Auld Lang Syne

We’re coming to the end of another year. It seems like a ritual, but it never really feels like the end of anything, really. It feels like an observance that helps us mark something that we can’t really see, like a border. But it’s not really nothing either. When I think about the end of the year, it seems more like the articulated vestibule between train cars. We pass from one year into the next with a strange kind of effortlessness. You know you’re in between places, but that inbetween is a place of its own.

Photo by Chris Huggins

Photo by Chris Huggins

Passing easily from one year to the next is not a satisfactory feeling. I sort of wish it was they way it used to be on trains before the vestibules: the noisy air full of soot and cinders, the gap between the cars requiring a bit of a leap to clear, the knuckle coupling pulsing and knocking malevolently as the train lurches along. As dangerous as it is to get from one car to the other, you know that you’ve done something once you’re across. You can take some satisfaction in that.

I’m beginning to think that perhaps too much of the world is easy these days. So much of what we accomplish comes at the push of a button, at the end of an upload, or as the result of a tap or swipe. I realize how old and crotchety this will make me sound, and I suppose that’s about right. I am a middle-aged curmudgeon of sorts. So, instead of a Jeremiad about technology and the like, and instead of an annual family letter, I thought I’d present a snapshot of the Petersen 5 as they are right now as we’re passing from one car to the next. Hopefully, this can give me a baseline for next year’s passage.

Maxwell is no longer in the nursery program at our church. Next Sunday, he’ll join the big kids in the primary program as a Sunbeam. With this kid we’re looking for any marker of age and maturity, because, despite his humor and intellectual prowess (not joking here), he is a runaway CPU process, a crotch puncher, and entirely deaf to the voices of his parents. He drains my batteries faster than any other thing that has ever been in my life to this point, and I’m including comprehensive exams, grading essays, and radiation treatments. We’re completely aware that we should not wish away any part of the kid’s temperment or wish him older. Curiosity is so hard to manage in a three-year-old and so lacking in adults. He’s got it, and we want him to keep hold of it. Maxwell also throws himself into everything so deeply that we could all take note. This is how you get things done. We’ll see what year four is like for this tiny tornado.

Isaac is in the eye of the storm. At nine, he’s come through the harrowing times that his little brother is in, and he’s yet to move into the tempestuous tweens where his sister has been. Ike has his own battles as a middle child and struggles daily to remind us not to forget him. He is not inclined towards any of the sportsball programs, which is going to make him the odd boy out around these parts. He’s 100% nerd, with glasses and a skinny frame. He scrunches up his face when he thinks, and it’s apparent that he’s always thinking about something, usually Minecraft. He is so much like me at his age that I worry I don’t honor his uniqueness. We’re watching him closely, and we’re impressed with his humor and intellect and memory and his ability to feel deeply. I want to encourage him to charge up his batteries during this calm.

Zoë is no longer in the primary program at our church. She’s moved on to the young women’s program, which means as a family, we’re poised for her to leave Tween Town for good. This year she’ll turn thirteen, she’ll advance from the seventh grade to the eighth, and a whole host of other transformations will take place. She’s made it through half of middle school without much drama (knock on wood). She is got it together, really, and I worry a little about what the future will hold for her. We hope that she’ll keep us in the loop, but that’s hardly likely, and it would hardly be her fault. Endocrinology is such a wild card, and as her body changes, her mind will, too. When I look at her, in her jammies, drawing lovely pictures of Totoro, I think of the maelstrom waiting to emerge. I want to be prepared for this. I hope that all those years working for the YMCA will supply some kind of Kung Fu for parenting a teenager.

Alisa is very possibly in the most flux of all. She has had a cascade of changes in the last few months and will continue in that vein for a while. She left classroom teaching this summer to take a job as the coordinator for an elementary arts education program. She now mentors many of the art teachers in southern Utah. Her supervisor is retiring, so she’s planning to apply for her job. If she gets it; big change. If she doesn’t; big change. So, there’s no getting around that. She’s also finshing her master’s degree with a thesis addressing the effects talking about art has on how children create art. Like our own kids, Alisa’s in a transition at our church. For a long time she’s had a ministerial calling with the young women. This Sunday the torch was passed to others, and she’s relieved of that calling. It is almost certain that this coming year will be unrecognizable from this last one.

Todd I’m probably the most stable, though this has hardly been norm. The passing year was a wild and tempestuous one; the upcoming one seems more likely to be calm. Last year, I left life as a classroom teacher and took on a new role as a program director, which puts Alisa and I in parallel tracks. Because of the big changes in Alisa’s professional life, I’ve been doing a lot more to keep things going at home. I’m in a phase where I have been living and working in the same place for longer than at any other stretch of time in my life thus far. I have some truly great friends here, new and old. The town we live in is in a legitimately lovely corner of the world. I have to admit that stability gives me a little bit of anxiety because it hints at the calamity lurking out there. The longer it’s been since an emergency the closer you are to the next one. I’ve got to watch what I eat, try to lose weight, and exercise. Normal stuff for a man my age. I’m doing that and I haven’t felt this good in years. I’m on the second chapter of a new book that I should be writing faster than I am, but I feel like this year is the year for that to take off. I’m not going to fret over the upcoming year, but I’m going to keep the old Arabic proverb in mind: “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.”

So, that’s what the transition time between 2014 and 2015 feels like for me. I tried to take its fingerprints. In a couple of days we’ll jump across the gap. We’ll see you there.

Because, What If...

A little sketch I did, running a non-canonical scenario that I know will thrill my friend Charles Cuthbertson to no end.

Kid Talk

Today I was driving Maxwell and his buddy Liam around, and I managed to capture a section of their conversation on my phone. It's like Mamet for three-year-olds.

Enjoy.

Note: After a couple of listens, I noticed that there is an absolutely fascinating structure to this conversation that goes way beyond mere cuteness.

It made me wonder how much amazing talk just evaporates into the past. 

A Kind of Christmas Story

After college and before graduate school, I spent about three years in the "real world." Even though I've found the academic environment to be a good fit for me, I think it messes people up if they have never been in an non-school environment. For this reason, I will try to scare students away from graduate school if they're showing interest while they are still an undergraduate. I try to chase them out into a real job of some kind so they can find out if they still crave school.

When I graduated from college, I did not want to stay in school. I wanted out. After a year or so, I decided to be a writer. What a marvelous and naive dream! I had some favorites back then, Richard Hugo, William Stafford, Raymond Carver, Wallace Stegner. All of them were college professors, they taught creative writing, but in order to be a writing teacher, you kind of have to be a writer first, and I wasn't quite sure how to do that. Raymond Carver advised young writers in one of his essays (I've lost track of which one) to get a job as a night janitor or security guard, which he says will give you time, silence, and solitude. Since that was the only advice I found at that time, I followed it, applied for a job cleaning banks. 

When the manager asked why someone with a college degree wanted to clean banks, I said, "I'm trying to become a writer."

She looked at me for a while, and then smiled. "I don't know what that means, but you look like a hard worker."

It was easy, meditative work. I'd go to my first bank around 6:30 after getting a cheese burger at Dick's (the start of a dire habit). Usually the bank would be empty and dark. I had a key, which made me feel strangely powerful.

I'd start with the bathrooms, which I hated most, and which were filthier than you'd think they'd be in a financial institution. This is also where I learned that the ladies aren't the immaculate angels they claim to be. After the bathrooms, I'd clean the break room, the manager's office, then head out into the main lobby of the branch. Vacuuming was last.

The big epiphany of those first few shifts was the discovery that my key opened everything but the vault and the safety deposit box room. What a massive amount of trust these people had put in me, without a background check. When you think of janitors, you think about that ring of keys on their belt. I didn't have a whole ring, just one key, but it ruled them them all. Moving freely through a bank at night made me feel like a guy in a heist movie. It was kind of a thrill. 

After cleaning everything, which took about ninety minutes, I would situate myself at the drive-thru window and use the type writer. I made it clear that I was using scrap paper, in case someone was reviewing security footage. There were one or two smokey plastic domes in there, but I had no idea if there were real cameras inside. 

From that drive-thru office, I would write. I mostly stuck to poems because I had another bank to do, but I'd also work out story ideas, or just free write. From my stool, I could see the neon of the neighboring retail shops, cars whizzing by, and in the background was the looped music, lite jazz, lots of nylon string guitars and soprano saxophone.

Come Christmas, the music shifted over to Christmas carols the day after Thanksgiving, the carols were mostly secular, and also mostly lite jazz. By the second week of December, the "Carol of the Bells" sounded like Casiotone version of an Edgar Allen Poe poem. It was a cold winter in Seattle, so occasionally a little bit of snow would swirl through the night sky, only to melt on the ground. 

The week before Christmas, I walked into the break room after cleaning the johns, and there were two men on the far side of the room, talking quietly. I recognized one guy, the branch manager, but not the other. The only reason I knew the branch manager was the fact that he kept a photo of himself and a deer he'd shot on his desk by his cup of ball point pens.

The branch manager did not look up when I came in. The other guy's eyes went to the floor, then back to the branch manager. Never over to me.

I thought of leaving, but no one said anything, I crossed the room and pulled the trash bag, tied it off, and reached down into the can for a replacement liner. The longer I stayed it became clearer to me that this wasn't friendly banter. Still, no one said anything to me, so I moved about the room, with my wheelie cart, cleaning as quietly as I could. Eventually, I got close enough to hear the conversation. 

The employee had been caught embezzling money. He'd been given responsibility for the vault and ended up skimming money off the final count. The branch manager outlined what was going to happen. "You're going to resign. This is your letter. You'll sign it and submit it to me. I will submit it to the regional office." The employee took the paper and looked at it. "You will repay the money you stole," the branch manager continued, "on this schedule." He handed the employee another sheet of paper. 

At this point the employee was openly crying. The branch manager ignored the tears. "We are not going to involve law enforcement at the point, provided you keep to your payment schedule. If you miss a single payment, or if you are late just once, we'll call the police. This is your warning." The employee nodded and said thank you. The branch manager handed the employee and envelope. "This is your final pay check. After this, we're done. Do you understand?"

"I do," the employee said. "Thank you. I'm so sorry."

"That's enough," the manager said.

"Okay, I know...You've been kind. You didn't have to—"

"I said, that's enough. I'm going to get my things. You need to leave, so I can lock up." The branch manager left the room, leaving the employee and I alone in the break room.

The man gathered up the papers he'd been given and then saw me. "Hello," he said.

"Hello," I responded.

"Merry Christmas," he said.

"Thanks, same to you."

"Are you going anywhere for the holidays, or are you staying put?" He asked.

"My mom and sister are coming up from Portland."

"That's good," he said, "Family is important, really important. Have a good Christmas."

"You, too," I said, "I mean, do your best."

I hated myself for saying that, and I was waiting for the man to cry again, or snap. The only thing that happened was the guy slowly crossing the room. When he got close, he clasped my hand and shook it vigorously for a few seconds. I can safely say his was the clammiest hand I had ever touched. I looked into his eyes, which were red-rimmed and tearful. He was dark-whiskered, and the day's growth make him look sick.

He said nothing, but his look was a question: "how much of that did you hear?"

In my head, I replied, "Enough. I heard enough." Then my thoughts broke away for a moment as a realized I was living through a Carver short story. This was the experience you needed in order to write stories like that, and to value them. You can't learn it by reading it; you can only recognize it because you've lived it.

He shook my hand again, and said, "We're going to her parents this year."

"That's good," I said. "Godspeed."

I actually said "Godspeed" to this guy, like I was some bit actor in a Shakespeare play. He dropped my hand and left. In the end, I think he didn't hear me. Would I have have been listening to the janitor after I'd been fired for stealing? The guy had a small box of personal effects, like everyone who's ever been fired in a television show. After he left, I got my spray bottle and wiped down the tables, then I moved on to the rest of the bank.

After I finished the job, I went to the drive-thru with my stack of scratch paper. Just as I was about to take my seat to try and capture what had happened about an hour ago, I looked over my shoulder at the smokey plastic dome. I remember saying aloud, "Not tonight," and then I remember thinking, I can't steal this story from this guy, when his next move is to tell his wife he lost his job. Then I wondered if he was going to lie to her, tell her he had some vacation he had to use up or they'd take it.

I left the bank and stopped at Dairy Queen for some fries and a sundae. I tried to write it there, in the booth, but it was already too late. I was out of the moment, and filled with sadness. After my little snack, I cleaned the other bank after checking all the rooms to see that I was alone.

Since that day, I have thought about this moment hundreds of times, I've tried to write it, too, but I never could. The thought for me was never about how crazy it was to see a guy get busted for embezzling. The thought was always: Why didn't they stop talking and wait for me to clear out or ask me for some privacy? Why did all of that go on with me in the room?

It took a while for me to figure it out, but the answer was that they didn't see me. I was beneath them, so I didn't register. I had to see this kind of thing go down in other contexts before I understood it.

How often does this kind of filtering happen? How often do we, because of our privilege, overlook all the people who take care of our messes? Even worse, how often do we look away, because we know that we're all brothers and sisters or indistinguishable from each other on the genome. And yet some of us are the mess makers and some of us are the mess cleaners? How often do we realize that it's unfair and unkind to divide ourselves this way, but we like how things have worked out for us, and we're unwilling to trade places.

Because of the time of year this story took place, Christmas often triggers my memory the most acutely. It makes me think about December 26th, Boxing Day, and its tradition of giving gifts to the help. It seems like a both a kind gesture and crappy one. Through the gift, or the tip, we reinforce the basic inequality of our culture.

I'm a tenured college professor now, which is a tremendous privilege, but I've been a janitor, and I've dug holes for a living, and I've driven a day care van, made pizzas, bagged groceries, and sorted recycling. Now I grade papers and go to meetings, and janitors clean my office. 

I try to "see" them when they are there. I try to talk to them, but it seems to embarrass them, so I've stopped. Sometimes there is more dignity in going unnoticed. 

The Lower Lights

This weekend we took a trip to the big city. We didn’t tell the kids what we were up to, we just packed them a bag, put some treats into little Christmas sacks, and piled into the van. Once we were saddled up, we told them that we were going to Salt Lake to see The Lower Lights Christmas show at the Masonic Temple.

We’d do a little shopping (we tasted most excellent chocolate and fifty-year-old basalmic vinager at Caputo’s), then see the show. We’d sleep in a hotel and in the morning get breakfast at our favorite little café. (If you have a chance to get breakfast at Pennyann’s Café, you won’t regret it). After that, we’d head home and get ready for the last week of school before Christmas.

lowerlightsstage.jpg

The concert was fantastic, especially after five years of listening to their music on Sundays and holidays. If you don’t know who they are, The Lower Lights is a kind of local Utah supergroup of Latter-day Saint musicians who have been making records of traditional hymns in a style I’d call it roots or Americana. Some might call it folk, others country, maybe old-timey. Many of them have their own bands and their own gigs. They aren’t Christian musicians in the traditional sense, and not really traditional Mormons: there were a lot of beards and jeans on stage.

With The Lower Lights there is a wonderful sense of community between the audience and the band. The show was full of foot-stomping revelry, huge layers of vocal harmonies, screaming Telecaster chicken pickin’, ethereal pedal steel guitar swells, good humor, and a reverence for both the gospel music tradition and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Their music is the one of the few times I feel a through line between my faith and art that touches me. I love my adopted church, which I joined in college when many young people are finding their way out of the faith traditions of their familes. Mormon theology is both and ancient and modern, conservative and really trippy, and in almost every way it’s made me a better person than I would be if I was left to my own devices.

I have to say, however, that I really can’t stand Mormon aesthetics. It’s actually more accurate to say that I don’t like Christian aesthetics, which in my opinion, are almost entirely lacking in subtlety. Christian art leaves very little room for me, as an individual, to think my own thoughts or to have my own reactions.  For me, Christian art is almost always a sermon when I need it to be a friend. Art that shares my aesthetics usually doesn’t share my faith. Conversely, art that shares my faith usually doesn’t resonate with me aesthetically. I used to get mad about this. These days, I just realize that it’s not gonna happen, and move on with my life. 

masonic-ceiling.jpg

The Lower Lights is one of a few exceptions. There is an earthiness to their music—stringiness and stompitude. Like the spirituals played by blues and country musicians, I get a sense that their love of God is coming from the mouths of sinners like me. They are David dancing for joy. For all the power of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and for all of their technical perfection, I do not feel like I am supposed to sing along with them. With The Lower Lights, it is expected. 

My publisher, Zarahemla Books, is another haven. Folks like Joanna Brooks, the guys in the band Fictionist, the Segullah bloggers, the Modern Mormon Men bloggers, my old Sugarbeet gang: they are all out there being the in the world but not of it. When I feel like there’s no room in the church for a scruffy ex-Catholic now-Mormon fiction writer like me, I look around at these people and my friends near and far, inside of the church and out, and realize an important message we used to sing about at YMCA summer camp: “All God’s critters got a place in the choir/some sing low and some sing higher.”

The Problem with Grups

You hear a lot these days about whining, narcissistic young people. You also hear a little bit about how they aren’t that bad, and we ought to just leave them alone. This kind of discussion keeps the the Huffpost/Slate/Buzzfeed hamster wheel spinning. I guess it actually generates a little bit of power, but quite frankly, I’m a little bored of it all.  

 

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Last Man Standing

This is a photograph of me, my grandfather, my uncle, and my dog. I have no idea when it was taken, but from the house and my hair I'm guessing it was about 1982.

I almost tossed it into another stack of stuff until I realized that everyone in this photograph is dead, but me.

This was one of those moments you never plan for, because you can't. It's the kind of awareness that hits you over and over again in middle age. I wish I knew more about Buddhism, because their thinking about impermanence is so valuable, and so much clearer headed about change than my own Christian traditions. In fact, everything in that picture has moved on.

My dog went first. I wasn't there. At that time, I was living on an island in the Puget Sound at a YMCA camp. I had a message in my box to call my mother, which I did from the staff phone. I hung up after my mother told me that she found Pongo peacefully curled up in the morning after being mostly miserable for the last few weeks of his life. My step brother buried him in the back yard. 

I wept openly because no one was there. Eventually a man named Steve Spaulding, who managed the camp, saw me crying and asked what was wrong. I sniffed and wiped my face with the back of my sleeve like a little kid and told him my dog had died. He just looked into the trees, pulled me into his arms and said, "Dammit, Todd. I'm so sorry."

Poppa Bob was the next to go. I got the call two years later when I was in graduate school in northern Arizona. My mother said plainly, "Poppa Bob died today, Todd." I remember asking what happened, and she said, "It's taken a long time for him to go, but after we went to see him last Christmas it seems like he felt he could go. Nana says there was a giant double rainbow right over the house. She couldn't see it, but everyone in Chinook did, and it felt like something out of the ordinary was going on."

I felt relieved by the news. Poppa Bob had been sick for a decade or more. At one point, early on, he apparently had some kind of heart attack in his chair, and because he was a physician, he got out his own stethoscope, listened to his own heart, and said to himself, "If I call Lucia, they can get an ambulance here, and they can get me to a hospital in Havre and I'll have a 60/40 chance of surviving, but I'll be a mess for the rest of my life. If I do nothing, I'll be dead in an hour."

He decided to live out the rest of his years as an invalid. There are very few people left in this world who have the character and skills to make choices like that.

Poppa Bob and I spent a day together few months prior to his death, and he went through a lot of old stories about WW II that my mother said he'd never told anyone. He let me go through a bunch of his papers from the military. We laughed a lot. From my position now, I can tell that he knew then that his time was going to come.

On the phone, my mother said it would be really difficult to get me to the funeral, and Poppa Bob wouldn't not have wanted me to leave school. Instead I wrote a eulogy and faxed it up to Northern Montana, which my mother read at the service. I was told that there wasn't room for everyone who came. His life and career was an influential part of that section of northern Montana. Someday I need to tell it.

A few weeks ago, my Mother sent me a text message about my Uncle Steve, which came during a faculty meeting. Again, the message was plain and unadorned.

"Your Uncle Steve died this morning. Details coming." I just sat there, and the words other people were saying broke into pieces and dropped to the floor. My cousin and sister were included in the text message, and their responses buzzed in during the meeting. I don't remember what the meeting was about.

Steve had stroke a year ago, and I thought he'd had a second one, but I learned from another text that he died of diverticulitis, which basically meant he'd died from ruptured intestines, which the doctors told my mother might be one of the most painful ways to die. Instead of getting help, he just lay in bed, suffering until he died.

Steve's story is complicated and pretty messed up. It's not worth going into, but I was, quite frankly, glad to hear he'd passed. It was really better for everyone. We think he knew he would die if he did nothing, so, like my grandfather (his father-in-law) he made a conscious choice about his life. In this case, he chose to commit suicide over the course of three days. His weapon of choice was a run away infection.

All of these thoughts and more broke loose this weekend, when I hovered over this picture. I wondered who in my family would pick up this photograph at some point in the future (I hope decades from now, but who knows) and say to themselves: "Everyone in this photograph is gone." 

How long before everyone in all of the photographs is gone?

 

 

I'm Writing Little Essays

For the next little while, I'm going to post a short essay on Sundays, more than anything to retrain myself to get a regular writing rhythm. I'm not so interested in the hustle of publishing like I used to be (was I ever actually "interested" in that, or was it a necessary evil?) but I do like the idea of setting goal and sharing. 

This kind of small-scale stuff is what made me fall in love with writing after I graduated from college, and it's what carried me a long through graduate school and tenure-getting. I had an absolute blast writing the first piece about me and some kids holding gladiator matches with spiders outside of our elementary school. It's been a long time since writing has been fun.

I'll send stuff out through Facebook and Twitter. Eventually, I'll also shoot some stuff over to Medium. Feel free to read, share, or comment.