Tuesday, July 5, 2005

Propane

I n days long-gone--my first summer out of high school--I worked several months for a propane distributor.  The business was run by two brothers, entrepreneurial types. They had a warehouse; they dealt in a whole range of petrol products--barrels of axle grease, high-viscosity lubricants, ordinary gasoline, and propane.  After just a few weeks, my duties stretched through the warehouse (sweeping, stacking wobbly towers of empty drums on wooden pallets three or four levels high, and hand-loading tractor trailers with grimy barrels) into the east yard where I painted propane pigs with a second coat before the service crew took them into the field for setup.  The tanks shipped from the manufacturer to the distributor (where I worked) in bulk, already covered with one skin of light brown paint.  In loading and unloading, the nylon straps would smudge the paint leaving unglamorous strap-marks around each end of the tank.  So much glamour in yard-sized propane tanks, really: the bosses didn't want marked tanks holding their fuel. 

In that small sandy (and weed-filled) lot, I used an old front-loader to lift the tanks, one at a time, into the air for industrial painting.  I suppose each tank weighed a few hundred pounds, considerably more than I could lift if one fell on me.  None fell, but the front-loader was so old that the crap-draulic compression seeped just enough air that the tank slowly lowered.  Gradually.  The tanks eased to the ground. I had to rush to get the underside painted before removing the lift-straps and painting the top side.  And the paint was the same dull tan color that the tanks had already been painted before shipping.  It wasn't painting to fill a color; it was more precise: painting to match wetness--to fill in the dry areas with fresh paint in the pursuit of coverage.

I never painted more than ten in one day.  Ten propane pigs in roughly six hours--no matter whether they were 500 or 330 gallon tanks--was the most I could bear.  And there were lulls in the shipments and orders, so it wasn't an everyday routine.  I would break from painting to lift more pallet-stacked barrels, even if I didn't have a proper license to drive the forklift.  Other times, sweeping.  One day I painted all of the curbs near the front office Road-sign Yellow.  Another day they had me mow the weeds in the side yard where the tanks-awaiting-purge-and-setup were stowed. 

Within a few weeks, Owners decided they wanted to send me into the field to refurbish older tanks on site.  I drove an old Ford half-ton pickup around the county, following addresses listed on a spreadsheet.  Called the homeowners. Let them know I'd be there.  Piled up the flat-bed with a weed-eater, a bucket of paint, a belt sander, rollers and sponge brushes.  When I say the Ford was old, I mean it was hovering in that hard-to-drive rut between rusted metal and stuff-doesn't-work-properly.  It was a stick shift with a maroon-ish cab.  No power steering, and never put it in second gear because it took two hands to get it out of second gear.  Into the field I lurched, stopping off at country homes and trailer houses, cutting the weeds around the tank, and painting.

When I think about summer jobs, two visits during my stint as a propane tank painter stand out clearly from the others (put fresh coats on maybe fifty tanks in people's yards that summer?).  The first one--a 1000-gallon tank--was on a farm east of town near the Chippewa River.  It was surrounded by deep weeds, maybe four feet tall.  I made two or three trips to this place to finish the job.  The old guy who lived there requested the service.  He probably tipped my bosses onto the whole idea of in-field tank-painting in the first place.  And he was on top of my work the entire time, constantly asking what I was doing, how much longer I would be.  Three days.  His tank: so pock-marked--a grossly uneven surface--I eventually quit sanding it (enough!) and went ahead with the paint.  Memorably bad--hot, dusty, and rough.

Worse: The 330-gallon tank at a mobile home near Farwell.  This was near the end of the job for me.  It was a reasonably new tank, small (330 gal.), well-raised on cement blocks, easy to access, or so it appeared as I chugged up the dirt driveway in the half-ton flatbed.  Only: it was surrounded by chicken wire, in the middle of a make-shift coop.  And! Many of the chickens were no longer alive.  On the worst day of that job painting propane tanks, then, I rolled a fresh coat on a tank in the side-yard of a Farwell mobile home while trying not to stand or kneel on dead chickens.  On the subject of summer jobs, that's all I have to say for now.

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Saturday, June 11, 2005

The Almost

E ight years ago today my mother died; nothing predicted it.  Although we never learned the deciding cause (off with causality, off with dogma), it was a defining day that I've mostly come to terms with.  The day-marker is like an anniversary; it imposes a peculiar singularity of feeling (a lonely annuity): very few remember the deathdays of ordinary people (even D. and Ph. might not have felt the date had I not brought it up, and Ph. was there).  This is not to say, by any means, that my mother was merely ordinary; instead, I like to think of life--perhaps all lives--as small-world extraordinary.  The day-marker of death, in its singularity, fails to evoke a broad co-memory; it sparks only a local co-memory, reaching as far as the family.  And so this is most certainly the echo of a moment felt by my brother and dad, felt by mom's siblings.  Perhaps a few, close others.

I don't have a whole lot more to say, and I definitely don't have the impulse to over-intellectualize the almost.  Barthes, in Camera Lucida, writes about the almost--the paradoxical nearness/distance that confronts him in a collection of photographs of his deceased mother.  I don't have many photos of my mother, especially from the years immediately before she died.  But the few I do possess lend an astounding credibility and accuracy to the experience Barthes describes.  Without understanding it in his terms, I was sensing the incompleteness of the image, as I still do, over and over.

According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands.  I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.  It was not she, and yet it was no one else.  I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not "find" her.  I recognized her differently, not essentially. Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false.  To say, confronted with a certain photograph, "That's almost the way she was!" was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, "That's not the way she was at all."  The almost: love's dreadful regime, but also the dream's disappointing status--which is why I hate dreams.  For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother: sometimes, in the dream, there is something misplaced, something excessive: for example, something playful or casual--which she never was; or again I know it is she, but I do not see her features (but we do see, in dreams, or do we know?): I dream about her, I do not dream her.  And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without ever having seen it, and to begin all over again. (65-66)

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Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Milkweed in the Sky

E arly this morning, just before leaving for work, D. stepped in and said she had an urgent message (was it a call, an email?) about a dead butterfly.  I was still half asleep, resting up from watching the Pistons-Heat clear to the end of game four.

Dead butterfly?

It's the life of an elementary school teacher, turns out, that some days start out this way, D. rushing to intervene in a grave situation, resolve what to do with the fallen corpse, determine whether to leave it or dispose of it before the kids get to the classroom.  As one among many year-end projects D.'s got 'em looking at the life cycles of butterflies. First, a whole batch of mail-order larvae showed up; each had to be separated into its own little home--a feeding cup of sorts with dirt and larva-decor.  Then the larvae were divided among the kids (something like two or three wigglers for each of the children to allow for the ill-fated, to allow for nature).  In each cup went larva food and a label matching the insect with the student-owner.  Next, incubation.

Now, after two weeks, several of the larvae have met the group's expectations for them; well on their way to becoming butterflies, former worm-bugs have spun cocoons, hooked them onto the lids of their feeding cups.  From there, D. moved each one to a bigger space--a kind of netted drum into which the butterflies will presumably unfold and flit around.  And some die, we've learned.

I don't know yet how all of this was resolved today; D.'ll be home shortly from picking Ph. up from his lacrosse finale.  And I'm quite sure that no matter what comes of it, nearly everybody will have forgotten by tomorrow, unless, that is, all of the hatchlings flit to premature overnight deaths (over the next few days).  Butterfly death: I'm hopeful for a more encouraging series of events to wrap up the school year.  Of course, with a small dab of Mod Podge, it'd be easy enough to tack on a preservative dimension, butterfly jewelry or something. 

Posted by at 5:53 PM | to Under a Bushel

Friday, May 27, 2005

Bemis, I'll Wash the Pot

W hile I was washing the dishes this morning, I was reminded that I'm unusually guarded about the coffee pot.  I'll wash the coffee pot; I almost always do.  I'm the only coffee drinker in the house.  I brew the coffee.  I fill the carafe to the six-cup line, shovel the grounds, click the switch.  I empty the pot.

In K.C. we had a fancy dishwasher.  It did the work of clearing grime from all the kitchen-wares.  But in N.Y., we're back to washing by hand.  And Ph., at fourteen, is as good as any of us at keeping us with enough clean dishes to eat.  No matter how we arrange our turns at the sink, however, I get an itch about others washing the delicate glass pot, especially Ph.  In fact, I often ask him to leave it as the final dish, then I'll wash it. 

What's so special about the coffee pot?  I'm not sure.  That's the thing.  It just seems fragile to me.  But this morning--first leg of a chore-filled Friday--I had a flash of insight, a coffeepiphany of sorts.  I'm almost certain somebody broke a coffee pot when I was a kid.  I can't remember who or under what circumstances or what even came of it.  Did it crack from careless washing?  Must've.  Least that's what I told myself this morning.

In turn I associated the not-quite-a-memory with the Twilight Zone episode--"Time Enough At Last"-- where the bank worker, after avoiding global catastrophe because he was in the vault when the world ended, finds himself with a bulk of time for reading.  Just Henry Bemis and books; time stood still.  And he's overjoyed about it, as I remember (a re-run me and J. watched multiple times on late-night TV, early teens), so overjoyed that he manages to step on his glasses.  Without them he can't see well enough to read.  Bemis was one sorry dude.  Woe!

Because I'm the only one who even thinks about coffee (not the only one who thinks differently about the fragility of the pot) in the house, it's a similar sort of despair that I'm trying to intercept, assist others in avoiding.  Interventional dish-washing, as I think of it.  Was I the one who broke the pot as a kid?  Could it have been me?  Doesn't even matter.  That it's implicated in my action--in my everyday way of living--presents me with an odd quandary, and I'm not sure, even connecting it up with Bemis, that I'm any closer to feeling differently about it.

Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself.

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Monday, March 28, 2005

Nickel Cadmium

P h. had his first lacrosse practice this afternoon.  I don't know what to think of it; seems like the past several weeks have left me in such a haze that I can barely keep up.  We squeezed in a brief trip to Dick's sporting goods on Saturday to pick up the last few items--mouth piece, padded gloves and so on.    And he's fourteen now.  Fourteen?  He and D. both had birthdays this month.  More than a week after returning from San Francisco, I'm finally settling back into normal sleep habits.  And, nonetheless, my eyes are constantly fogged from fatigue.  Used up most of today staying inside from the non-stop rain, writing a five-page essay on emergence, sociality and cognition for a class I have tomorrow, and finishing up some required reading due later in the week.  D. and I were supposed to catch up for a trip to the bank, but she got waylaid at work, intercepted long enough that we decided to hold over until Wednesday.  She has a class on Monday nights; just got notice that she's fully admitted in the program for early childhood literacy at SU--a promising turn since switching ed. certifications from Missouri to New York has been nothing short of complicated.  And so without the car, Ph. and I walked to Westcott for General Tso's tofu, two egg rolls and a two liter of Faygo Red Pop.  I'd cook, but the restaurant is just two blocks away, and so I figure why not?  Plus, gotta get out of the house now and then.

And I heard from the folks at Johns Hopkins to confirm my travel schedule to Albuquerque for three days in mid-June.  That means I should get back in the gym and test out my stiff-weak ankle, work it back into good enough shape that I won't be embarrassed in ten weeks.  And there's a CFP due this week, and an hour and forty-five minute gig in Albany coming up in two weeks.  It's the time of year when I could use a new battery pack--a shot of juice to pull through the last five weeks of the semester, the school year.  But no, it's nothing much revelatory, nothing I'm alone in feeling (on a rainy Monday in Syracuse, late March), and nothing I can't overcome just by plodding along on momentum.

Posted by at 9:47 PM | to Under a Bushel

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Trails of Activation

N o, I really don't have time for puttering around with graphing software, so that's exactly what I did for a brief while yesterday, an insignificant gesture of defiance at my own focus and production obsessions.  It is spring break after all, a period of regenerative slothfulness.  Yet knowing that I have to ease into slothfulness to avoid system shock, I watched a little basketball while reading, trying to get ahead of the post-break reading load to avoid any related trauma on down the line.  It all folds together--the slothful regression, the read-ahead and NCAA hoops--this way, in what I'm calling trails of activation.  Just a quick graphic generated by software from a randomized list of stuff from Saturday.  I'd offer claims toward intelligibility, but that would require effort and, therefore, undermine my attempts to enjoy some overdue rest and relaxation. 

Posted by at 9:23 PM | Comments (4) | to Under a Bushel

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Daze Awf

A s the semester chugs ahead (unbalanced load of wash? no...that's the sound of Semester), I'm finding it harder and harder to manage the demands and commitments. Oh bore, another lament on the challenges of grad school.  No mind-blowing revelations in this, fair enough, but it's what's working on me right now as I think about all that I didn't get accomplished today, a Wednesday throughout which I didn't so much as leave the house (hey it was thunder-snowing and I biked 10 miles w/o crossing the room, so it wasn't a total veg-day).  And I get the all the old rules about "read as much as you can," "learn to power-skim," and so on and so on.  But it's still tough as heck to keep it all moving merrily along.  Weinberger, Hayden White, Ong, Barabasi, brief, predictive-reads on Linked (from 205ers), CCCC paper, perl scripts (wtf?), and something or another "publishable quality" on pedagogy, cognition and performance. And a 30-minute phone call with my brother who's temporarily in Boise dismantling and assembling intricately-programmed, adhesive-dispensing robotic arms. Splodge!

I'm only on campus two days a week--Tuesdays and Thursdays (other than practicum meetings on alternating Mondays).  Turn over three grad seminars and a section of sophomore-level research writing on those two days.  It's fine, efficient.  But it leaves me idling low on Wednesdays and Fridays--barely capable of flopping a home-row-frozen set of key-punchers on the laptop to plunk out any few words, much less reading more than forty or fifty pages very carefully (or interestedly).  Began the day today by searching with no end in sight (piece by piece) through a file cabinet for an article from last semester.  Found it.  It was folded.  The only one folded.  All credit to me, thanks.  Then, in a second-wave ransack of the various paper piles, notebooks, folders (paper, plastic, and digital bits) and cabinets, I searched for a couple of pages of notes (white legal pad...I can see them!) I scribbled down last summer--before the move.  Didn't find 'em. Gone. But I did find this old photo of the house I grew up in (hey, you want cohesion, my brother's the maestro of industrial glues, not me).  So here it is.  The place in middle Michigan where I lived for about seven years, from ~10 to ~17.  Must have been J.'s turn to cut the lawn. 

Posted by at 10:36 PM | Comments (5) | to Under a Bushel

Monday, January 31, 2005

Me me me

I n the footsteps of M. and K.:
What time did you get up this morning? 6:40 a.m.
Diamonds or pearls? Pass.
What was the last film you saw at the cinema? A Series of Unfortunate Events
What is your favorite TV show? Family Guy
What did you have for breakfast? Two coffees, toast and eggs (would've done PB&J on toast, but we're low on J).
What is your middle name? Norton (after maternal gram's maiden name)
Favorite cuisine? Berbere sauce on injera. Where's my mail order of berbere powder? I placed it nearly two weeks ago!
What foods do you dislike? Eggplant
What is your favorite flavor? Vanilla.
What is your favorite CD at the moment? Velvet Underground and Nico.
What kind of car do you drive? Mostly hoofing it these days. Honda Element when it's available.
Favorite sandwich? French--aguacate, jamon, turkey, tomato, mayo, mustard on wheat. Hmm. Or ruebens. Ruebens are tasty. And bratwurst--if you'd call it "sandwich."
What characteristic do you despise? Bossiness and arrogance are tied.
Favorite item of clothing? Grey sweatshirt.
If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? Ottawa?
What color is your bathroom? Caramel? Something tannish.
Favorite brand of clothing? If it fits, I'm thrilled.
Where would you retire to? Huatulco or Xalapa.
Favorite time of the day? Now.
What was your most memorable birthday? I can't remember.
Where were you born? Michigan. What, are you trying to find out my password?
Favorite sport to watch? Basketball.
What laundry detergent do you buy? Um, is that for washing clothes?
When is your birthday? Fifth of May, '74.
Are you a morning person or a night person? Switches around, depending on obligations.
What is your shoe size? 14
Do you have any pets? None. And it's very disheartening. Next question.
Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with your family & friends? Miss you much, and sorry I haven't called lately.
What did you want to be when you were little? A tomato farmer.
What are you doing today? Reading, tracing themes, contemplating a shower.
If there was one thing you could do right now, $ is no object, what would you do? Open a restaurant and declare myself head chef.
If you only had a few days left on earth, what would you do? Panic. What the hell happened?

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