Owen and I have a writing challenge going on. We each have to write 3000 words a week with the continuity of something that might become a book. If one of us fails to reach our weekly number, then the other gets to pick the blog topic the other has to write about. And not just write about, but defend and, even worse, not at all reveal that they're pulling for the Assad regime in Syria because they lost a bet, but because that's how they genuinely feel.
Otto threw the tiny dump truck and yelled. It wasn't a fun yell or a call out to save someone from danger, but the kind yell made popular by William Wallace in Braveheart. Otto had snapped, and he communicated his loss of civility the only way we'll ever know how: by throwing something with a loud primal roar. I kind of remember doing a similar thing. It's a younger sibling short circuit of sorts, like when my parents found me, half asleep, shrieking like the Scottish rebel and strangling my older brother, who prior to the assault had been lying in bed and, from under his huge 80s headphones, doing some passionate air drums to Ronnie James Dio. I lost it. After so many years of antagonism I just couldn't take it anymore.
Otto didn't take his time in lashing out at his oppressors. He must have been about 8 months when Quin's drive-bys drove him to curl up around his toy and emit an air raid siren. I was proud, but concerned. The kid didn't even have a chance to enjoy his infancy. But I guess that's the role of big brothers: unwittingly, and often to their detriment, they toughen up the new kid.
Already a madman.
This morning I couldn't quite trace to any specific incident the source of Otto's war cry. He stopped his stroll into the kitchen and popped. The little toy flew past me, and he locked into a gaze far beyond that of the natural world before letting his lungs power his pain out into the open. Quin shook his head--a quick flare to let me know he had nothing to do with it.
It's a tough world for little people but it makes it easier for parents drop them off at school. Last night I had dreams of Quin's first day at kindergarten. He'll only be four, and he's smaller than most of the other kids. I saw him in a classroom; sunshine trying to get in from the pulled blinds, and him being sad while other kids mocked him for not yet being five. I woke up and just lay there wondering what in the heck we're doing. He will turn five ten days after school starts, and he will charm his way into the hearts of teachers and his peers. Also, with Quin distracted by his new "five-year-old" school, his brother might get a break from losing his toys.
That could be a rosy prediction, but it's what my brain does. It knows I'm about to run it around my skull, having it search for the missing pieces from between now and when Quin was a tiny, screaming infant. They're not anywhere to be found. They're strung out behind us as we lean down to help tie a shoe. They float up and disappear while we teach knuckles and high fives. They fly past us as we evade flying dump trucks.
The other day Quin grilled his mother about Jesus. Our neighbor's kid received a quick Christian primer on Easter, and ever since has been obsessed with the betrayal. After finding some pictures of the crucifixion on their iPad, he brought it over to our house to show the boys. Quin was shocked, but mostly enamored, and now repeatedly proclaims what he's learned: that crosses kill people and Jesus lives in space. His big question to his mom was, "Does Jesus fly a spaceship, or does he just live in a cloud?" He also asked about Snoopy, and if Snoopy spends time with Jesus. I'm not sure where that came from, but I'm a big fan of his Space Jesus. I kind of see a young William Shatner with long hair who powers through awesome adventures in sandals and a glittering space robe.
The antagonist hides it well.
The sad part is that we're about to send him away to unlearn all that magical imagination. Quin's idea that mixer trucks suck the concrete from the sidewalk instead of pouring it onto them will be squashed and unlearned. He'll see things for what they are instead of what they could be. (Granted, having cement trucks vacuum up the sidewalks might not be practical, but having the gray go and the grass grow seems like an awesome place to live.)
There's this whole measure of genius, like serious Einstein genius, that has been found to be lost in our education system. It's the kind of thinking that has adults stumped but kids thinking up brilliant solutions. The example I've heard is the perplexing question of how many paperclips it would take to cross the Grand Canyon. The educated sit down with paper and pencil and labor over distance and erosion and the brand of paper clip. The kid rolls his eyes and says, "one." Yes, it takes just one, big huge awesome paper clip to span a great gouge in the earth.
I didn't think of all this as I leaned down to pick up my little William Wallace who'd just shrieked and hurled his truck. I didn't think of it when I looked past Otto to shoot a suspicious glance at his big brother. I didn't think of anything other than, "How in the Hell am I going to get these kids in the car and to school on time?" That's what you do when you're pushing through the morning to get to work a little less than awkwardly late. You step out of the quagmire and onto the solid ground. The place we know. The surface that makes our wheels go round. Ah, forward, and soon I'll be able to turn up the radio.
The funny thing is that it's all back and forth. We go to school and back from school. We go to work and then home. We move like pendulums and the only thing that goes anywhere is time. There's some big clock somewhere, maybe on Space Jesus' ship, that's simply doing what it's told to do. Go. Get us to the next place so we can get back home. And it makes me think that maybe Otto wasn't mad at his brother at all, but doing that kid genius thing and disrupting the morning routine. Nothing slows down time like a little truck wung at your head. It spirals to a spontaneous ballet, stretching your perspective and defying all the rules we abide by and, for a split second, takes you to a place where you can move like a kid again.
The poetry was over quickly. The moment with the aerial toy ended and my mind snapped back to it's normal size. Otto was scolded, Quin interrogated and in typical unproductive fashion I promised to lay waste to the entire house if they didn't get in the car.
Quin and Otto are now going to the same school. Brought to you by Benetton.
I remember waking up as my dad pulled me off my brother. We were all together, my mom holding my sister, and both of my parents asking me what in the hell I was doing. I guess my shouting had gotten everybody up. I tried to explain to them I had no idea what had happened. Peter had provided some complimentary big brother torture, and then I went to bed. It was just another night. But now Pete was bewildered. He rubbed his neck and stared at me, his headphones askew. The music provided a tinny soundtrack to a rare family moment.
First I should say you have no idea how much I worshipped Walden. I should explain the geography...topography...cartography. I lived in Gould, a suburb of Walden, and according to Google a ghost town, but I went to school in Walden. It was a long bus ride, and as a kid, all I wanted was to be part of a family that lived in Walden. Walden had pavement, and sidewalks, and kids who rode bikes and actually enjoyed it.
My pining ran deep as a thirsty spruce and it only got worse every time I'd show up to school and the townies had started a new club or secured some secret that no one who rode the bus had the privilege to know. I remember my friend's mom saying that I was the most mature of the group. Of course. All the cool shit went down while I was out of town, so all I had left was the the 'more mature' kid card. That, and my dad had done much to frighten the dumb out of us. Although I still wasn't not dumb enough to ride my bike the 20 or so miles to Walden. Often I'd get there, exhausted from cranking out the last few miles with visions of hanging out with the cool kids, only to find they weren't doing anything cool at all.
So we'd all hang out, me fading in and out of consciousness from riding a bike across the county, and dream of being able to drive to the big city. The closest one was Laramie, defined as a big city because it had stop lights and a McDonalds. And oh man did we love McDonalds, and eventually Taco Bell. So much so that when we were able to drive, we'd do the 120 mile roundtrip just to eat a 99-cent Big Mac. Of course the irony is that we lived in the beef producing capital of Northwest Colorado. We could harvest a steak in the time it took to get a value meal. The other irony, the one of fast food taking three hours, also did not occur to us.
Now I live within a mile of three McDonald's and two Taco Bells. There's a Del Taco, a Wendy's and a Burger King all just down the street. While I am slightly bothered that my kids consider eating a Happy Meal a chore, I am overjoyed that they can't wait to leave the city to go to Gould and Walden. And now...neither can I.
When I'm at work this is actually what's in my head.
That isn't to say I didn't take at least some advantage of the river below our house. I almost drowned in this one several times. What I would say is that my experience with, say, fishing never produced the father/son bonding I'd see in commercials during Magnum PI. My father fished out of necessity for food, so he was kind of like a Shiite fisherman. He took it very seriously and had no patience for his second son who constantly got lost in the willows. Our tender moments included my dad and older brother honking the horn on the Jeep so that I might find it.
Growing up in North Park (to include all of the metro areas: Gould, Walden, Rand, Haworth, Owl, Teller City, Hebron and Cowdrey) meant you grew up with cowboys. They still have horses and herd cattle and take their way of life very seriously. Of course growing up I didn't look up to these people like they'd just walked out of a Western. As a matter of fact, I kind of resented them. They took all of the women. In Walden, it seemed, when a girl reached a certain age, she fell for a cowboy. So while me and the non cowboy-kids stood on the corner in front of the Fair Share grocery store, the cowboy kids barreled around town in the coolest pickups with their females giving up much of the bench seat to sit practically on top of them.The county flag could be a silhouette of a some crispy bangs sidled up to a cowboy hat.
There are many lessons to the Cowboy Way including maybe don't drive a Subaru station wagon.
Cowboys had many advantages. They could do the Western Swing, which if you haven't seen is where you get a woman dizzy enough she'll go home with anybody. The non-cowboy kids had to make do with the awkward courtship of rocking back and forth to REO Speedwagon. The cowboys had a uniform. They had boots and jeans and hats that made them a familiar and comforting presence to a young female. it was like getting a package delivered by a trusted UPS guy, as compared to some of us Walden kids in confusing patchwork of what we had gleaned as modern fashion from our occasional trips to McDonalds.
Oh, and cowboys had guns.
He's smiling because he will have their women.
Quin and Otto did not have time for such petty hangups. They took to little Cowby Tristen like he'd showed up riding a Pegasus.
Forts are an important aspect to any kid's life, especially if building shelter is incumbent to not dying. One of the more desperate forts my brother and I ever built was when we we were riding down Owl Mountain and a summer storm shot a terrifying amount of lightning out of the sky. We tried to build a leanto under a bridge until we figured our mere movement was enough to have us killed. I still remember the moment when, looking up to Pete who is five years my senior, I tried to salvage the last bit of comfort by asking him if he were afraid. A slice of lightning cracked open the air above us and he said, "Yes." It was the longest twenty minutes of our lives, until we saw our savior. It was our mom in her twenty-foot station wagon tearing up the dirt road. I'd never seen anything with wood panels move that fast, and not since the mountain lion by the river did Peter and I run like we did to catch her.
Fraternity was not always so readily available. Some years later my brother would emerge from the woods with a gun and purpose. He'd gone out deer hunting and returned with big news. He'd found a fort. According to him it was the most amazing tree house he'd ever seen. Laura and I would have to pay a dollar each for him to show it to us. Since he was armed and excitable, we obliged. We didn't believe that he'd found a place much like "from Swiss Family Robinson," and were very ready for a horrible practical joke. I imagined something with deer blood and/or feces. Instead, he lead us to the most amazing treehouse we'd ever seen. It was only about a mile's walk from our house, and that dollar investment would lead to the epicenter of underage drinking and teenage makeout sessions.
Now about the animals in North Park. They are everywhere and mostly for eating. I grew up with a lot of animal killers. Often it was just for fun, and my childhood friends could attest that I was the one kid who would sit in the truck and hope for an ending to the bloodshed. There were mounds of dead rabbits, porcupines, gophers, birds...it was pretty awful. But sometimes there was purpose: meat. As a matter of fact, for my family that was the only purpose. My dad made a mandate that expressly (and explicitly, as in epithets) said that anything we killed we had to eat. As a child he'd killed a crow, and his father forced him to prepare the bird for dinner. As traditions go, resentment is a hot one in our family, so we lived in fear of killing even bugs. Actually, especially bugs. I have no idea where the meat is.
There was the gray area as to what would happen if we hit an animal on the road. Luckily our father wasn't witness to those incidents, and somehow we were lucky to not be a part of many animal vs car collisions. Which is amazing, as there are far more animals than cars on the road in North Park.
Even though the human crowds are a bit skimpy nowadays, I'd ride my bike from Denver just to get there. There is a cool in the air you don't get in the city, and you've not seen stars like the stars that layer the night sky in North Park.
The only bar does well for itself
That, and there's still a feeling that it's OK for a kid to be a little bit dangerous. You can wander by yourself for hours and almost hope that a stranger shows up with some candy, if not water and bug spray. Growing up in Gould meant that we were born for cheap labor. While as a child this hampered my lifestyle (which included skipping rocks and peeing on trees,) it kept us busy and, part of every child's dream, driving bulldozers and running chainsaws.
The boys are excited but they're actually being recruited. Could be the last thing I ever see.Yes it's fun at first, until you realize you're doing it for free
I look at Quin now and think it's amazing that at his age I was already chopping wood. At twelve most everyone in the county was expected to drive. You were either a designated driver from the bars or for feeding cows, but your role was important. That's a big part of any small town experience: you are important. You leave a big city nobody notices; depart Walden and the bank closes.
With all due respect to the deceased. But you gotta love shutting down entire institutions.For all that bragging you'd think I'd live there. To be honest, I don't know how the people who do live there live there, at least as far as making money and surviving winters. Growing up there was this constant cloud of our survival, which made for stressful dinners, and I'm pretty sure much of my random bouts of crying. Still though, there's always that temptation when you go some place and everybody is so dang nice.
Things are pretty laid back.If not a bit quirky.I should say that in all my years living in and visiting North Park, I've never seen another guy riding a long horn steer. People up there don't do that. They ride angry bulls instead, and then eat their testicles. Call it a tradition, or something people do if they grow up without a Playplace. At some point my brother and I are supposed to cart my dad's body to the top of Owl Mountain and set it on fire. That'll be when he's dead, but that's the plan he's made. And maybe that's why people live there: you're left alone to do as you please.
On the edge of nowhere and approximately smack dab in the middle of everything else.
We kept saying it in different ways. There was the exclaimed interrogation of nobody in particular, "Twenty years?!" The solemn reflectiveness while staring into space, "Twenty years..." The trailing off of disbelief. And then there was the direct verbal attack, "It's been twenty years. How did that happen?" as if somehow you had something to do with it. Unfortunately, we don't. We leave high school with a handful of cash and a head full of empty and we have no idea we've just been catapulted into the rest of our lives. We have no clue that launch pad feeling is going to require some navigational skills.
So time takes over and we stand in the backyard of a high school friend and try to figure out whose kid is whose. The kids are everywhere, and they're nice distractions from the hair loss. Some of my class started having kids early, and I remember the talk about those classmates. They were having kids too young; they should go out and live, we'd say. Now they're fully enjoying the party while their children are somewhere taking care of themselves. These pioneering parents look more confident than the others. And it's amazing what life does to a person, but here I saw people who grabbed the controls and left high school behind. I remember some of them being shy and timid. That afternoon I spoke with no one who wasn't upright and beautiful.
For the most part I was stoned by it all. There was a kind of sedation that had me floating through the experience. I wanted to pour the evening into a fishbowl and keep it alive as long as I could. The shrieks of children and the happy laughter of genuine surprise. The clanking of horseshoes over 80s songs.
Steven saved some videos we made in high school. I appeared in a few of them, well pretty much all of them, and it was so weird seeing me again. It was as close as I might ever get to going back in time to shake the shit of that little doubter. He was never good looking enough. His friends didn't like him. He had no idea how to get laid short of being raped. Twenty years later I watched this kid with all this hair, so much it looked like he was mocking me, and hoped he wouldn't let me down. He'd totally know that. I watched him try to be funny, but slightly impeded by his self consciousness. He was very familiar, yet I was transfixed by the seventeen year old with the brown mop topping an ensemble of a wildy colored Fresh Prince of Bel-Air button-up and Zubaz parachute pants.
A lot of parents are dead now. The trees that grew up with us have died too. They were taken out by a beetle infestation. The whole area is dry, too dry, and a lightning strike could set the whole county ablaze. During the party that was a lot of the talk: the fire by the Poudre river. It had already burned tens of thousands of acres and had closed the canyon. I told someone that we weren't able to drive "up the Poudre" and Steven laughed. I was glad he made the joke as I think I was sounding too serious. A bit douchey, like it mattered that I delivered the road closing like the news. And it was a nice callback to high school, when someone wouldn't have to apologize for a dirty pun.
The fire weighed on the evening. All the changes did. The town has lost a lot of people over the years, and there was a time when it seemed Walden was going to grow and business prospects looked promising. A lot happened: 9/11, the economy, the beetle kill. Another lumber mill came and went. And that guy who bought up all those landmarks hasn't done anything but leave them to rot. It's hard to blame him. There aren't many people there to appreciate them anyway.
I was surprised that I was nervous going to the party, and the next day my friend Jason said he was nervous about riding in the parade. I told him it probably was the expectations. But it was a good thing. We'd realized we mattered to the 14 other grown ups who came back to tend to their childhood. Good news is that nobody cared who you were or who you'd become. They were happy just to see you. And that we're all still living. Not just the opposite of dead.
In the parade we all rode on a flatbed trailer behind a pickup. Someone from our class painted some banners that announced the class of '92. We joked that it was the one time that we were all on the wagon. Still, I bought some beer and we all seemed to bathe in the attention and sunshine of a small town parade that goes on longer than it needs to. Or maybe not long enough.
Sarah and I are the two worst people to have kids. We love them too much. We would, if we could, bottle them and save them forever under five miles of shale. Their quirkiness, their observations, their fuzzy heads are all too much. That's why we're together in the first place. The world is all too much. It doesn't have to be, but we make it that way. We're sensitive. I feel global warming. I really feel it. I hear seals dying and the Tuareg people crying. Sarah feels the awkwardness of lame conversations before they happen. She senses A picture of Sarah.bad things before the strings of catastrophe ever put them in play. Mostly though she can only shake her head at all the love she wants to give. I'm not bragging. I'm saying we're fucked to the hilt. We're soft in a hard world. My head swims in salty tears and Sarah's heart is too big for its cavity. It pokes through her rib cage like a morbidly obese person in a lawn chair. It's pumps against the rough edges and she wishes we had enough money to give to every charity, and to give every dog a home...and we both wish we could, for a moment, not give a shit.
But then the boys come along and you can't but give all your shit all the time. And tonight when Otto has a rough go (pinched his penis in a Thomas the Tank engine book...it happens when your parents are airing you out and you're reading Indian style and after showing your mom the biggest train engine [Gordon] with proud emphasis slam the book shut) and Quin is acting his favorite comic lines from Finding Nemo, you can't but sit and shake your head because they deserve more than you could ever give.
We've dried out the mountains and set them on fire. We've pissed off the world and drugged the rivers. We're leaving behind mounds of garbage and a world choked with flipping juice box straw wrappers, and somehow we gotta kiss their heads with confidence. We're on the uphill fighting to get to higher ground; an incessant battle but a job most worthwhile. It's the least we can do: remind them they shouldn't use potty talk and keep the world as shiny as possible...no matter what it looks like outside.
So about five minutes before the pinch, Otto is crawling into his mom's lap and Quin is showing off his new There's light.cowboy hat/sunglasses ensemble, and I see Sarah look up at nothing in particular and shake her head. She's in love like she never thought she could be and short of cutting herself open and giving all she's got, she's got to figure out how each boy goes to bed knowing exactly how awesome they are without actually telling them that. She also knows that about twenty things will happen in five minutes that will test her fortitude. The toothbrushing is never easy. The boys won't let me do it anymore. And there's the battle to get everyone peed and jammied before it's too late to feel like good parents.
It gets done and there's that little sigh, for about an hour, when you get a window to blow out all the exhaust. It's a day, and the sun has slid away in an elliptical swing that sometimes seems like more of a projectile weapon than a celestial time keeping device. But we'll be back. Hurled into the morning and driven by the futility of our flesh and blood. We're supposed to be more than that, right?
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 01:24PM 
