Dad's adage. That was so important to him, and I took it to heart, it seems. That forms the basis of my relationship with computers, for example. It's a moral thing. Relationship to Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Ideas about qualtiy. It didn't stall, you stalled it. What did he mean by that? He said it to Becky and Beth Ann when the old 49 Chevy he bought for them to drive to Ohio State would sputter and die as they let out the clultch. "It stalled," they'd say. "It stalled on me." That's when he'd through it in like a jab, like punch, not letting them get away with it. "It didn't stall; you stalled it." "It stalled!" she'd exclaim under her breath, but just loud enough. Becky would simmer, she'd smoulder. Dad would redden at the insolence of this little girl. I was a little kid; just an observer; I took in the tension, the clear forces, battling, sparring. I carry it with me today when I watch people; it somehow ingrained a fear a terror of confrontation. It didn't stall; You stalled it. A mantra, a catechism, an old saw, a chant, an incantation, an old jingle that you get get out of your head, a sing-song taunt over and over again it goes: It didn't stall; You stalled it. It didn't stall; You stalled it. It didn't stall; You stalled it. It didn't stall; You stalled it. A big finger hanging in mid blue air waggles and points right at me: It didn't stall; You stalled it. It didn't stall; You stalled it. I tried to figure out what really happened. People don't want to know what's under the hood. They just want it to work. That ain't enough for me. If I'm obsessed, that's one of the main things I'm obsessed about. But the dark side of it is that you blame yourself for everything. Nothing is a glich. You feel guilty about gremlins. About blaming something on external forces. Nothing happens just by accident goddamn it. And so forth. You feel... responsible for things. Unless you don't. Rather, if you let something or somebody come into the realm the circle of what you deem your sphere of responsibility you become hyper responsible for that. That's why you're so reluctant to let anything into that realm. Once that person or that entity is in, it's in. You'll be responsible out the ass for whatever it is. That's it. That's what I was thinking about, but it's so damn hard to put into words. This whole swirl of stuff, and it allstarts with Dad's conversation/fight with his young daughters, with Becky and Beth Ann who he bought a car for, an ancient forty-eight chevy that didn't stall, they stalled it. Daddy, it keeps stalling when I'm driving on the freezing cold day down to the OSU campus. No, it didn't stall, you stalled it. Like I was saying, it stalled, says Becky defiantly. The sparks flew. And little Robbie watching apprehensively, oh my god don't fight, please, and so forth.
The time I was four years old and we went to western pennysylvania to visit aunt anna and elsie, and they had that horsehair stuffed furniture and that dark wood trimmed house with that dark hard carpet and that dusty pump organ that we couldn't touch and elsie said let's go milk the cow, and she was sitting on a three legged stool beside the cow in the barn and she said to little robbie come up close, and I was wathcing as the sprong of the milk stream rang angainst the bottom of the little pail and she sqoze one nipple and then the other and there was a rhythm going in the sprong sprong sprong of the streams of milk going into the pail, and we were in the barn with the hard packed dirt floor strewn with straw and the old cow stood, a giant next to elsie who was also very large sitting on the tiny wooden stool she looked like a big man, sith her heavy farm coat and her short black hair, and she said, come closer robbie, see how the milk comes out, and then she twisted the nipple suddenly towards me and a stream of white milk shot out and into my eye, and I pulled back and cringed and wiped my eye as elsie laughed and everybody laughed and at that point the heavy red velvet curtain closes on the memory, just like in a theater. All I know is that Elsie was the woman who came to visit excentric old Aunt Anna at her farm there in western pennsylvania some thirty years before, and she never left, just stayed. That's what dad said. How strange. Who was this elsie? I was never to know. And what could I imagine about it? I was never to know.
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