Shadow

Apparently, to Nelly, there is no such thing as too hot to desire two warm bodies, one furry, one mine, pressed together. Who am I to disagree? At night, she inserts herself against whatever curve presents itself, and whatever temperature can be driven sweatily upward.

At yoga class, I look down and see my black pants are etched with tiny white lines: I take her with me wherever I go.

Nelly has been my shadow now for years, some of them hard years, and through both the days and nights of this particular passage of life, she has been my shadow.

She walks just ahead of me on the path. If I shift to the other rut on the logging trail, without looking backward (dogs, like mothers, have eyes in the backs of their heads), she shifts too. I think it's not because she wants to trip me. I think.

We go to the swimming hole. And except for the periods during which she is investigating other people's picnics, she is standing on the shore, looking worriedly at me, five feet away across an unbridgeable expanse of water. She starts to whine. No matter how much she wishes to shadow me here, however, her aversion to swimming trumps it.

We have grown closer over the years. This, I think, is true love. Or it's not; it's learned behavior. I am a biological determinist, a pragmatist, except when I am being an unabashed romantic, believing pretty tales and weeping at simple narrations of longing and loss on the movie screen.

She follows me from room to room, up and down stairs, panting now in this heat. What is her fear? To be left alone. That is it, to be left alone.

Startled, I look at her with the sudden realization that once again she has known things before me. Both of us the same in the most elemental way: we do not want to be left alone.

She cries out her dismay as I back out the door to go to the grocery store (did I mention that Nelly is a screamer?). She has no idea that I will return, or aim to at least. That this parting is temporary. In this way, she also knows something before me: that someday, when neither of us can know it, the parting will not come to an end. The door will not open again. This is why--even in the heat, even in the annoyance of tripping over the dog who has silently situated herself exactly where my feet are planning to land--I do not complain about the little heater, black and white, who follows me everywhere, who presses herself against me in the night. She knows, sometimes, I will need to reach out in the dark. To be reassured, for now, we are that most delicious of things. Together.

True--or False--Love

This is all hypothetical, mind you. I have been considering the idea of love, as a subject for scientific study, and find myself curious as to what others have found in their experience. Like, is it ever real?

The princess story is a potent one in the life of a little girl. She will find, or be found by, her prince. And then the adventure ends. The story ends. Life basically ends. But it's all good, because, after all, life is hard. With the prince, another plateau is reached. Heaven, let's call it. Up there in the clouds, there's nothing much to do but roll around in the warm goo of mutual love.

It can be that way, can't it? For the first year, I mean.

Then, inevitably and always, reality strews its nails and glass shards in the roadway. The smooth and elevated ride goes bump, bang, down. [True or False?]

I see them now, the women who are approaching forty and who have not yet found their prince, or even any kind of regular guy who does not have an addiction to liquor, poverty, or an endless series of six-week relationships. I can almost see it in their bodies: the hopefulness, tensing under their skin, pulling them along by a certain belief that if only they find a man to marry, they will finally be happy. It becomes, in fact, the driving feature of their lives: they are looking, furtively, anywhere and at every moment, for a possibility. He just might be at the dinner party tomorrow night. And then he isn't, and you see them sag, see the impatience to get out of there--you mean I have to sit here, captive, for three whole hours, wasting time I could better use in the search of a lifetime?

I see them, because I was once one of these hungry women. I haunted the streets and the clubs, a desperate look in my darting eye. The more that people told me I needed to stop being desperate, that it alone would prevent that which I desired most (they were right), the more unhappily heartsick I became (I was right too, inasmuch as I never did learn the trick of not feeling what I felt).

There are only two options then: either you finally give up, realize you're never going to meet anyone, get on with your life, and then meet someone because of it. (The Zen of Marriage, this is called.) Or--in the happy ending that invariably turns sad--you attract the kind of man who could really, really use a desperate woman. [True or False?]

Funny, now, though. After much of a lifetime spent yearning for just one thing as if it were everything [True or False?], now it's the one thing I don't really want. I feel pretty much the same way toward marriage that I feel toward being bitten by a rabid dog.

Marriage: it can't end well. [True or False?]

It so often ends in contempt, over-familiarity, at best the death of the floaty, ecstatic dreamworld of first love.

But tell me different. Go ahead, tell me. Love--is it true?

Tripping

The mind is such a strange thing, untethered to our wills, going one way while the body in which it resides goes another. We think we control our thinking (itself a form of veering off the road we pretend to be motoring smoothly down), but really we don't. We are two things, each holding maps of different worlds.

How did I get so lucky? I don't know. But I am, unspeakably. The latest apparition of the roulette wheel stopping just where I wanted it to (Black, 31!) is that last week I was able once more to ride the Blue Ridge Parkway. I have now done it four times, on three different motorcycles, and each time it has revealed itself to be utterly new. I felt as if I had never been there before, riding the crest of the world, looking left down into impossible space, right, the same. It's slow dancing with your motorcycle, that road, rich with sensualities like skin against skin, an intake of breath suddenly full of the scent of someone else. So what was I thinking as I went along, flicking side to side? I was thinking of animals.

There was the vision of Nelly's body as I left her with the petsitter; her tail arcing down as the other dogs rushed her at the gate, crowded around her for a sniff and a "I'm priority here and don't you forget it" hard, cold look. "Take me with you!" she seemed to cry, quietly. But bikes were loaded on a truck, and a full ten hours were needed to get to North Carolina, starting now. I had to turn away.

I was abjectly grateful, then, on return to be given some photos: Nelly doing her own slow dance, once I was gone, canoodling with a retriever on the floor, luxuriating in slobber and pawing of an almost X-rated sort. She did not suffer, thank goodness.

At last I was on my way, on a trip that magnetizes my thoughts for longer in advance of it than the trip itself will last.

Along the way, at the sides of the road, there were cattle, lying serenely in the shade of the trees, ears tagged with big plastic markers to show what they were really here for. My stomach lurched at the sight. They did not know. They would not know, until the last moments, until the truck, until the smell of death. But what was worse was the sight of the long barns, exhaust fans spinning on the roofs, that were full of the animals we would never see.

There was the black racer, venturing out onto the heat of the parkway's pavement, that I saw too late; I veered around, with a childish futile wish that the next vehicle behind would also go around. I knew I should have stopped, moved him to the grass. The same with the turtle, surprised, motionless head raised, in the middle of the lane. I wish I had stopped for him, too.

There were horses in the meadows, stately in silent self-possession. Horses do not know how well they own their ideal and impossible beauty. How they strike me speechless with their muscled smoothness, their Greek form. I love them still. Always will.

There were the dead by the roadside, golden fur ruffled by the wind of our vehicles, a brief simulacrum of life, quickly reduced to goneness when we have passed. A fox. A skunk. A squirrel. A deer. A chipmunk. Numerous dead, some appearing to reach to heaven in supplication. Oh, but that's my gloss; the end was swift (evinced by the exploded state of the corpse, the proximity to the point of impact) and rigor mortis plays tricks.

I've long wanted to write a poem about roadkill, but another poet has already done it, and anyway it is a tough subject to get right, without hitting a tone of accusation, sentimentality, or worse, both. I leave it alone. There's really nothing to say about these anonymous lives slowly assuming oneness with the paving.

***

Night fell, and still I was riding. The second year in a row that the clock pulled a fast one on me, found me still riding past dark on the parkway that only belongs to us during the day. A flash, an animal crossing ahead, and--what was that? A tail, brown fur, what was that? --Not given me to know. But safely into the grass on the other side. The kamikaze toad? Well, some make it. And some do not.

The fawn, with mother, shocked by the feel of strange hardness under soft cloven feet, scrabbling now in panic, slipping in the roadway. I was the agent of this fear.

The luna moths, dropping down from above, then yoyo-ing up and down, as if drunk. They are rare, now, but always were rare in their strange beauty. A luminous blue-green in the headlight., the color of old bottle glass. I looked, but could not see, in the mirrors what became of them in the darkness behind.

I went on, and the days, the nights, were filled with animals. They prompted thoughts about them, and us. (Them versus us.) They made me both sad and awestruck, filled with a sense of my own otherness. That's the tables turned, for a change. That's the way the mind works, the body going down one beautiful road, the thoughts down another.

That's Amore

{This piece, an interview with one of the most fascinating motorcyclists

I know, originally appeared in "Boxer Shorts," the newsletter of the

Yankee Beemers. The photo below shows the subject

running in the 2006 Motogiro d'Italia.}

For a pursuit that is largely solitary, motorcycling has a satisfyingly perverse habit of bringing people together. Across miles, even continents; over years and differences. Then the cement is as lasting as any found in human society.

Marina Cianferoni is an Italian writer (in addition to contributing to a Spanish classic-bike magazine, she is author of a 2007 study detailing every significant appearance of motorcycles in international cinema) and rider who lives north of Florence. Her story is but one of many examples of how these singular vehicles set us up better than Match.com ever could.

Our mutual love for them brought us together: I’ve corresponded with Cianferoni for a decade. Her command of English has been helpful in bridging whatever gaps our deep regard for bikes can’t cross; my Italian is limited to a few choice words picked up in the days of attempting to comprehend Guzzi workshop manuals. It was my good fortune to meet with her last December for coffee in Great Barrington, where she laid out proof that she is one of the great philosophers of the inimical passion motorcycles inspire.

For her, bikes are both a personal pleasure and, for a hundred years, an historically important aspect of culture. Not to mention a supreme matchmaker: she is sitting in Uncommon Grounds with her husband, Juan, a Spaniard who one day logged on to Motocicliste.net, looking for information about the R75/7 he hoped to buy. It so happened that this is her beloved bike—“a real friend,” she says, as she believes the relationship can be so profound that you come to know your bike almost as a person—and the machine she says she will never, ever part with. “A bike is more than an instrument; more than just a way to experience freedom. It is a creature, like a human being. Always as a child I heard my father speak of his cars and motorbikes as ‘he’ or ‘she,” and this colored the way I approached them.” That introduction left her, she says, with “a very romantic feeling.” It will be returned by the machine, she believes, “if you respect her maintenance.”

Her first bike, at 21, was a Yamaha SR250—“I really fell in love with her. It was a very easy bike to learn on. I rode this bike to work in Siena—and what emotions! to ride, alone, with my map, me and she.” Not only emotions toward two wheels, once again: she proposed writing an article about the 200-kilometer trip to the editor of a bike magazine, and he took the article—and, briefly, her heart. After selling the Yamaha due to the requirements of a subsequent boyfriend, a Greek (we agree that she would have done well to remember you get rid of boyfriends, not bikes), she borrowed a Honda VF400F from her father. That is when she learned she prefers two cylinders: “This was a very nervous bike. I developed a relationship with her, and I liked her, but the need to rely on brakes, not the engine, is not the way I like to ride.”

The way she likes to ride—on a responsive, beautifully engineered and balanced opposed twin—was literally a gift. The R75/7 (“less beautiful than a /5, but rare”) was given to her by another boyfriend. “I will never sell her, never never. Even if I was going hungry. She and I will always stay together.”

She says that in Italy, being a female motorcyclist is still relatively uncommon, and those women who ride are more often interested in competing against men on the track. But this Cianferoni finds hard to understand: she has little interest in riding fast, but much in riding well. “Like a painter, I want to draw a line through the turns that becomes a thing of beauty. Then the satisfaction is enormous.”

Like the stereotypical BMW rider, perhaps, she prefers to ride alone. The club mentality is not for her, nor is new-bike fetishism. To her, history is a continuum that lives inside each and every motorcycle, and thus the mark of a “real” motorcyclist is an abiding appreciation for that genealogy. Riders of newer models, she observes, often won’t look at her bike, an unconcern she finds incredible: “After all, she is the grandmother of their machine!” She feels the majority of bikers today are not “real” because they do not care about history or philosophy. They don’t have respect for the past, she explains, and knowledge of the past is fundamental to a true understanding of motorcycling. That is why she wrote her book on motorcycles in cinema—because movies show the history of our culture, and motorbikes are situated solidly inside culture. “The film critic does not understand this—they know cinema, but they don’t know what a motorcycle is. For this reason, I wrote from anger: I will explain to you why this is so important!” Her title is a manifesto of her theory: Due Ruote e una Manovella, or, loosely translated, “Two Wheels and a Crank Camera” (a reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1928 film Man with a Movie Camera, which contains footage of the director riding pillion while operating a crank camera), since the development of moving pictures was coincident with the development of the motorcycle. They are bound together in both the velocity of their rise during the first decades of the last century and in the particulars of their “moving,” cyclical technologies.

Marina Cianferoni is the truest of the true biker, and a passionate exponent of the power of motorcycles. Without them, we wouldn’t be friends; she wouldn’t be married to Juan; and I would not, that day in Massachusetts, have been given a package of the most unbelievable pasta I’ve ever tasted. Viva le moto.

Your Pretty House

There, in one momentary flash, it all comes: the pang of hope, of a dream vanished, the squeeze of too many years; and then it goes--one whole life, over in the time it takes to pass. Then it's on to the next lapidary life: But take a look at that place, will you! When I'm out riding country roads, into small towns and then out again, every few seconds I see the next, and the next, all the beautiful houses I would have lived in, if I had had the time, the possibility. I long for each one in succession, then give them up in the space of a minute.

Inhabiting each mile out on the road more fully because on a bike, and therefore feeling a part of the air that surrounds the domicile of another, the yearning is more intense as well. The Victorian farmhouse, on a height above the Hudson, with the view of distant mountains; the urban brick townhouse, black wrought iron surrounding; the slick dark wood modern glimpsed down a gravel drive in the hillside woods--I want them all. I want enough lifetimes to live in that beautiful place, and that beautiful place. In a beautiful place, life would be beautiful too. I would have lawn parties, and tend great gardens, and have large spaces inside in which to move, room to room to room, as if traveling the road of the interior.

I have seen your pretty house. And I have wanted your pretty house, in a fit of lust that embarrasses me. I should not want; I have what I need. It is modest. It is mine. But it is not your pretty house, and I want to own it, just once. Yet I am in my lifetime, on the downward arc, and there is no longer room to even fantasize many more lifetimes. (When I was in my twenties, in my thirties, I could still imagine the supply of lifetimes was more or less infinite, like the selection in the cereal aisle at Shoprite.) I get but one. That is the point. Silly.

This, for me, is the wage for riding around. New England, New York, the South. We built great houses here in the past, didn't we? And damn if each one isn't calling out to me, pulling my sight from the road ahead to an orgy of imagining: What if I lived here?

I love the beckoning drive, the spreading maple. The large porch, the dining table out on the patio. The horses calmly cropping their green meal beside the barn, living paintstrokes to embellish and beautify the homestead.

Hey, look, you: I have had my time. I had the big house and the big parties, the big garden (or the beginnings of one, anyway, though it did have the big weeds). I should not ache that keenly to go back, to have that kind of time, energy, money, dreams. To want that is to want youth with all its attendant hopes, and that's not cool. But riding these back roads has taken me back, so I seem not to help it, no matter how Buddhist I aspire to be: Desire is the seat of all unhappiness.

Today I listened on the other end of the phone line as a friend, in tears, described her frustration that as her husband works, their own house seems to be falling to pieces. This broke, in the recent winds; that is falling off; the other is crumbling or shearing or graying or tearing. And her husband is helping other friends get what she knows she will never have: the backyard pool, the perfect siding, the ravishing landscaping, while yet others have kitchen renovations and new mosaic tile in the bath.

The thing is, I myself think of her place as someplace I could never have: so lush, so welcoming, so amenable to the outdoor dinner party, in part supplied by the vegetable garden I will never have (at least not here, in the tree-locked shade of a small yard). She wants the house of someone she knows; I want the house of someone I know, as well as a hundred houses of those I do not.

I ride, slowing, past the great estates, and past the farmhouses of promise. I try to quell desire. It is all telling me something, my ache, and the quick shame that follows.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I come home. I pull in to the drive, and admire the stone on the side of the garage. I'm pretty happy with that pot of annuals, there. The house looks tidy. Someone else, passing by on the road, is probably thinking: Look there! How sweet. I wish I could have a house like that, someday. They don't know, but maybe they will.

They ride on, down the street.

I'm Sort of Thinking About Procrastinating

1. Write letter to prison pen pal. This will prompt three long letters in return, filled with lists of books read and questions about what you are reading now (letters from prison, primarily), so you feel guilty and have to respond at least once more, and also file the clippings of recipes included and daydream about when you might make the pasta with grilled asparagus and parmesan.

2. Decide to see what's really in that filing cabinet; spend an hour revisiting the "unfinished projects" folder, and marvel that you had some very interesting ideas twenty years ago, and spent considerable time getting halfway into some perfectly viable subjects. Maybe you will come back to them someday, eh.

3. Unload dishwasher. Then write one and one half sentences. Decide laundry needs doing.

4. Pick up Legos from son's bedroom floor. Tomorrow, you can do it again.

5. Recognize that Facebook is a bad way to procrastinate. It's another thing you feel like procrastinating about. Look for ticks on dog instead.

6. Check the National Weather Service. Weather is always useful to know, in case you want to do something other than work.

7. Check email (good for hours).

8. Check the mailbox (if you start early enough in the day, this can mean two or more time-wasting trips).

9. Stack wood (never ends).

10. Start researching weekend trips you might like to take, someday, if the writing gets finished, which it won't now, since you are researching trips.

11. Go outside for a breath of fresh air before tackling another sentence. Notice the garden is full of weeds since yesterday, when you also did this.

11. Go back to the laptop, now in sleep mode, and reread everything you've written previously. Don't write anything new, though; you're exhausted.

11. Get a good night's sleep, so you can write well tomorrow.

These Dogs

In a former life, I lived in Hoboken. It's hard to convey what a little shithole my apartment was, even though this was a time when all urban young people lived in execrable conditions. But the amazing thing was that a family of four had previously lived in the place I thought was so small it was going to squeeze the life right out of me. It was the kind of space that gave you a steady run of dreams specific to living in miserable confinement: there are magnificent palaces spreading out just underneath you; there are grand apartments that may be accessed through the back of your closet, etc.

This family had moved to the basement apartment, which they considered a step up due to a shed-like addition that thrust out into the back "yard"--a storm-fenced pad of concrete.

One day, out front by the trash cans, appeared an assemblage of the most impossible riches: as strange as finding pieces of Versailles beside--well, beside a shithole in Hoboken. Porcelain figures (I think one was indeed Marie Antoinette) and objets d'art. And two life-size ceramic whippets, elegance personified, sitting on ceramic pillows with noses lifted to sniff a rarefied air. They sported real jeweled collars. (Who put those on?) I furtively looked around to make sure no one was looking, and I hauled all the loot into my apartment. I didn't know where I was going to put it, as it would not really fit anywhere. I would have to get rid of a chair.

Later, one of the children downstairs told me her family had had this stuff for a long time, then suddenly decided to get rid of it in a spring cleaning. Jeez: four people and two whippets in my tiny apartment? The bric-a-brac went to a friend who needed targets for his air rifle. But the whippets have been with me now a very long time.

{This originally appeared in the book Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, edited by Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes}

In the Good, Old Summertime

As the temperature rises, so do my hopes. It's a function of the memory, how it is connected to ambient states.

I remember, as if from yesterday, the sound of the ice cream truck, and how it chose our house to stop in front of. We would converge at a run, clutching our dimes in sweaty hands, and then came the agony. To choose; how to choose? Popsicles of the sweet rainbow: root beer, 7-Up, sky blue flavor (what does the sky taste like? Like this). Then all day, playing; long days that seemed to promise no end, no rain. In my memory of summer, there is no rain. Ever.

Besides the neighborhood-wide games of kick the can ("All-y all-y in free!"), there was the family road trip. We always went to the beach for a couple of weeks, all the way from Ohio. This is the paying-the-piper part, the horrible before the happiness part. Because we would be going in one station wagon--a large one, to be sure, first the Comet, then the Country Squire--but there were five of us, and a scotch-plaid cooler for lunch at a wayside picnic table (it never, ever rained), and suitcases and, at least one summer, a large white styrofoam surfboard.

Dad would make little modules for us, one girl on the backseat floor, knees over the hump, pillow for the head, and still damned uncomfortable. One of us in a seat, the other half being piled high with towels and the portable bar--gin and tonics could not be done without, for it would not be summer then, to the grown-ups--that never missed an overnight outing with my parents. The third of us would have a pallet in the way back, smashed between the rest of the suitcases and the side. There was, of course, no air conditioning. And hours to fill, with what? Reading, of course. I always had books I had to read. In return, emphasized my father, we were to give advance warning that he needed to pull over. In the way back, there was no window to stick the head out of so to streak the side of the car with vomit.

We would fight. Of course: what's a summer road trip without the shrieking girls hitting each other, and the angry father threatening to leave us by the side of the highway if we didn't quit it? I never believed he would not do it, either, as he slowed down on the verge. My heart would pound; I could not imagine what would become of me, a lonesome girl standing on the side of I-80, watching the white station wagon accelerate toward small invisibility, but I imagined I would find out.

It would keep us quiet for a few minutes, as threats do, before the heat and carsickness and crampedness and miserable excuses for sisters finally overboiled again. When will we get there?

Well, finally, we would get there. Then came long ferry ride, and the excitement of the sea air, the rolling waves, the gulls swooping down for bits of bread (and bits of fingers) above the boat's wake, was a combustion chamber of magic. Pulling in to the pier at Nantucket, seeing our friends waving, growing larger by the moment, was sheer happiness in a frozen minute.

A lot of living takes place in two weeks at the beach when you're nine. A lot of bicycling, and getting slammed to the sand by the waves, and sunburn, and clam rolls, and bonfires on the beach after dark. The next day, we'd do it all all over again. Sometimes we'd pick blueberries, and then there would be pie.

Is it possible there is a world like this out there still, with shimmering heat rising and painful feet running over the hot parking lot, and no schedules to keep? My memory, intruding into today, says yes, and so it plans trips. Trips in the future that are going to be a lot like the trips of the past. Now that I am the parent, the days are shorter, and it sometimes rains. But I understand, in the deepest part of me, the part about the gin. Now I have inherited the portable bar. And it's coming with me. No matter where I go. I'll buy the limes when we get there.

Friendly

I get too moony when I think of friends. I know. But I am overflowing with soppy emotion again today. I have been thinking of all the riches motorcycling has bestowed on me, and the mysterious path that led me back to it, a place I needed to be even though I did not know it. Yet something, someone, did.

The friendships that hold me closest in their embrace--the ones that hold me up, and will ever do so--have come to me through this. In only a short while, they have become the tightest, the blissfully stickiest, that I have ever known. How do you know when a friendship will last until the final days? Look around. Then place your money on the folks who are wearing helmets.

Beyond the internal, unmixable, physical and spiritual joys of riding--the soul's great "yahoo!" reverberating inside your brain at every shift into gear--there is the equal joy of knowing you ride with a great net under you. A net made of people who also ride, and on whom you can call when you are in need (company, assistance, advice, presence, tools, time, affection).

I took a ride today on my new motorcycle. I have never before owned more than one. Much less three. I can see how this becomes a habit.

I took a ride today on my new motorcycle because a friend took two airplanes and rode it eight hundred fifty miles to get it back to me. Just because he is a friend, and because he loves riding, and because he loves it when others love it. Then he gave me a brief tour of the new machine's bits and pieces, intimidating since new, but soon to become friends, too, of a sort. Then he followed me on a forty-mile circuit of local roads not because he desired a ride--though he does not ever scoff at those--and upon returning home, gave me an intensive lesson in bike-washing. (I am impatient, but the bike is happy that he is not; it will probably never shine so well again.) Finally he stood by while I gingerly backed the bike into the garage, a maneuver that requires finesse and strength and an initial watchful eye, or at least it seems so to me.

This morning I had breakfast with motorcycle friends. Afterward, I went to borrow a tool from a motorcycle friend. Tomorrow morning, I will meet and ride with new friends. Throughout the day, I have been marking down on the calendar in my head future rides with other friends.

I have a friend, on the other side of the country, delivered to me by the agency of motorcycles. He is of profound heart and mind, and I can count on him to see into me, and through me, and to say things that will either make me think deeply or laugh idiotically. I have never met him, but he is one of my best friends.

The correspondence I carry on with another friend, also a writer and a motorcyclist, is to me like sustenance. When I get an email from him--literate, fascinating, long, full of thought and passion--I feel like the doorbell has rung and it's the takeout delivery man, with a delicious meal for a very hungry person. Go on and say it, though it sounds wifty as hell: I cherish them, and him.

With another friend down south, I have shared some ups and downs. But we have carried on. On bikes. They bind us, and I hope always will. It is not my fault some emotions have gotten involved: high emotions are what these machines are all about.

I realized, with a start, that in one short year, a circle of new friends has drawn itself about me, impermeable. It's a thousand friends strong, because with bike friends, friends of friends are friends, too. I could probably ride across the country and stay every night with some motorcycle connection, strung like pearls from sea to sea.
I could share every meal of the week with motorcycle friends if I wanted; I could talk on the phone, or email interminably, with no one but motorcycle friends.

What a good idea.

It makes me go all gooey inside. It surprises me, this suddenness, this unending richness from the one thing that life is all about: connection. And love. Oh, and that moment the gear engages and the world is new again.

This Is My Day

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. It is a day to think fondly on your credit cards. And about the miracle of breakfast in bed.

Today my son asked, as I showed him the folding tray I had just fished out of a box in the garage, the tray upon which we used to carry breakfast upstairs to our mother on her special day (I am subtle with my hints): "Mom, when is Kids' Day?"

Ha-ha, my son. Every day is kids' day!

He was buying none of it.

I seem to never know what I know. As my happy-go-lucky clock was ticking onward a decade ago, I would go to group therapy and say: I just don't know about this baby thing. Every other woman seems desperate to have a baby; it's this natural, unsubdued urge. You see this look in their eyes. The look of Please, Dear Lord. And I have no idea what that would feel like. I just feel this blank . . . not-knowing feeling.

The members of my group--who knew what was deep inside of me better than any other humans, poor souls--looked back at me. We know, Melissa.

What do you know?

We know you want a baby.

I do? You know??

Um-hmmm.

The one thing that clinched it, strange to say, was a simple picture that swam up in my brain one day. My husband and me, sitting gray-haired at the Thanksgiving table. By ourselves.

Well, you know how history has changed that particular image. It could never, ever become real now. In several and unexpected, contradictory ways. Because fate doesn't like it when you decide you know what's in store for you. You do not.

And boy, did I not. All along the way, I did not know anything I thought I knew. I was going to do this the non-invasive way. I was going to listen to African finger-harp music and lull away the time before arrival in a birthing-center whirlpool, a beatific look of knowingness on my face.

Not exactly sure where the morphine drip fit into this, or the hollering--twice--for the anesthesiologist. I thank modern medicine. In fact, I genuflect before the epidural.

I wonder if motherhood has made me better. It has certainly made me more conscious, most of the time, and at moments almost bloodily, painfully conscious of my failings. They are legion. I never knew this so fully, before.

They were right, my friends in the therapist's office. Now I know what I did not know then. You can't always get what you want. But in a birthing-center room ten years ago (assisted by a male nurse and my little sister, who thought this baby was never going to come and so went out for a drink, coming back only about five minutes in advance of the big push), I did get what I want. And what I need.

Art by My Needlepoint Habit

Unleashed

In the dog park, I sometimes watch movies of people's childhoods. Or at least that is what I feel absolutely certain I'm seeing, projected on top of their interactions with their dogs. For when could we possibly learn to parent, except from our own parents? God knows, I have the eerie experience all too often of hearing my mother's voice coming out of my mouth--saying something I have no business saying, and something moreover that I do not want to say, but only hear when it's too late, out there weightless as vapor but able to slice nonetheless.

In fact, I've had too much experience of late learning how my words--wayward, unthinking, unintended, but once out, unrecapturable--can hurt. Even though I would do anything I possibly could to grab them back out of the ether. Once there, it is too late for anything but apology, which is like a tetanus shot well after the wound. It only works sometimes. I lay awake at nights, remorse pushing down on my chest.

The majority of dog owners, like the majority of parents, generally try to show their offspring a good time. So you bring your dog to the park, or your child to the playground, and unclip the leash. To run, play with others, chase balls, roll in horse manure (the dogs, not the children). Seeing the enjoyment--yes, dogs smile when they're happy--is an enjoyment to you, too.

That is, if that is what you were once given to experience yourself.

If not, and there are plenty of unspeakable parents out there, who didn't have to get a permit to have a baby but should have, who get busy visiting their bad news to the next generation. It's just, unfortunately, the way it works (without intervention, of course); the mechanics of parenting like the mechanics of pistons and cams.

I saw a horrifying movie in the park last week. Worse than that, my child saw it too. But it was a dog who had to live through it.

It started out such a happy visit. The old places the same, greening in spring; the old friends, too. Blue sky, happy Nelly, happy child. Thus happy Melissa.

And then, a scream. There is no way to mistake the sound of pain, or surprise, or anguish. If your channels are open, the way they were made at birth--a baby has an infallible truth meter for animal expression, and so does a child--then you knew what this sound was. Canine or human, you knew.

A man had his spaniel down on his back, pinning him to the ground by his neck. The dog was writhing, uncomprehending (Why has my person done this to me?), and, sickening to see, was trying with his whole body to ask the man to cease the attack. Dogs have a particularly rich vocabulary of appeasement gestures, even if most people have no idea what they are--which is one reason a park full of hundreds of loose dogs will have such a relatively small incidence of fights. Trust me, the people in a dog park will go five to one in terms of intra-species fighting to that of their charges. It was as sickening to watch this dog throwing everything he could--wagging his stump of a tail, trying to lick the hand of the man--as it would be to watch someone whisper, "Please don't . . . " before the punch. The man merely tightened his grip, pressing down on the animal's trachea. That's when the dog screamed in pain. There was no way to mistake that sound. It seemed to streak the very air with blood.

My son ran to me then, his face contorted in distress. He was starting to cry. "Mom! Make him stop!" I wanted nothing more in this moment, both for him and for the helpless dog. But I did not know how. The group of people with whom I'd been talking went on, oblivious. Or so it appeared; I knew all of them were distressed, too, but no one could "interfere." You can't do this kind of "discipline" to a child in this country anymore, but to do it to a dog--why, be our guest. My son didn't know that, however; he thought there had to be some law of justice to which one could appeal. Barring that, he felt sure the most powerful person in his life would surely have the power to stop this. That person would be me.

He buried his head in my chest, unable to look anymore. The scene went on and on; the man was looking for something in his dog, the look of the prisoner of war who knows it's all over and has given up everything, even the will to live. The dog, though, still wanted to live. So the man stayed on his knees, the ugliest look of pure rage on his face I think I've ever seen.

My anger built too. And finally I could not stand it anymore, the cries of the dog, the shuddering of the boy's sobs, the movie of this man's childhood unreeling before us, in which he was smacked "just because" by a grownup he had trusted and loved, though neither was earned. Why, Mom? and Please do something! were spoken into my coat, and then I moved.

Some people are politick, and know how to say things so they can be heard. Non-confrontational, nicely couched.

Not me. My voice breaks with anger, and the jig is up immediately. I knew it would fail before I set out, but I had to set out. It was being asked of me. I stood over him. "In addition to hurting your dog, you are also hurting a child, who is now in tears because of what you're doing. Please stop."

That is what I said; I wanted to say a whole lot more, but I turned away. I knew it would not be heard, and it wasn't. He was just "training" his dog; he was not hurting him; did I want my child to be knocked down by an unruly animal? I did not reply, because it would unleash in me what was now roiling in my brain, on the verge of becoming so unchecked I feared I might throw a punch. I duly noted the irony, at that.

He finally let up his dog. To follow me. His voice rose now into a holler at my retreating back. But violence never solved anything. Plus, he was a very large man.

We walked out of the park, my love and I, arm in arm. There was nothing I could say, so he did: "Some people do not deserve to have a dog." Nelly walked next to us, and he held her leash. It was a very long time before his tears would stop.

Geography of Memory Part CLXXXVI

Time changes everything, almost. It compresses memory
under its weight, the years making it denser, so it takes up less space. It is the recent past that seems more alive to the senses. The past behind it grows thin. Until you are no longer even sure if it happened to you, or if you read about these distant things, or imagined them. What is this ache? How can you today sit at a stoplight in Manhattan, staring at the blank and grimy brick wall of a hundred-fifty-year-old building on the edge of the edge of nowhere, waiting for the green that will send you flowing into the tunnel, and think, "Mother of god, I love New York City so much I can't stand it"?

It is because living here has changed your molecular structure, and it will always be in you. A visit back will trigger the fountain of memories, and the incessant play of emotions. Some are so powerful they seem a part of the fabric of the city itself--out there on the concrete--not in you.

A couple of years ago, thrashed by an inestimable pain, I could think only of fleeing to the city. It was going to help me understand something, or fix something, or get something back. I had to go to the place where our life began, together.

The second, and almost simultaneous, urge I had was to write about it. It's part of the strange concoction that is me. It feels like the only way to know where I am, as if I am constructing the geography of my life by drawing a map made of words. Then I will be able to put a red dot on it and say: There! There I am! I am not lost after all.

Here is what I wrote about that first trip back, a few days after it felt like the world exploded:

I was driving quickly away, as if pain were a locale. When I reached Brooklyn, I would finally escape it.

After we moved away from the city, our route back for visits had become the Battery Tunnel. But that costs money, and suddenly I saw before me a new life in which I would sit up late, stacking pennies into red paper rolls. Now it was dark Monday night, rain-slicked, and the Brooklyn Bridge would be empty. Free, also.

I followed the way off an old map stored in memory. This was the path of a thousand trips—-after dinners, after parties, after movies; in the back of a cab with my head on his shoulder, or in a car I drove too mindfully, trying to stay in lane after a cocktail or two so I could get to the place I used to call home.

The front tires hit the up ramp, and that’s when I knew I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have gone anywhere near our past, which resides at the junction of physical place and embroidered memory. Now my old life was rising up before me, all around me. The lights of Brooklyn were almost singing. They drew me toward the rocks, and I thought I was lost, until I looked through the windshield and saw myself, walking around the corner at Douglass and Fourth Avenue, Mercy at the end of the leash. I was hoping she would squat soon, so I could get home, put on my pajamas, maybe watch the eleven o’clock news in bed together. Then I vanished from the street, because I could no longer see through the windshield. The rain. Or no. Not the rain.

Today, I went back to Brooklyn. I traveled the same route. It took me along the same streets of history, and this time went even farther back; for a strange reason, I had forgotten the deeper, preceding parts of my life there, Pacific Street, Dean Street. Until suddenly I was going past them, in sequence. How wonderful of them to arrange these streets in chronological order for me. I drove up St. John's Place, to show my son the place into which he was born. He had never seen it. And I found something else there: the realization that with time, sadness goes. It leaves only a wistful residue of memory, and a new happiness: that I had it then, and that it is gone. I am glad for all of it. And especially that I am happy to return to Brooklyn, running into people from the past on occasion, walking the same grass in the park that was touched by a dog who is also gone, and mourned, but at a distance now. I remembered the way to get to the bridge, and I always will.

Red

I am a communist. Well, not really. I am more of a socialist, but that is an attention-getting statement to put up front. Yet for a brief while it was literally true: a long time ago I attended meetings of the communist party in the United States.

Which one, you ask. What faction? Because there were so many. (Check your card, Melissa!) While I may well have thickened my FBI file, I did not receive a card--nor did I know or care what faction it was. Because, as you may guess, I was not there primarily on account of politics. I was in my twenties; I was feeling revolutionary; but, as the first clause suggests, it was an adorable guy who lured me into the red room.

We met through some labyrinthine arty channels whose specifics I now forget: screenwriting class? punk rock? some freelance-underling gig? At any rate, he wrote a zine espousing the party's views as well as his musical tastes (and if you weren't writing a zine in the early eighties, what the hell were you doing?) and I wanted to help. After all, I liked the Clash too. I also would have poured his Cheerios in the morning plus milked the cow for them, but I never got the chance. Instead, I tailed him around to meetings and wielded the stapler when the time came. It seemed to me that all they did was argue about arguing in those meetings, anyway. A child could have seen that these people were never going to get to the point of actually doing anything.

I will never forget the moment Mr. Cute Commie looked up at me from his careful rulering on a cartooned zine page, narrowed his eyes, and with a tight smile hissed, "I look forward to the day when heads roll down Park Avenue."

Now, I was all for metaphoric heads rolling down figurative corridors of American financial inequity. But this guy was looking forward to real severed spines and blood-spewing carotid arteries. His look chilled me through and through. All of a sudden he was not so adorable anymore.

I ran.

But I have stayed a happy joiner of many of the rare socialist endeavors that have presented themselves to me. They represent, in my view, the flowering of the highest potential of the human spirit. Just plain good, in other words. The eloquent version, of course, belongs to Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The good and just society is neither
the thesis of capitalism nor the
antithesis of communism, but a
socially conscious democracy which reconciles
the truths of individualism and collectivism.

A good place to see this in action, at the plodding fundament, is at the food co-op. I am addicted to this type of collectivism in action. My first was in college. On the first floor of a drafty farmhouse there was a basket of brown eggs and about eight barrels of foodstuffs you scooped yourself (because no one was going to get that messy on your behalf: peanut butter, honey, liquid soap). That was it. Back home in Akron on holidays, I searched until I found a food co-op there, and I dismayed my mother greatly by bringing home brown rice and raw wheat germ, worse because she imagined it was also dirty. To her relief, the co-op closed, because Akron is just not a cooperative place, being a town that would sell its soul to the devil in return for a chain store of any sort (or so says Chrissie Hynde). But then I moved to Brooklyn, and I found the beating heart of edible socialism in the Park Slope Food Coop, one of the largest and lushest in America; you could practically hear my smug laughter all the way down Union Street as I hugged to my chest an affordable bag of otherwise unaffordable blood oranges, French cheeses, and fragrant soaps. I could get them because no one other than the producer was making a profit, and we all had to work in the store, no exceptions. ("No exceptions" is the soul of collectivism.) Moving away from this store is what really broke my heart; leaving the crowd and pace of the city, not so much. So when I found a tiny food co-op up here, I felt right at home: it was a little dirty, a little expensive, and a little little, but the sight of people like me lugging sacks of grain around and bagging dried fruit cheered my heart.

Up here in the sticks, we even managed to find a cooperative swim-and-tennis club: membership was cheap, because everyone worked. It felt like heaven--familiar and right.

What is wrong with me that I feel this way? So un-American.

[Please, please note that I agree not with the perversions of communist-based systems that have anything to do with top-down control or violence of any kind--as with Christianity, more damage than kindness has been done in the name of this ideal--but with the theoretical possibility of leveling the field, and living for and with each other.]

This past Christmas, for the first time in our new life, we did not go to Akron or Utah to be with family. I was a bit scared: I myself become a child at the holidays, wanting them filled with people and cheer. The prospect of spending the twenty-fifth alone, the two of us, was frankly terrifying. So I canvassed all my friends, just short of grabbing them by the collar and pleading for an invitation. I finally found someone; yes, we could come over for Christmas dinner. Relief. That's settled.

Then, two days before Christmas, an e-mail arrived: Actually, no, sorry, you can't come for Christmas dinner; I neglected to ask my husband, and he doesn't want you. (Well, not said exactly like that, but it was the meaning.)

Two days before Christmas. My son, asking what we were going to do. "Something fun, honey, I promise. I'm just not sure what."

Desperation now. To the point of asking distant acquaintances. I practically had to do it with eyes closed, it felt that embarrassing. If it was just me, I'd take a klonopin, get into bed, and wake sometime on the twenty-sixth. But it was not just me. And that is the point of this story.

One of those acquaintances told me, at last, about the community dinner in Woodstock. It's for everyone, she explained. Come, work, eat.

It was what I had been looking for. An opportunity to show my child that it's just not us here. It's not always about our wants, needs, desires. Sometimes those have to be pushed back into the wings while others stand out front getting their share of spotlight. (I hope I am not making myself sound unselfish; that would be a lie. And I am not good, though I want to be.) Giving unsavory lessons: one of the yucky jobs of parenting.

We walked into the large hall of the community center. It was bubbling with noise, activity, and yes, good cheer. Every type of person was there: the wealthy, the poor, the strange. People on public assistance, people whose taxes (one could only hope) were helping to fund that assistance. All going down the food line together. And we spooned equal amounts of food onto each of their plates.

My son was proud to help, I could see. And when our turn came, we ate too. We sat in chairs recently vacated by people who had filled their pockets before leaving with bread and apples, because they would need them for the coming week. We left without filling our pockets. But we left full. Have you ever felt this way? I hope so. Maybe you are a communist too.

Chaos Theories

By now, everyone in the western world with a mouse and a vague interest has seen BMW's elegant commercial for the S1000RR. The crystal and flowers, dozens of place settings and candelabra--all remain coolly upright while the small matter of the thing they were standing on is removed from under them. (Suddenly, to be sure: 193 hp.)

My table, on the other hand, is haphazardly loaded right now, and the piled-up china needs no encouragement to come crashing and clattering to the floor: walk by, gently, or perhaps even just give it a hard look.

No, I am no longer depressed. I am too breathless for that. In my unconscious attempts to fend off the dark demon, I have apparently decided to back myself into impossible corners while carrying tippy loads: a schedule that looks like it belongs to six people belongs only to me. The deadline that looked doable when I inked it--and perhaps was, way back then--now has its jaws open wide, and I can see the yellowing on the great shiny fangs. That should be enough. But I've also tossed in a 24-hour rally (again, looked doable when with a click I sent my ninety-five dollars and my name; now, though, I think about the reality of riding hard, and thinking, for 24 hours, and I know I am utterly out of my league). Oh, and planning a month on the road . . . with my child.

On what bike? That is the first, and necessary, matter, and it too is falling away out of my grasp. Last week, on the way to Virginia for spring break with children, I stopped to look at an R1150R that was for sale. Riding it: in a word, wonderful. After the weighty issues of the K75, it felt resolved. It does not take me long to dream my way into an imaginable reality, and by the time I'd hit Williamsburg, that bike was mine. I was already making space (space? where did that come from?) in the schedule to return to pick it up. And then, in a phone call yesterday that I thought would include making an offer, I learned the owner did not intend to sell it after all.

I sit, chin in hands, staring at the table. I've moved some of the piles around, but they are still lopsided towers, trembling in their silent warning pre-fall. I wonder what exactly it is in me that makes me build such things, only to look at them--my life--in such bemused dismay. There must be a reason I get myself into such jams. Reasons, but no reason. Perhaps for the hilarity the recollection will bring, far in the future. Not now, though. Right now, I'd like another motorcycle, please. I have a feeling that would solve everything. I'll use it to pull the whole table down.

Wishes Come True

In his 1930 book The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell put his finger thus on a hard-won truth: "At twenty men think that life will be over at thirty. I, at the age of fifty-eight, can no longer take that view." I no longer believe there are any chances that may not yet present themselves, either, because last week, at my age (whatever that is), I got the opportunity to redress an omission in my life. After decades of wishing to, I finally went trail riding.

Without Woodstock itself, this old dream might never have been realized. It is the kind of place--unique, perhaps, except for certain crunchy outposts in sun-addled California--where a diehard motorcyclist like Ed, major domo of the local riders, would live across from the real estate holdings of super-rich weekenders from the city who rarely visit their fiefdoms. Says Ed with the gentlest of sneers, "Aw, they come up on Friday, have a barbecue on Saturday, and go home on Sunday. They don't even go into the woods. Probably afraid." These are people--like the Russian who owns the mountaintop across from Ed--who simply like the feeling that their names are inked on deeds filed away in some county office, affixed to a map of some mysterious hundred acres. This (and not a visit to the woods themselves) is a source of great comfort.

Also to the people who like to go riding there.

So Ed, collector and fixer of bikes, can get on his Bultaco, or his Super Sherpa, or one of a few others, and head up a gravel road opposite the Mill Stream. Up, and then to the right and to the left he passes masterpieces of modernist architecture, expansive wood and steel domiciles secreted in the deep woods, homes for people who have too many homes. In other places, it's the abject poor who hide among the shadows of trees in mountainous cloves; in Woodstock, it's people who have made it big in media.

There, back beyond the type of houses I have ached for all my life, is heaven for the guerrilla trail rider. (Heaven, because in this well-to-do wilderness there's little chance that an Upper West Side music producer will dispense shotgun justice at the property line.) So, with me on the reliable and light Super Sherpa, and Ed on the two-stroke Bultaco (which will soon complain of thirst and quit running, needing to be rolled back down the hill and exchanged for something with a clear fuel line), I followed the leader off the road and into the woods.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what the bike would be doing, either. I could only extrapolate from the fact that Ed did not keel over sideways when his tire glanced off a rock or went over branches, though whether that was solely due to his experience and skill I could not guess. I just kept that throttle on (yeah, in first gear). When the bottom third of his wheels disappeared into the water of a spring freshet, I put on the brakes. "Uh, Ed!" I called. He turned and looked, and there was I, shaking my head. My fears were inchoate enough--did I imagine I would hit and awaken some submerged miniature Loch Ness monster, or was it simply the clothed-human urge not to suddenly find oneself sodden up to the neck?--but they were furiously roiling my insides. Ed dismounted and crossed back to me, riding the Kawasaki over for me.

Onward over the narrow trail we went, too much passing continuously under the wheels to identify: rocks were gone over, boulders skirted, ends of logs grazed. It was both fun and as scary as anything I'd ever done, and maybe the two are not separable here. It could not have been fun if it did not scare me, and if it did not scare me, it wouldn't have been all that much fun. Suddenly I was aware I was gripping the throttle as if it were something I had to kill.

Up ahead now was another small stream, this one wider. It was only my shame that would not let me beg this time too. Ed's shouted wisdom was unassailable: "Just ride through it!" "Just through it? Are you sure?" the small girl asked. "Yes, I'm sure. Just ride through it."

I did.

Nothing happened. Except that I rode through it.

Onward over the narrow trail we went.

But then into sight came a steep hill. That is where I stopped and decided nothing would make me go up it. Because after you go up, you have to come back down. This time my shaking head had nothing of the question about it. "Had enough? Well, another time you might want to do it. You just have to cut the engine on the way down. Here, watch me." And up, revved high, he went. A minute later he was rolling back down. It looked like so much fun. Like a big, huge room of fun, in which you could get lost for a long time. As long as the trail itself.

I think I got it. Why you'd want to throw yourself around all day, sweat, slew sideways, fall down, get up, hurt like hell the next day. My natural timidity did not allow me to go all the way, but at least I left the road for a bit. To search out a second chance, up in the hills around Woodstock, the place I now find myself.

Embracing My Snakes

I am on the favorite old-home dog walk. That is when I see them projected by my spring-addled brain onto the river rocks lining the path between the creek and the cornfields: a sudden shock of a black rat snake, outstretched across my way to gather the season's first warmth. This one is fictitious but will soon be real. It always feels like he's crept up on me, but the truth is that I've crept up on him. He's minding his business, slowly, and his surprise is evident in his wary flicking eye.

The human (and canine) fear of snakes is instinctual, and makes a hell of a lot of sense. Only, as with almost every eminently sensible instinct, some individuals simply don't have them. Fear of heights; fear of snakes; fear of falling off high towers. When you live with someone who does not have an aversion to something you do, you can be made to feel foolish. On the other hand, the difference is mighty useful for snake removal when they decide to crawl into the living spaces of your home.

For nearly a hundred years, the house I used to live in was home to unknowable generations of black rat snakes. They molted their skins in the attic; they moved silently between the stones of the foundation. On occasion, they would drape themselves across the porch, the branches of the trees. And, most alarmingly, one day a black head, followed by the dully shining rest of a body much like the head, flowed out between the two sections of the dishwasher. As I happened to be standing next to it, at the sink. The little glimmer of movement--the scream.

Still, I tried to catch my breath, psychically speaking. A wildlife protector from some agency I had called in a panic--my toddler had reached, smiling, for a snake before I saw that it was not in fact a stick (another scream, quite instinctual)--dressed me down. "Some day, you will be happy to know," he said in clipped tones, "they will all be gone, when everyone like you has finished 'relocating' them." I was chastened; I had not proposed a euphemism, but rather actual relocation. I wanted them alive, somewhere else.

From that moment, I determined to embrace my snakes. They had been here before me, after all, and so they were like the ghosts of the long dead in that house, whom I also would never presume to throw out. Much as they might spook me.

I approach that which I fear. I stand as close to it as I can without causing fear in him, too, and I stare. Demystify, or de-snakify. Need I reveal I am offering up a construction here, a metaphor that is simultaneously a real thing? A creature who scares me as well as gives me a chance to break past the bounds of my own smallness, and proceed from here.

To the memory of my friend A.V.V., whose bravery,
and young beauty, were borne ever outward in her smile.
Too soon gone. Too soon.

Moody

The list of things I am unfit for is a long one. Ballerina, freestyle skateboarder, auto mechanic, seamstress. And, in yoga, meditator. Get me in that room, sitting on the mat eyes closed, and I can do everything but “observe thoughts as they arise, but let them go.” No, they fall over me like a feather comforter, and I breathe them in and out until I am transported four hundred miles away, walking into the Diamond Grille in Akron. Always, walking into the forties in the form of a restaurant I’ve been in only a few times, yellow light on blonde wood. I wonder why I always come here, when I am supposed to be at yoga class. I get hung up on this place. Among other things.

Then, the voice of the instructor this morning, suddenly opening my eyes to the blue overhead through the skylight and a contrail of white vapor expanding slowly. “This is the best moment of your life.”

It was, and then it too bisected the view in disappearing cotton. I came here wearing a gray heaviness that I thought I might never again have to bear. I had forgotten what this felt like, the mood that descends and pulls me down, down. I am caught in the anchor rope, and there is only so much breath left in me. The next time I inhale, it will be water, and then I will fall all the way to the bottom.

I have been living lately in a green world, shot through with light, one with a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of joy. I was not sure where it came from—after a year of building my own new mental house, sawing and hammering and watching the walls go up, finally the roof going on—but I was not going to question it. What is this strange feeling? Why, it’s happiness! I had grown so used to feeling this lately, I had begun to believe it was the steady state.

Ha.

Everything changes. Happiness, too.

I used to say, Panic attacks are something you would not wish on your worst enemy. (I have compassion even for criminals; they, too, suffer.) But this past week, it’s depression I have been making the reacquaintance of. It’s like meeting the dead. Alive again. And horrible.

It’s a hole in the bottom of your bucket. A minute pinhole you can’t find in order to patch; the water seeps slowly. I was going to write something, tomorrow. When tomorrow came, I decided I would write it tomorrow. I got into bed right after dinner, fell hard asleep, then woke at two, and and four, twisted up with the duvet. Woke tired. Aimless through the day. Hopeless through the night.

I tried to parse its meaning. It couldn’t have just come back for a visit, unbidden, because it missed me, from our long relationship of yore. It had to be here for a reason, sapping all desire.

The week before I had ridden long, and hard. I had felt the exhilaration of doing something I did not know I had it in me to do. The ecstasy of thinking , for all those miles, about the one thing that’s paramount in my mind right now, and had the magic of the road solve it—the answer to a problem I did not yet know I faced—out there just ahead of me in the Pennsylvania dark. I came home so tired I did not even know it until the next day. The day after that, I was even tireder. And then it became something else. A fatigue of the spirit. In the following week the sum total of my accomplishments was three loads of laundry.

I must remember that I have never stayed anything for long. Not panicked, not sad, not angry, not happy, not productive. Or unproductive. I wish I could say, for now, this was something in the air. But it seems to be in me. Maybe tomorrow I will finally get around to washing my bike, as I have been telling myself to do for six days. Maybe tomorrow it will go away, this feeling like chains that clank about my ankles as I try to walk. Tomorrow it could all turn out different. We could both be washed clean.

In Prison

The world subverted.

Everything that is known--the foundations of life, what we call "love," the myriad considerations that keep us together and in harmony (for the most part) so that we can function as a society--all of it is turned on its head in there. So that up is down. Love is hate. Understanding is torn top to bottom. "This hellhole," writes an inmate of Attica to me; "this shit storm they call justice and I call hell on earth." The notion of justice, even: all tied up and turned around until it is not possible to read what Webster's has to say about it and believe the dictionary tells the truth. What is true, inside the cellblock?

Your friends become your enemies, and the people who punish you are besotted with their power. Or perhaps it is their powerlessness after all. Who knows anymore.

When we lock up animals, for the crime of being voiceless, we call it a zoo. Depriving a creature of its freedom to follow its biological imperatives--to move, to fulfill basic needs for companionship, safety, food, space around the body, to know who is who--causes well-documented neuroses. Animals take to what are called stereotypies: pacing, cribbing, ceaseless licking, self-mortification. They slowly go out of their minds. They turn on one another in acts of aggression; unwarranted aggression, it is termed. And when the animals are humans called prisoners, these behavioral last resorts are then considered proof of their unfitness to be returned back to the outside. And so on the inside they stay, further ruined for the possibility of freedom.

Yet sometimes, prisoners are let go. Then they become frightened because it looks like the rules have changed once again--the subverted world is quickly turned right-side up once more, hence nothing that worked for them previously (the strange rules of exchange; the hard methods of self-protection; the awful plays of power that pass for the expression of love, as in the forcible taking of the weak, the new, the unguarded) will work out here. It is terrible, suddenly, this freedom. And so, another crime. At least they can go back to the familiar. Recidivism rates are currently around 67.5 percent. That is a number to think about. Think hard. It tells a strange tale, of inside and out.

The institutions are called "correctional." This in itself becomes part of what is subverted: the presumption that inside, things are taught, things are learned. That there is, in the end, hope.

There is not. Because we are not honest about what we are doing here. Is this not then, strangely enough, a crime we commit?

In his book Coercion and Its Fallout, Dr. Murray Sidman, a foremost behavior analyst, writes (in a chapter titled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," an apt title for any exploration of our prison system),

Ordinary standards of justice are suspended in these citadels

of law enforcement, so even conformity to regulations does not

ensure the avoidance of punishment. The slightest suspicion of

any departure from the rules brings the authorities swooping down

on the whole inmate population. Because constant observation of

everyone is not feasible, accurate assignment of blame for

instigating disorder is impossible. Indisciminately and

capriciously, therefore, they administer the approved measures

of solitary confinement, lockup, ruthless questioning, revocation

of privileges, and surreptitious viciousness. The guards, their

uniforms, the very sound of their footsteps, and all aspects of

the prison environment become signals for unavoidable punishment.

Depression is common among prison inmates. Yet, because it keeps

them "well behaved," it is not considered a serious problem.

It is from (very unfortunate) animal experiments that we have learned precisely what happens when punishment--say, electric shock--is administered "indiscriminately and capriciously." Not knowing when it is to occur, and therefore not knowing how to avoid it, the rat ceases even to try. He dissociates from his fear, from his anxiety; those emotions were designed to assist in preparing for action, after all, and now no action will be of help. He gives up. "Learned helplessness." Or, in another word, depression.

The lie is given. "Correction"? What then is being taught? Perhaps it is merely a lesson in how terribly humans can act toward other humans.

From afar, they are imposing, and dismal. It is clear they are hiding something. They are hiding something big from our eyes. Something we do not wish to see. So that prisons are most of all hiding a truth about what is inside all of us.

Behind these locked gates, these stone and concrete and tempered steel walls, 2.3 million Americans now live. China, four times more populous than the United States, has but 1.6 million prisoners in its jails. (Another way to understand this--those big numbers are almost too big to picture, aren't they?--is to imagine the fact that this amounts to one in every one hundred adults, incarcerated.) And we are getting harsher and harsher, too, in imposing our will: from 1925 to 1975, our rates of incarceration were fairly steady. Then the numbers shot up, raced up, almost as if it were such a pleasure to us that we wished only to jail more and more and more. So that now the U.S. has one quarter of the world's imprisoned people, though we have only 5 percent of its population. One might almost say our best-producing cash crop is prisoners.

It is tempting to ask where this all might end. It is also necessary. Or else we might find more and more of us inside, and only a few beyond the gates, beckoning. If we are willing to keep what is hidden in plain sight a secret inside our hearts, they too will rot. Like the humans whose various pains we are all too happy to forget. It is necessary to look inside. So that we might see how it is that the world turns upside down, reversing all that we think we know about ourselves. It is necessary to look at the walls, the bars, the weapons that are made from objects once innocent, now fearsome in their new shape. Human ingenuity is the one thing that remains unchanged, inside.

Prison photos (c) Andrew Garn

Conscience Takes a Holiday

What a strange locale, the ski slopes. As close to the place we call "nature" as it is possible to get--the elemental mountains, stripped of animal comforts, even to the thinness of the air. And as detached from nature as anyplace save the Mall of America. A place devoted to doing something as unnecessary as sliding down snowy hills on two boards, then being hoisted back aloft to the top to do it all again. This unproductive (but irresistible) activity is bracketed by journeys to and from gigantic parking lots, often in gigantic cars that can negotiate winter terrain as well as hold lots of expensive, single-purpose equipment manufactured and purchased solely for these few lavish days in the winter. Many of the skiers I know are very "green" people, so obviously they're averting their eyes when they head to the ski resorts.

Yes, me, too. "Blind spot," I think it's called. I have so many of these they'd make me breathless to recount.

Now that I live twenty minutes from a state-owned ski area that would not win any prizes for luxury--the lodges are overcrowded, the food dismal but still shockingly overpriced--I cannot justify not going skiing, at least a few times each season, primarily because for kids it's such huge fun. For grownups my age, it's largely a day spent praying to avoid either frostbite or hard landings. (But it's also huge fun for us when we allow ourselves to go a little too fast, or pause mid-slope and look out over the panoramic view--blue sky over gray bowl of far-off mountains--that can be had no other way than at the top of a chairlift.)

Many lessons can be learned at the slopes. Some can make you a little bit sick.

The chairs stop operating at 4:00, so everyone can get down from even the highest run before sun gets clipped by the ridge of dense mountains. It was only 3:30, but although I wanted to make another run, having successfully evaded both blue fingers and hairline fractures, my internal dog alarm was now ringing. That's the one that got installed the day I first got a dog; the one that buzzes insistently when I've been away from home for five hours.

Why five hours? I don't know. It feels like the whisper of love. It feels like my dog wanted me to come home, attend to her needs.

To the friend who was gesturing, "Down to the bottom, we'll go back up this lift again," I gestured, "No, can't, gotta leave." She slid over to me, perplexed. "Why?"

"Nelly is alone, and I need to get back. I've been gone five hours."

She looked at me like I'd given her something spoiled to eat. "We used to leave our dog alone for ten hours, and he was fine."

I have heard this one so many times I have lost the patience for smiling tightly and shrugging my shoulders. Now I say, "Can you go for ten hours without having to pee?"

Her response: "Well, you can crate the dog. Then they won't pee in the house."

Please permit me to jump up and down and tear out my hair for a minute, will you. There.

These small sentences contain so many large implications. Like The problem is not whether another animal is suffering because he's trapped and has a natural taboo against soiling his own nest, and so will wait in an agony until it's no longer possible; no, the problem is whether or not you have to clean up a puddle when you get home. And also: The fact that I have a dog is not going to stop me from doing things I want; a dog is a convenience, like a tennis racquet, that can be put in a closet when not in use.

The biggest, though, is: I assume my dog feels what I want him to feel, because it's more comforting for me that way. Ergo, he's fine. But that is simply because he lacks the means to make his owner realize that he's not fine. And what lack of common language doesn't accomplish, lack of empathy will. Or, wait: a lack of even the desire to have empathy.

This exchange up on the mountain instantly reminded me of all the similar, shocking conversations I've had with people who purported to love their dogs, and they rained down on me until I was wet with unhappiness. "Yeah, one time he got locked into the gallery, and we didn't realize until the next day he was there; 28 hours and he didn't even go to the bathroom! He was fine." "One time my father couldn't make it home and the dog was there all weekend. Only peed a little, by the door." And do you think he felt terrible things when he did?

I remember the time I offered to pick up a friend's dog up from the vet's where he had been caged--er, I mean "boarded"--for the weekend. Three young vet techs were hanging out in the room, looking at something together and laughing. Dogs watched from behind their bars.

They gave me the leash, and the lovely brown dog jumped out of the cage. We walked down the hall, and he kept looking nervously up at me. I opened the door, and he managed to get his tail clear of it by one inch before he lifted his leg to pee. And pee. And pee. I think it took seven minutes for him to void his bladder. Then he took three more steps, to the first patch of lawn he could reach, and crouched. That took a long time, too.

I think maybe those vet techs had been looking and laughing at that thing for quite some time. Like, days.

Oh, why do I know anything? Maybe people are right. Maybe I make this stuff up. Maybe I project. Maybe dogs' bladders are indeed made different from ours, by an evolutionary process that foresaw ownership by people who liked to ski full days (once it foresaw the invention of the chairlift).

It certainly would make my life a whole lot easier if Nelly would only be fine when I left her home for entire days so I could go do fun human things. But I have a piece of her inside me, so she comes along whenever I go. I can hear her when she begins to whimper, and then I can't help feeling bad for her. It's the damn inconvenient piece that makes it seem that a responsibility comes along with having a dog. Love has a weight, and it sits on your shoulders.

Ode to Speed

Can one regain innocence past? Let us return to a lost time
and see.

It is 1909 and the world is coming alive with the hum of engines. Fearsome, alluring, raw potential pushing at the edges of its own constructions. F. T. Marinetti quivers with excitement in the words of "The Futurist Manifesto": "We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly!" He was talking about mechanized speed, and the new, improved version of happiness it would deliver to the populace. "Time and space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed."

He rails against the "gouty naturalists" who he sees as counterposed to the forward-looking embrace of the engine. But a smarter head than his--and one that knew the engine profoundly well, not just as objet with good lines--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the poet of flight, knew that this was a false opposition. The machine brings us to a place of elemental humanness: the moment when every sense is fully engaged with time and space, and when life and death stand starkly looking at each other, right over your head. This is living--pure, animal living.

His swoon-worthy book Wind, Sand and Stars, which situates the point where man, nature, and machine meet, was published in 1939. This was five years before he disappeared in an airplane over the Mediterranean. (Is there anything more unrelievedly eerie than the lone aviator who flies over the horizon and falls off the edge of the world?) In the chapter titled "The Tool," he takes on the naysayers who carp that mechanization causes a decline in spiritual values. He puts paid to that "fictitious dichotomy" (as beautiful language in the service of beautiful thought always will): ". . . the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."

It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact. Contrary
to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue
of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature.

The speeding engine compresses time, and our instincts race to keep up with it. We vibrate with the effort, but do not notice, because we are no place but fully inside the experience. There is no way to comment on it.

Therefore speed is life. It keeps us in this instant, which is the very--the only--definition of living. Here, now, fast. But do not fool yourself. About any of it; that which I only intimate.