The Travelers' Return

I've been house-and-farm sitting for some old friends since the end of June.  Last Thursday night marked their final return after two months of kicking around mostly northern Europe and the British Isles, and another month lazing on the beach in Mazatlan.  They had a brief stopover here for a couple of days between the two excursions.

I've spent 90 days alone throughout all this.  I didn't exactly go stir crazy.  The down time was much needed, having just left 13 years spent on the east side of SF Bay, thirteen years which became increasingly difficult and disillusioning as time went by.  It wasn't all doom and gloom; there were good times too.  Just fewer good times than I'd hoped for. 

What that time really did for me was solidify me.  That wasn't my intent when I went down there, quite the contrary.  This won't make sense to anyone, but my hope was that my stay would dissolve certain aspects of my character.  But that didn't happen.  Instead, my character gradually became more distinct and more clearly defined.

That definition appears to happen through the process of working with others.  Sometimes the friction of working with others will knock off your rough edges, and I suppose that happened to me to some extent.  The alternative is working through opposition with others.  This opposition may be external or it may be internal and never expressed openly.  For me, sometimes it was the former; more often than not, it was the latter.  

Either way, what happens with opposition -- if you meet it head-on -- is that it solidifies who you are inside.  Standing up for yourself solidifies your character.  

After many years of experiencing this both in my professional life and through extensive volunteer work, it was apparent that my growth wasn't happening in any spiritual, immaterial realm, but in my ego, in my personality. That wasn't what I wanted or intended but that's what happened.  You take energy in and that nutrition allows you to grow in whatever way is most natural to you.  I also gave a lot and this point is crucial: it's all an exchange, a circular flow of energy, or no growth happens at all.  You have to give as well as receive. 

I have no problem with giving; in fact, I actually had to learn how to give less.  Some people or institutions will gladly bleed you dry.  You get taken for granted.  If you have a strong sense of self-worth, you won't allow that to happen. When the balance of the equation is askew, it's time for a corrective.  My "corrective" was to move a thousand miles away.  There were no heartfelt goodbyes.

Now I'm in a new phase.  I have a book to write.  I'm just getting the building blocks in place in order to do that: a place to live, a job to support it.  Next is putting in the time and research, to make notes to flesh out my ideas.  I won't be posting about the subject matter online.  Why?  Because I've learned not to trust anybody.  You too, dear reader, whomever you might be.  Don't steal my ideas.  Have a little faith in your own originality.

To some extent, I leave a piece of my heart behind in California.  But I've done all this before -- I've had to walk away from people and places I care about -- I will survive.  And flourish.  Why?  Because I choose to.

4 Pieces by Ludovico Einaudi

I'm sitting by the bay window at sunset watching the clouds slowly change hue and listening to this piano.  It's the perfect combination.

These four pieces are being played by Jacob Ladegaard.  It's interesting to watch the focus upon the hands -- his subtle sense of touch gives one some impression of how this kind of tone and texture of sound is given shape.

Parents Passing

As I said on Thursday, on Friday I visited the cemetery where my mother and father are buried.  I did not take the dog -- it didn't seem to be appropriate etiquette -- and I'm glad I didn't.

My home town is a small country burg, under a thousand people, situated in a long farming valley.  The valley probably extends for fifteen miles.  It must have been a river channel once, perhaps 15,000 years ago when the water from the great Missoula Flood backed up for miles in all these lowland valleys.

The town is healthy, whereas many of these small towns have died.  First, the stores in town begin to shut down.  Then you lose either the bank or the post office, or both, and finally the school closes.  That's the real death knell of the community. All that remains open then are the grain elevators and warehouses.

Back when my mother grew up, from the early Twenties until, say, the late Forties, the population of this county was actually much higher than now. That's because at that time you could support yourself and a family on maybe 250 to 500 acres.  If you had more than 500 acres then you might have another house on your property, or at least a bunkhouse, for the hired man and possibly his family. I would guess the population of this county was nearly twice what it is now, seventy five years ago.

As time went by, this all changed, of course.  By the time I was a kid here, you really couldn't support yourself on less than 1,000 acres.  Now it's probably 2,000.  Sons still take over the family farm, but there aren't as many of them.  Most kids leave now.  Farms have consolidated.  Land has changed hands.  Some land is now farmed by companies that are not local.  When you're not tied to the land by blood, the heart goes out of farming.  You care less about conserving the health of the land.  You're just looking at the bottom line.  You use utilitarian practices which may gain you more $$$ post-harvest but which really aren't good for the soil.

Still, my hometown has a sense of pride about it.  The demographic is different now, though.  It's no longer strictly farming families or people employed in the industries that support farming directly.  Now it's a bedroom community for retirees or for people who commute to the nearest larger city, which is about 50 miles to the north.  Hence, there are fewer kids.  The high school's about a third of the size it was when I attended.  Educational co-ops with neighboring towns have become a financial necessity, keeping the schools from shutting down entirely.  It's also necessary to combine with nearby towns in order to field sports teams, due to declining enrollments.

All that said, the town looks exactly like it did 44 years ago when I left.  The same grocery store is open, owned by the same family.  The woman running it was my coach on the swim team in the summer; her son, who stayed and helps run the business, was four years younger and we lived together one spring in college. He has a nice, long Ho Chi Minh goatee, struck through with white hair.  I said to him when I saw him, "Mike!  We got old and grey!  How did that happen?  We were supposed to stay young forever...."  

The bank is still there, the post office too.  One pharmacy closed and another one opened.  There are two small hardware stores, a gift shop that makes espressos (!!!), a second-hand store, and the grange supply turned into a "country store."  All in all, everything looks the same.  The houses and yards are well taken care of.  The little town park is green and still has a swingset and a merry-go-round.  Last night was Homecoming for the high school football team, but I didn't go.

You can drive through town in under 60 seconds on the main street.  There are no traffic lights, not even a stop sign to slow you down.

A mile or two east of town, further on up the valley, on the sloping hill on the north side of the road, is the town cemetery.  All these little towns have their own cemeteries.  For some of these little burgs, there are now more people buried in the cemetery than there are living in the town itself.  It's a way of life that I'm not sure will survive intact through the end of this century.  Hope I'm wrong about that.

Anyway, our cemetery is really quite a peaceful spot.  Lots of pines and other trees interspersed throughout.  My mother and father are buried between two pine trees above and below on the hill, maybe 50 feet or so apart.  As fate would have it, my grandmother got buried between my dad and mom.  Just like in actual life, Grandmother always tried to come between my mother and father.  They really didn't allow that.  My mother always took the high road with her mother-in-law and probably earned some stripes in heaven thereby.

Dad died 35 years ago.  I was 34 when he passed.  We had been at war for thirty years by that time.  He was a smothering presence in my life, one which I just couldn't seem to shake or get out from under.  His own father had bailed on the family when my dad was one year old, so he grew up without a father.  He thus overcompensated and overdid it with me.  He had his own issues as a human being.  He oh-so-gradually mellowed as he got older.  We had some healing experiences together right at the end of his life.  But that's a story I'll leave for another day.

Mom passed on my dad's birthday in 2015.  I was preparing to move back home that summer to be closer to her, but she left before I could get there.  I sat alone on that hillside by her grave and felt like an orphaned child.  I don't cry often or easily, but in that instance, I let myself cry.  I allowed myself to feel the loss.

For about a year prior, I kept dreaming that I was visiting my mother at home, but the house was always empty.  And for about a year after she passed, I dreamt regularly that I was trying to find my way home, but could never locate the house.  Eventually, I came to terms with the loss, as we all do over time, but still I feel guilty that I wasn't there for my mother in her last years.  I was busy trying to make a life for myself in California, which never really happened.  Now I'm back home and will make a new life for myself here, on the old ground.

I will probably choose to be buried in this cemetery someday. Let myself rot into good wheat-producing soil.  It's a peaceful place.  My two remaining sisters feel the same way.  

Honestly, I don't feel like my parents are there.  I go and visit their graves as a sign of respect, and I made a fall floral bouquet which I placed on Mom's grave yesterday (sorry, Dad!), but I don't really feel like they're present there.  They've moved on.  Wherever life and existence -- since I don't believe that anyone or anything ever really dies, but simply continues on -- have taken them, I trust they're doing well.  

You see, despite the horrors human beings can go through on this earth, I have an overarching sense of faith that it all subserves a kind of long-term higher learning in the end.  That may seem like a stretch for some of you, but it's a deeply rooted feeling in me.  I understand it intellectually, too.  Someday I will write about this at length in a book.  But for now I'll just say that I trust that both Mom and Dad have moved on, have had a chance to review and digest their earthly experiences, and are probably both excited about the chance to continue to live, learn, and grow 

Because, after all is said and done, that is what this life is really all about.  I'll meet them both in some other guise down the road and we'll have a different relation to one another.  It will be interesting to see where things go from there.

The visit put me in a pensive mode for the rest of the day.  I wanted to write about it this morning, and then move on with my day.  Life goes on.  As it will when I pass as well.

Dogs, Redux

I gave yesterday's ending dream a trial run today.  Put some old blankets over the back seat of my truck, collared the dog and loaded her in, then took off up the road.  I'm south of the Interstate.  Due north is a little podunk farm town that probably would have dried up by now if it wasn't for the occasional weary traveler who pulls off for gas, a cheap bite, or even a night at the fleabag hotel.  Well, I haven't stayed at the hotel so that might be an unfair characterization.

Anyways, I cracked the back passenger window down a bit and hit the road. It's about 3 miles of farmland and then 5-7 miles of rangeland to this town. By rangeland what I mean is a washed-out basin several hundred miles long and wide of exposed basalt, scoured by a flood that scientists say held 10 times all the water in all the rivers on earth today.  That's a lot of water.  Trying to visualize this is well nigh impossible.  But drive through this country, mile after washed out mile, and you'll begin to get an inkling of its staggering immensity.

The gas station fortunately has lattes, so it's my version of Starbucks. There are two Starbucks within driving range, but they're both another 22 miles away, in opposite directions.  With the price of gas being what it is, I'll pay extra for my little Chevron latte.  They also carry the daily newspaper, which is my other daily vice. Only it isn't printed daily. The regional paper doesn't print on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Saturdays.  I really didn't foresee my dotage existing without being able to minutely scrutinize the stats in the sports page each morning.  That's a huge cultural shift for me.

The dog did okay but at both that stop and a short one at the downtown grocery, when I came out, she was sitting in the driver's seat.  I didn't even wait until I got in.  I just hollered from the sidewalk, "Get out of my seat!" and re-iterated that statement in forceful dog lingo when back in the truck cab.  (sometimes I just growl at her -- it's a quicker, easier form of communication)

All in all, it went pretty well. Tomorrow we'll head into my old hometown, 17 miles due east. I should visit my mom and dad's graves on the other side of town, but I don't trust the dog.  I could put a collar on her and a leash but, you know, pooping on somebody's grave is probably not good karma, even for an innocent like a dog, so she'll stay in the truck there as well.

We'll keep extending these excursions.  I tried to take her for a walk out in the stubble fields yesterday but she took off running like a demented deer.  Long sprints and jumps.  Let's just say she didn't stay close.  I had to take her back to the house and do the walk alone.  Steve hasn't trained her to stay close yet.  Not sure if he will.  

I took her down to the creek once and she immediately jumped in and happily lay down in the mud.  In that instance, I took her home, put on my swimsuit, and carried her into the walk-in shower in the utility room.  She tried hard to scramble away but I got her on her back and spun her around a few times, after which she nobly surrendered to her ignoble fate. After she was dry, I had to take my own shower!  Now tell me again, why do I want a dog?

I'm practicing, I guess, for eventual dog ownership. We'll see if I pass the tests.  

Dogs (and cats)

When I was growing up, we always had a passel of cats and dogs.  My sisters (two older, one younger) were all cat people; hence, each had their own cat.  My oldest sister had Blackie, a smoky dark long-haired cat who had a mysterious air, and liked to roam outdoors -- we lived in the woods then -- but he'd show up on my oldest sister's bedroom window ledge when night-time came and she'd open the window and let him in.  Blackie we lost pretty early on, the first of my oldest sister's many heartbreaks in life.

My second sister had a gentle, genial striped tabby who would allow herself to be dressed in full doll-clothes regalia and pushed around in a stroller.  Her name was Baby Face.  Baby Face was "easy" -- she was perpetually in heat and thus perpetually pregnant.  Whenever we moved to a new locale, which was every six months to two years, Baby Face would immediately become pregnant.  Ergo, that sister was always finding a new litter of kittens in her bedsheets, clothes closet, under the bed, in a carboard box in storage -- wherever.  I think Baby Face single-handedly -- well, with all the male company she kept -- populated the entire western United States with kittens.  Certainly the West Coast because we lived in all three states -- Washington, Oregon, and California -- and she had litters in all of them.

For a while we had a beautiful Irish Setter but he kept knocking me down, me being about two or so.  He wanted to rub up against me but only ever succeeded in knocking me over.  So when he approached, I would start swinging away in order to preserve my upright status.  Sometimes I won, sometimes he did.  Old Red.  He used to hide under the family Studebaker, a low-sitting car, on the 4th of July when the fireworks all went off, and always got himself stuck.  My dad would have to crawl under the car and carefully drag him out.

And for my fifth birthday, I got a dog.  A small one, part dachshund but heavier, longer fur, and little bigger.  I named her Heidi. She pooped prolifically and everywhere, and if a door opened, man, she was gone -- she was pretty fast on those little legs.  Would ignore your calls.  It was rare we caught her; she'd amble back home when it damn well suited her.

What used to irritate me was how my sisters would say, "She's not your dog!"  That is, until it was time to feed her or scoop up the piles of dog poop in the yard.  Then it was, "She's your dog!"  This obvious hypocrisy riled me, but apparently didn't bother my sisters any.

Those animals, sans Blackie, made it to the farm with us in August of 1965.  Heidi was in 7th heaven (ever wonder where that phrase comes from?  someday I'll tell you), running through the wheatfields, at least until the stalks grew taller than she was.  Then it was hard to find her way home.  You'd see her jumping mid-field, ears flapping in the air, trying to get her bearings.  She lived to about fifteen.  She went blind but had made a trail around the house and would run laps all day for exercise.  You could look out any window at any time of day and in a couple of minutes, Heidi would come trotting by.  She was a long-distance trotter until the very end.

Frosty, from my Uncle's litter over the hills, soon joined Heidi.  They were about the same size.  I don't know how, but Baby Face got pregnant again and before too long -- within a few years -- we had about a dozen cats, and maybe half were feral.  My dad could sometimes tame them.  He was far more patient with animals than with his kids.

We got more dogs over the years.  My favorite was Puddin.  This must have been the winter of '66-'67 because my oldest sister had come back up from California.  It was snowy and on the bus ride home my other older sister thought she spotted a puppy on the hill in a snow drift.  So she walked back to the hilltop and, sure enough, a sweet little black and white shepherd of some sort was now in the family.

He was a great dog.  He and I would play rough in the yard.  He loved to be rolled and tossed; he'd then run back and start gnawing away at an arm, a hand, my foot.  He never broke the skin; he instinctively knew exactly how much pressure to put on and never went past that.  If I threw him too hard and he yelped, he'd come running back in for a quick hug and then we'd begin anew.

One mother cat was a little off her rocker.  She took a couple of litters of kittens out into the wheatfields and didn't come back with them.  The second time this happened my dad realized what was going on and had her spayed.  Anyway, this had happened again.

We had moved my dad's mother -- we called her "grandmother" with all the emotional distance that phrase implies -- into a mobile home on the property and dad had built her a deck to sit on.  To sit and watch the wheat grow, I guess.  Anyway, one of her sisters came to visit and they were both sitting out on the deck.  On top of the long hill in front of our house, where they were facing, they could see Puddin -- way up on top of the hill.  He was moving very deliberately in a kind of zig-zag pattern down the hill, taking his time.  This was late May, early June, and the wheat was about knee high, so they could see Puddin's back but nothing else.  They commented on this and wondered what he was doing.  It took him about 30-40 minutes to get all the way down to the gravel road, usually a three minute jaunt.

And when he got there, he nosed out this skinny, scrawny little kitten that the mother cat had abandoned on the top of that hill.  Puddin had patiently herded this little cat all the way home.  If you think animals cannot feel gratitude, let me tell you, that cat never left that dog's side.  She would constantly rub up under his chin and he'd be sitting on his haunches, looking at you like, "What did I ever do to deserve this?"  But he stoically put up with this cat's undying affection until the she finally passed away -- after a happy cat life around the place.

Puddin and I would go jogging together.  We'd be toodling down the road at a comfortable pace when, all of a sudden, I would sprint and get a ten yard lead.  Puddin would speed up, catch me, then lope along for a few strides looking over at me as if to say, "You think this is fast?!"  Then he'd hit the afterburners and scream down the road at high speed, leaving me far behind in the dust.  That was our game.

The last dog we had when I was growing up was Pepper.  Small, black and white mutt.  Her thing was birds; when she was a puppy she would chase after birds flying, looking up into the sky the whole time -- and fall in a ditch or crash into a bush, or worse, a tree.  She eventually figured out how to navigate the obstacles on the ground while chasing the birds in the sky.

Pepper would greet me every morning in a special way.  

My "bedroom" was the coal cellar which you entered through a trap door in the floor of the pantry.  One corner of the cellar was paved and had walls made of a kind of strong cardboard.  The rest of the basement was dirt.  Yes, I was interred in the earth for the duration of my adolescence.  It really felt that way.   One could probably theorize accurately about the psychological symbology of that experience.

In the morning, when I would lift the trap door with my shoulders, Pepper would race over, flip onto her back, and I would blow a big fat raspberry on her tummy. "PHAATTT!!!"  It was our little ritual.

I've not had a pet as an adult.  I would probably get a dog, but I've lived my adult life in cities and it never seemed appropriate to me, having been raised partly on a farm and seeing how absolutely happy a cat or a dog is on a farm, to raise one within the confines of a city.

My roomie in California had a dog.  It was her condo.  At first she had two little dogs, elderly, who passed within months of one another.  Then she got a German shorthair retriever, a very high-strung, hyper-active dog who couldn't be alone and who never really figured out that I lived at the other end of the hall.  I would walk out of my room and be attacked at high speed by a dog barking madly as he dashed down the hall.  I was tempted to whack him on the nose out of fear and frustration, though I don't believe in hitting animals.  It felt like self-defense. I was never sure if he was going to bite or not.  Otherwise, he was a total goofball.  Loved to chase balls. Wyatt.

Where I'm staying now, there's a springer spaniel, a little female, who's totally codependent.  She can only be where a human is.  If she's in, she wants to go out, but only if you'll go with her.  If you let her out and don't accompany her, she'll sit on the front step facing the door, staring sadly, wondering why she's been abandoned and tossed so thoughtlessly out of her home.  She's sweet enough in temperment, and has a wide assortment of stuffed animals that I throw or play tug of war with, but sometimes I wish she'd just go run around outside.  Be a dog, you know?

We do have one ritual together.  I'll say, "Cows!" and Toni will immediately jump up and start running around in circles.  This increases in rapidity as I put on the bib overalls I wear down to the barn.  Then as we approach the barn, she starts running in circles on the NW corner of the building, where the door is.  She runs these tight circles until I approach, then runs one big, next-to-last circle around me, one more tight one ending right where the door cracks open.  She's sure there's something in the barn to chase!  A rat or a cat.  (I once managed to quietly save a mouse from her without her noticing.)  

Once we hit the barnyard to fill the feed troughs, she scours the ground because who would want to miss out on that delicious doggy delicacy, dried cow pies?  What could taste better?  I try to get her to stop but she is a dog after all, I guess.  She scared up five pheasants this morning, all hens, and was halfway to the creek after them before I could get her to come back.  Hunting season hasn't opened yet, dog.

Years ago, I dreamed of having a pick-up truck.  I mean this quite literally.  I dreamt one night that I owned an old, beat-to-hell late Fifties white Ford pickup, body all banged up, and I woke from that dream the happiest I've ever been in my life.

Well, now I've got the pick-up truck. Seems like the next thing I should get is the dog.