kid knowledge

Here's what I do know.

I know horrid shades of carpet, plaid couches and dirty linoleum.

I know the curves and contours of my father's broad, hunched shoulders bent over his drawing table.

I know the size and detail of that shape at the exact distance I stood in his doorway with a baseball and mitt, then slipping away back to my bedroom, unnoticed, leaving him to try and try and try to meet a deadline.

I know controlled chaos.

I know the shrill, eager rhythm of my sister's reading voice in a minivan smelling faintly of vomit, hurtling through the tri-state universe's concrete veins and arteries, a missile of tightly wound family nerves aimed at wholesome experience.

I know the optimal coordinates at which to center a pile of raked leaves in front of a swingset, to ensure a soft landing.

I know the wrinkled bark of the dogwood tree in our front yard, the two or three agreeably curved branches that allowed a comfortable seat when I needed to wallow in short-lived childhood resentment.

I know the smudged, soggy green of grass stains, and I can recall the period of several years over which they slowed and then finally ceased their reign of terror over my faded hand-me-down jeans.

I know I miss grass stains.

I know the thumping whir of my ceiling fan did not drown out the hushed, urgent murmurs of my parents arguing about money in the kitchen after we went to bed.

I know pressing, damply cerebral nightmares, the inexplicable loss of basic motor skills, the desperate reaching for an ill-defined, shrouded construct of grave importance.

I know the shame of discovering I needed glasses --

the first inkling that my body might not be a faithfully flawless machine to do my bidding obediently until old age, when it would be perfectly content with farting irreverently and drifting gently

in the shallow end of the community pool, like Grandpa's.

I know the air-conditioned, vacant hours and days of summer in a small town,

each minute seeming to elapse in twice the normal time,

adolescent love, curated mix CDs, cheap iced tea and hair stringy with chlorine.

I know the kid with the straight-A report cards and piles of comic books,

the gullible grin and the walkman always needing new batteries

who at some point settled in and buckled up

and, bewildered, watched the years close over him and rush past him

like the warm, frothing waves of Jersey's grey-green Atlantic did

during the Julys back then

who is inside this disheveled lump of a man

whispering pleadings bent toward instinct

the cadence and texture of his voice

when I try to listen,

when my mind is still and vulnerable,

nudging me towards myself.

The Summer Train

      One of the sensations that I can conjure if I concentrate, with which I also become reacquainted a few times a year or so, is the vaguely electric warm potential of summer nights in the still streets of my hometown. It is a crystal clear remnant of years of repeated circumstance piled into my memory, not connected with any particular scent or event or person (I find that many of my memories are attached in this way). The feeling of being out and about, actively bored, tracing familiar paths walked hundreds of times through silent block after silent block, is an unbroken thread that winds itself through the tapestry of my adolescence, connecting familiar faces and phases and tracing the terrifying transitions that came with growing up. 

     At 14 and 15, we darted through yards and shadowed parks playing man hunt, a game where most of the allotted playing time was spent walking alone through the night searching for movement in your peripheral vision. When the enemy was spotted, a chase might unfold through the neighborhood the raw exhilaration of which wouldn't be matched for months of high school. My first kiss took place after a long walk around town late at night, stretching my curfew, finding shadows to wrap ourselves in between the pale orange beams of streetlamps. If nothing else, my friends and I would wait until after midnight and stream out of basements or off of porches into the night just to buy half gallons of cheap iced tea and walk the railroad tracks that cut through town until we got too sleepy to balance.        

     In my adult life I remain assured and am regularly reminded that I will always be in love with the sound of that train's distant dependable whistle cutting through the thick warm air of small town nights in the summer. It seemed during the slow procession of my childhood and adolescence that a short time into summer vacation, a night would come when I would find myself lying awake in bed listening to the train fly by, and mentally mark the close of another year added to my body and mind. The train's rumbling progress brought with it cascades of emotion, long imagined adventures with juvenile crushes, sorrow and confusion over expiring friendships, fear and excitement of witnessing my own body and identity fluctuate and develop. As the bizarre whispering tendrils of sleep crept into my sensory landscape, I would float out into the still orange night and do battle with the monsters of youth.

      The hurdles of small town boredom, ever increasing in height as we grew up, led us not only into the tumbling, socially charged catharsis of drugs & alcohol in parents' basements but also out and up, in the middle of the night, onto the roofs of school buildings, where I found my first personal niche. After midnight, we circled the high school, spotting possible weaknesses that would allow us to explore new sections of the huge expanse of roof under which we spent overstimulated, half-awake hours during the mornings and afternoons. We chose school buildings for their general sturdiness and strange, blocky geometries that allowed us to wander the roofs without worrying about being seen from the ground. I was most often the first to scout a new way up, the most daring climber, and the quickest with encouragement when one of my friends got spooked or claimed to be too tired to take a lap around the roof at 2am on a Friday night. When the corners, gaps and shadows of the high school roof had been exposed to us, and we had ridden the waves of adrenaline that carried us through those first expeditions into the unknown, we spread out onto other roofs around town because it just seemed like the natural thing to do - we cherished those close calls with janitors, the slinking through darkness to seize our chance to climb, but above all, the heart-pounding pleasure in getting away with something so innocuous but delightfully against the rules. Thus was my appetite for adventure forged in the tepid coals of small town adolescence - excitement had to be cultivated, not encountered, so the burden of finding an outlet for our pent-up angst and energy resided entirely in our imaginations.

      On visits to my home town nowadays, I'll often pick a night to stay up a bit later, until the traffic of errand-runners disperses, leaving silent streets in a near-vacuum waiting to be filled by the rusty echoing howl of the train's whistle. I amble over the cool floors of the house I grew up in, grasping onto the excitement for the known-but-unknown that I grew up with, reduced now to a faint unsettling deja vu that my mind manipulates and rearranges the older I get. My hand turns the lock and slides the chain in its housing, a ritual made reflexive by hundreds of nights of quiet practice. I step out, or rather my trusty legs carry me, every step and movement printed in muscle memory, the cracks in the sidewalk looking just right, the night enfolding me reliably. I am far removed in time, and I walk in the middle of the empty road, and the tangerine street lamps evince silhouettes of past lives, when it seemed like everyone I loved was within arms' reach and we had perpetual plans to meet at midnight just to be near each other. On a night like this I will walk and think and feel until my soul is reacquainted, however briefly, with the billowing sense of possibility that caused the summer nights of my boyhood to nearly vibrate, and I will breathe in the still blackness, retracing my younger self's steps I'm sure, remembering pieces of me and wondering how they fit together.

About a rock climb, told sloppily in the second person

From a mile out it looks bizarre, more than improbable, a stout lump of sweeping lines and pillars erupting out of the plains for no discernible reason, God's 8th grade art project. It was a distant silhouette the night before that could just be made out from the lawn where tents were sloppily erected by the light of headlamps, but it didn't need to make sense then, in the heavy darkness, separated from you by a night of dense melatonin dreams.

To get to those perfect, soaring cracks, that will today chew you up and spit you out slowly and methodically, you have to humbly scramble up sharp talus and brush for a few hundred yards that probably feels like much further, and it's like you're tiny worshippers swarming towards a temple, laboring up its slopes in a shadow of otherwordly nature. Which you are in a sense, your fingers and knuckles ready to spill sacrificial blood, packs full of ceremonial trinkets and attire well worn by ritual.

The different sizes have been covered, you've tried and finished a few. Hundreds of feet of unreal, perfect straight-in hands. Insecure fingers and ring locks. Steep, unforgiving fists and wider that make you sweat and swear and nearly weep. Here, stamina and pure grit are rewarded rather than flashy, technical movement; you have to dig deep. The line whose proud length you now nervously examine as you rack up and tie in in the beating afternoon heat is the most coveted in the guidebook. A grim, perfectly symmetrical chute of grey-brown igneous rock split by a continuous thin crack on its inside left corner. The chimney starts on a gentle slope and curves quickly upward, steepening to just shy of vertical for 130 feet and change. The crack is steep and discontinuous, undistinguished on its own, but this line isn't just another crack is it, no, it stands out because of a sobering geological coincidence the consequence of which you're about to know intimately: the width of the chute happens to match an average human being's wingspan all but perfectly. The idea is to spread out arms and legs and reach, push, scratch, heave, worship friction, up and up as the walls inch closer together mercifully and you're finally allowed holds and a stance atop a pillar.

This is a bit above your limit, you know. Just a bit. You could be stronger. Fitter. You could have done wall sits and lunges over the past few weeks to prepare - damn, that would have been a good idea. It probably won't go. It's too hard. Too sustained. You begin.

Inside the chimney as you move up the start, what you didn't realize from the base becomes searingly apparent - this thing has been baking in the sun all day, you've elected to climb in a microwave. Dumbass. It's a little after 4. The low sun hammers your back. The rack is leaden, augmenting gravity.

The first moves comprise shaky laybacking as you resist the dreaded full stretch. Submitting, you turn and reach, palming the opposite wall, then extending your legs outrageously. Your calves engage, feet pressing out and down, and a dull burn sets in. Tourists point and murmur, gawking from the distant walking path. It's comically, tangibly hot. Push out, scoot the feet up, do it again. And again. Claw and desperately try to jam in the crack when you can. Anything to take a fraction of your weight off of your screaming legs. You've made some progress up the chute, but it stretches up and away and you can't see the top, it's too far, you're moving so slowly. Each added second spent to hastily slot a nut in the crack yields precious ground to the advancing pain.

The moves are rhythmic, regimented; the back of the chimney moves slowly but steadily down through your aching vertical world as your progress accumulates. You taste bitter, dirty sweat. The climbing is singularly physical but you've nearly left your body, it's not helping, the legs quiver when they're planted for too long, calves rock solid lumps of pain. But the platform is there, and leading up to it are holds, precious holds, if you can reach them and rest your lower half for even a second, you know you'd have it in the bag. Growling, desperate groans and animal barks escape your teeth. Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten. It hurts. You reach down to place a cam, you haven't done so in too long, fifteen, twenty feet, it takes eons, it's sloppy, but it will do, a few desperate seconds and the rope is clipped, you look up, wince, your left foot slips, hip rotates out, weight comes entirely onto your shoulder and arm, you're done, you can fall, take, no, a noisy exhalation and the foot is back wedged into the corner.

Up. Up, because it's the only direction that has ever made sense. Up, while your body is young, while time allows it, while the sense of urgency that chased you to the desert and the Rockies and jagged canyons and shitty slabs and bird shit-covered ledges and smelly cars with strangers hurtling through the night to suffer and sweat and fester in tents for a three day weekend remains unexpired. Up, because the pain is heartbreakingly worth it, more clearly, acutely worth it than you can ever remember until it's in you and through you and out of you in gasps and hoarse, croaking yells through peeling lips as your hands find the holds and you crawl onto the platform and collapse, your partner exhaling, the tourists on the road offering faint whoops and clapping, your muscles and skin a sad wreckage, the route done on sight, the accomplishment spectacularly meaningless in the grand scheme of the sport and in the world in general, the solitary satisfaction of which tears a gaping grin into your arid mouth as you lay on dusty rocks and breathe.

Image is from Mountain Project. Not me. 

Collected

Imagine that I could weave knowingly through faces blurred, collected

lightly touching but not committing

dancing over investments and plans and knocking things over here and there

holding on to the hem of your shirt as you walk away

is that it? are we done?

Imagine my ark of the familiars, my ushering in of the great ones, the ones that looked me in the eye

so they are within arm's reach

and would come if I called, in seconds.

See it as a house with no right angles, where I am surely supported by lattices of hands and elbows where it is not frowned upon to sip whiskey from a coffee mug

and the strung-together words tumble out too quickly for anyone to really understand, but we get it

oh, we get it, yes! of course

It is important to be fast here, so fast, to deliver the message in time

because we are slipping by so quickly, unmoored almost as soon as we arrive, the perceived urgency of purpose making us into equal and like charges.

here we are, and we are beautiful, and we are so hurried, needing, perpetually about to leave.

I have touched and hugged and, at my worst, waved

to too many of those who are about to leave.

and did we cover it all? I'm not sure, I'm never sure.

I will stand dependably and happily nearby, watching

bewildered, because it seems like in the space between two heartbeats

against the white noise formed by the shuffles of feet on wood paneling

and the muffled creaks of bodies settling onto cheap furniture

we all acknowledged that this expires, this belonging

we tacitly sold this moment to memory.

Morocco

On that cold Sunday morning, cold enough so that it felt justifiable to stay in bed past 10 o'clock, because it was soft and warm and electric underneath the blankets, the blinds drawn against the reluctant grey of the late autumn sky, I learned that the only woman I had ever really believed I would die for was going to walk out of my life the same way she had entered - like a sudden gust of wind that blows the screen door out of reach, like a strong wave that finds you tentatively wading, stronger than you were ready for, whose spray is so cold it makes you gasp.

She didn't even have to tell me, it just occurred to me there, watching her smile and cry. I was perplexed momentarily, twirling a strand of her hair around my index finger - I couldn't think of a reason she might have to be upset. Some mornings on my commute, when the heat is tuned just right on the train, when my mind can't help but sift through memories fading at the edges, I can still recall how her breath felt on my cheek, and the particular way she used to place her palm against my chest. Yes, she had those freezing cold fingertips.

“Of course,” I thought to myself then, the realization only slightly raising the speed of my heartbeat. This explained the little mysteries that dotted what I knew about her, the desperately little I knew. Why she had told me she was selling her perfectly functioning mid-2000s Honda Civic, the car she picked me up in twice, in which we made love parked along the cul-de-sac down the street from her parents' house. Why she would change the subject when I mentioned spending New Year's together. And yes, she skipped to the next song on the mix CD I made her when she recognized “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

Well. It's funny and sortof pathetic now, but yes. Of course.

The lump was building in my throat; I was beginning to feel like I would shatter at the slightest touch, watching the tears plot curves down the bridge of her nose, her fingers gentle icicles on my collarbone.

“I'm sorry, I couldn't figure out how to tell you. I'm sorry.”

“You're the only one who has ever made sense, though. Don't you see it?”

She winced. Those magnetic grey eyes, the way she would gaze at me, relaxed but intent, when we talked. Fuck, she *got it.* She was so much smarter than me, more articulate, more defiant, no trace of lethargy. She understood how profoundly sad the simple matter of life is, and at the same time, how wonderful. I had not, and still have not, felt more alive than I did during the week I had with her.

“Where?”

...

“Morocco.”

Morocco.

I am older now, and my life has built up a regularity and security that I appreciate, for the most part. I do valuable work for people, and pay the bills, and walk my dog, and vacuum my apartment once a week. I spend 36 minutes on the train on weekday mornings, and when I can't shake those eyes from my thoughts, when I remember how our bodies fit so perfectly together, I feel like a little kid again, getting yelled at. I have to shift my weight uncomfortably, and glance around, clenching and unclenching my fists. In those moments, I'm quite certain that when the doors open on my stop I'll run towards the eastern horizon, you can't see it through the skyscrapers but it's there, and I won't stop, until the city gets smaller, until the sidewalks turn to chewed up empty lots and snaking overpasses, until my lungs and arteries burst, and I know I'll ignite, and the wind will blow my ashes East, over the ocean, out, out of here. To Morocco.

NJ Transit

Human beings stand and lean and crouch and squat, arranged nearly unconsciously according to their preferences for personal space. These are clumps of tangled molecules ordered miraculously in a configuration permitting blinks, blood flow and higher brain function.

Unfaltering gazes rest on screens suspended from the ceiling of this chamber, which rumbles faintly and seems to ceaselessly bustle. Some screens are mounted on pillars. They are waiting for The Number to appear, which upon its blinking into being will indicate to where they should briskly accelerate, herding through a doorway like lambs.

Many of them are well-dressed, neatly buttoned and zipped, veritably packaged. It's likely that this happened this very morning, the packaging. It is a prerequisite for the privilege of trading in acceptable social currency. Handshakes, nods, glances, how are you, doing OK, great, that's great, that's wonderful. Start slipping in this area and you notice that your personal space expands quickly.

The people watch one screen or another, sometimes craning their necks to and fro between screens in two different places, in case one is more up-to-date than the other, in which case The Number would appear there first. All of the screens show exactly the same list, which includes the names of places that are in various ways not The City.

The people lean against railings, pillars, friends, and luggage. They sit on steps. They are multi-colored. If you were to ask, the consensus on how their day went would be some degree of Pretty Good. These watchers, gathered here together for a few minutes, have pasts and futures that spread in all directions away from now like spilled water on the floor. They have achieved this and that, have slept in strange places, have hurt badly, have managed to wake up every day so far, their veins and arteries ferrying blood circuitously day after day, as they will continue to do until reluctantly forced to stop.

There is a man in wrinkled jeans leaning on his child's stroller as he waits for The Number to appear. His gaze is tired but abiding, patient. Patience in The City usually follows fatigue and resignation rather than effort. Here, it is simply built into this particular routine, because The Number always appears if one waits for it.

A student, a girl with thick dark glasses and tights, sits on the steps and watches, out of the way, her knees and toes turned in. Today, she has consumed slightly over two-and-a-half cups of coffee, thirty-seven minutes of NPR, and the passing glances of one hundred and eleven men between the ages of 17 and 58.

An older chinese woman in a red coat with red luggage walks, looking, then pauses, then seeing the directed gazes, takes up her post. She has two grandchildren, which is plenty, she supposes.

A young man and his girlfriend stand supporting each other, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders, watching, murmuring, but both watching.

I am watching for The Number too, having ricocheted through my own confusing series of events, which is apparently called Life Until Now. We have each pinballed here, off of failed relationships and paystubs and Things-That-Almost-Were, and we watch the screens. We are here. It occurs to me that our waiting for The Number is a shared purpose that will dissolve in as wonderfully automatic a fashion as it assembled us here, unacknowledged.

For these few minutes, we are a cult. We could join hands and exalt The Number, could sing hymns, could dance ceremonially, could hand out pamphlets. We have things in common, I know.

And then, The Number is there. An exhalation rustles through the people in the chamber, followed by the clicking of hurried footsteps, and the rhythmic tap of wheeled luggage on the tiled floor. Pockets are patted, tickets clutched, coats thrown over shoulders. And we file out of the chamber, and disperse, swept into other trajectories, our clocks more or less accurate, our eyes straight ahead.  

Banner

And a banner will unfurl atop the solemn parapets of your fortress, and eager hands will stretch it taught against the winds in which it billows, grasping for purchase, and held at such an angle that the shadows leaping forth from the setting sun, clotted red in the west, recede reluctantly, so eyes for miles straining, blinking against the settling dust of day's end, when turned toward the patch of cloth on stone, settle upon the letters emblazoned, reaching, gasping, turned out before the dusk falling on your kingdom, laid bare:

WELCOME HOME.