Yogi Bear stole picnic baskets. That was his schtick. What an odd topic for a cartoon. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to make it a goal to run off with somebody’s picnic basket one day in the near future. It’s a bucket list thing. The wicker basket would be filled with sandwiches lovingly made by a stranger. Fancy cheeses, spicy mustard from a glass jar, maybe some champagne. Cloth napkins and actual silverware. Some pie in tupperware.
What a nice treat it will be to eat their looted lunch. Sandwiches taste better when somebody else made them. Any person with whom you’re close will make you a sandwich. Just ask them. You’ll be surprised. Much rarer, however, is eating a sandwich made by somebody who siddenly hates you.
A local grocery store features a special section for unique cheeses. Rather than the traditional cooler for Velveeta and its cohorts, it’s a low cooler, almost decorative. One strolls around the oblong, but circular, free standing receptacle, taking a tour of the world’s cheeses, quesos, Kase. It’s a refrigerated moat of cheeses arrayed at hand level, for picking whilst strolling. Cheeses that pass for exotic: goat chevre, gruyere, aged this-and-that and other cheeses that require umlauts and accents to spell. Cheese triangles jut out toward the shopper, vying for their attention. Round pieces mimic body parts: butt cheeks and jowls, mainly. Square stacks of cheeses that were once part of the same monster block are like soft Legos for kids and adults alike. A store staff member carefully arrays these cheeses (I would hope this person is specially trained in cheese presentation, or should I say seduction…a specialist cheese raider who came from the European division to manage Portland’s cheese presentability). Whatever the actual case, I can attest that a latenight employee removes all the carefully placed cheeses into a rolling cart and then disappears into the back. I wonder how all that handling affects my already softened Gouda.
The rind on some reminds me of an athlete’s unhealthy elbow skin. If the shopper walks 360* around the fancy cheese cooler and pays special attention, they’ll find a nondescript box of end pieces nestled in amongst the larger braggadocious pieces. It contains cheese cutting mistakes and regrettable remnants of otherwise successful cheese cutting endeavors. I fucking love it. Basically, it showcases unpresentable cheese pieces. It’s labeled “pieces under $5, and I always feel like royalty because I can taste a $50 cheese piece for the price of Kraft Singles. Weird titles of cheese end up in the bin. And weird shapes that are impossible to resist. One is called, simply “MAXX Cheese”. You may find oddities like impossibly thin slivers of more rind than actual cheese, and odd portions of cheese wheels that are both round and square, in defiance of all I know about cheese physics. For what it’s worth, I’ve found the rind to be deliciously musty sometimes, like a friendly but smelly goat on a farm. The rind on other cuts looks like an athlete’s unhealthy elbow skin. And for $2 in this land of international plenty, why NOT try the ugliest, most forsaken cheese?! It’s a damn gift, it is. Just a generation ago, Soviets stood in line for days as the great experiment of communism fizzled out, just to get a loaf of bread and maybe a whiff of The People’s Cheese.
I may have found my muse in irregular cheese “ends and pieces”. I bought a miniature triangle of Fontina for $1.88 that was so thin I could almost roll it up. I ate it in front of the fridge as I unpacked my groceries. It didn’t even make it to the cheese compartment of my old General Electric. And there’s a shingle of Aged English Cheddar in my hand right now from the $5 receptacle that smacks my face with its sharpness every time I bite it. It’s thin like a Pop-Tart, and that seems to make every bite more savory….surely, any human scientist would concur that a thinner cheese surface area exposes more taste particles to my mouth-brain (tongue), thus resulting in a more pungent cheese experience. And the crumbly nature of the harder cheeses is enhanced by a thinner cut.
So, forget the big money cheese monoliths, buy instead the bits and pieces. Treat yourself to cheese rejects. Boycott big cheese. Adopt, don’t shop. And don’t talk about the resistance whilst simultaneously buying the cheese of the 1%. Big cheese is so out of fashion. George Costanza’s hedonistic piece of cheese “the size of a car battery” doesn’t belong in today’s world of hybrid cars, tiny houses, and skinny jeans. Shop the $5 cheese bin for the betterment of cheese, for variety, for the world, and to be a cool guy, like me.
In a nebraska farm town years ago, I had a cup of coffee during lunch with another sales rep. At the time it was an out-of-place request, a whim accompanied by a pang of awkward self consciousness when the waitress offered to make a pot just for me. In hindsight it was revelatory: coffee in the daytime? At a business lunch? Who does that? Two cups I had during that sitting, on the side of an allegedly famous steak sandwich. That day I was freed from the disgusting bonds of the traditional flat, syrupy soda that every other America seems to swill with their vittles. Instead, I could enjoy some measure of midday respite with a hot beverage, enjoyed with the same slow reverence as a cigarette smoked in a barcalounger. Not just the black brew itself, which I’ve come to see as medicinal, but also the service; the pouring has become therapeutic to me, the personalized attention of a half-cup warmup. It’s as traditional and comforting as service gets in the routine of a traveling sales rep, away from home. Oly’s was the name of the joint that served me that coffee, in Paxton, Nebraska, on a day so cold my pens all froze while cataloging heavy equipment at a local feedlot, and wouldn’t write. The restaurant was known for the giant polar bear in the foyer, 8 feet tall. It was both stuffed as in having been taxidermied, and stuffed into a yellowed glass case of decrepit antiquity to keep folks from touching it. A more terrifying, cruel relic I can’t imagine. I’d feel less queasy dining next to an iron maiden from the Spanish inquisition, or a burnt Salem witch.
Years later, I moved to the Pacific Northwest, bringing my coffee habit with me as I drove to Portland through Wyoming (2 leisurely cups, Penny’s Diner, Rawlins), Salt Lake City (Mormons don’t drink coffee, but they sell it…their only true god is profit), and through Idaho (always a to-go cup in Jerome and then a sit-down cup in Nampa) on to Oregon (Pendleton whiskey and grinds).
I found that the milder temperatures of the Northwest’s winters failed to penetrate my Rocky Mountain-hardened senses. It rarely froze overnight and my down coat stayed in the closet. It was temperate when measured by degrees. But the constant humidity, low gray skies, and short days bored into my warm core like mountain bark beetles, and chilled me in a different way. Warm clothing couldn’t address it, but coffee softened the permafrost therein. And so my coffee intake doubled, tripled, became a requisite for which I was known. I didn’t drink it in the morning, oddly enough, unless the hotel actually put a cup in my hand, or unless I worked with somebody who insisted. But I drank it at every other woke moment, and I felt like an addict, eventually swearing to anybody who would listen that I was admirably cutting down.
Then an iconic piece of Pacific Northwest art found me, and my coffee addiction became quickly vindicated. Twin Peaks. The original show from 1990, in which Kyle McLachlan plays a strange, meticulous FBI Special Agent named Cooper, in love with the Northwest countryside, where he is investigating the murder of Laura Palmer. The show is set in northern Washington state, and filmed in an appropriately drizzly Washington town, Snoqualmie. In his travels on the road to solve crime, he dons a rigid black suit, muses on every detail of his accommodations, particularly fetishizes good pie and coffee. The Northwest suits his east coast character nicely…it’s no coincidence that the movie features berry pies prominently, here in the land of berries. He advises the local Sherriff to give himself once daily a present, whether it be a nap in his office or a “cup of hot, strong black coffee”. He describes the coffee with vigorous emphasis on the adjectives emitting from his stoic jaw: “hotttt, sssstrong….”. Doughnuts are featured prominently in the show, layed out in artful stacks on every table of the movie, seemingly. Throughout the show, Cooper relishes as he sips, usually from traditional diner coffee ware that clinks so pleasingly in the saucer. It’s an exquisite taste of film noir Americana, expertly wielded by the awkward directorial Lynch through his ceaselessly upbeat Agent Cooper. Cooper celebrates a good cup of coffee with the hyperbolic aplomb of an overjoyed simpleton, and meticulously documents the best coffee experiences to his tape recorder for the mysterious Diana therein.
So, it could be that the Pacific Northwest, having spawned Starbuck’s into all our collective consciousness some 40 years back, and offering a wet dishrag of an extended winter season, validates the worst coffee addict in me. For if Agent Cooper can be as brilliant and upstanding a protagonist on several cups a day, unimpeachably presentable, surely I can sell some fucking auto parts all over Oregon and Washington, in the real world, with a cup of strong, black hot coffee in hand.
Relocating means reevaluating every item in your menagerie: is it worth keeping? Does sentimentality outweigh practicality? If it’s American to move, then it’s uber modern American to evaluate one’s knickknacks with reticence and fervor: CDs, for example. In the world of The Cloud and of MP3 flash drives, where every song is available instantly with barely a declaration of wanting it, how can one justify these fragile, inconvenient flat pieces of plastic? Only by nostalgia, and for no other reason. Some folks feel zero nostalgia. They don’t understand others’ attachment to items: sentimentality, historic curiosity, the sense that an old button channels its once-owner and the era in which she lived. Some folks are oblivious…who care’s if Lincoln once sat in this chair? It’s just wood and fabric. They may be considered coldly practical, but when it’s time to move one’s heavy, spacious life possessions to a new dwelling, those folks might be called immune, fortunate, gifted. But I am not they, and I suffer from nostalgia, oh dammit I do.
It’s a fuzzy old blanket, in a green color that divulges all the worst of the 70s that clung on into the 80s, stubbornly. I still don’t know why it was ever appealing: earth tones, a remnant of hippy-ism perhaps. It’s a baby blanket, small and square. On its avocado-green small spread are little cartoon brussels sprouts. They’re shown bounding about a field with corn cob friends and fences all about, a pastoral farm scene. It’s a “Green Giant” blanket, a giveaway, from the time of my birth, that was earned by saved can labels: peas, creamed corn. Please tell me there is no such thing as canned brussells sprout. But there’s canned asparagus, so peoples’ tolearance for mucky, dingey perserved vegetables knows no bound, apparently. And I keep this blanked ceaselessly as I evalute my things in moving across the country endlessly (7 times, soon to be 8, since adulthood). Because it’s sentimental, and I’m stricken with nostalgia. I would never use it, or even display it, this blanket, not over the back of a couch or whatever. But neither would I ever risk its vintage prestige by putting it at the bottom of a drafty door in wintertime. It’s just too valueble, because it speaks volumes about a young woman, younger than me, suddenly stuck at home, the mother of an infant, while her new husband, a man she barely knew, worked every day. She was an army wife, and like every young army wife probably wondered what the hell she had done to make herself so far from any home she’d known, shipped off out of the reach of family and friends in an era of written letters. As a feminist, she must have looked through Bronte and Shakespeare and wondered if she’d made a horrible mistake, as so many women have. These thoughts paraded across her consciousness as she watched The young and the Restless on a scratchy old TV in the humble army base quarters of a young officer family. Usually, they were cinder blocks or brick, well-used and utilitarian. And as she watched the show, she clipped coupons and recipes, studied magazines to learn ways to be a mom, to be a wife, to match the glamorous army officers’ wives she would have seen at the Commissary or the Exchange or the Class Six.
This blanket is filled with the tragedy and triumph of a woman who would soon make her life’s work raising me properly, while she fought thoughts of defeat all by herself, before post-partum depression had a name or women were allowed to serve in the army. Before cel phones, long distance phone calls had to be planned in advance and budgeted, and the quality of the voice on the line was often poot. She would call her parents and cry about the distance, the separation. She saw them so rarely that I can remember each time. They’re all dead now, every one of them. But I still have this blanket to bring me to the scratchy tv screen of my infancy, and to a beautiful, confused young mom who sat many days at home as an army bride in new, strange towns where she knew nobody amongst the similarly-transplanted dwellers of planned military communities. Each neighborhood was like a science experiment: who would make friends and adjust, who would hole up at home with only a baby to keep her company all day. And she would decide in those early days that being a mother and a glamorous army wife, and later a professional manager, an artist, a musician, but always, always a beam of sunshine was what she would do. And so she did, until she died in bed at home in her early 50s, a bed that had been moved downstairs so that her friends could visit her as she slipped away. She was suddenly the young woman again, and all her children could do was lay by her side like babies and speak to comfort her, as she couldn’t speak herself, and watch her story, her life, the accumulation of all that experience and love and fear and youth slip away like every other human being in every other family tree, ever.
She once clipped coupons in the 80s, young and blonde and home with baby Jeremy. She hoarded how many can labels to cash in on free giveaway, a soft blanket for her infant son. She mailed the clippings, with the correct postage and a little letter enclosed, and waited an interminable several weeks in an era when there was no tracking on the internet, no way to follow-up, only the hope that the requested goods would magically appear in the mail, perhaps with a letter from family or somebody far off whose face she struggled to remember as she read it. And for many years that blanket wouldn’t mean anything to anybody, but for its occasional appearance amongst the boxed-up clutter of another move. It would share with him a brief glimpse of a history in which he participated minimally, of the young army wife, of his mom. So, I’ll keep that blanket forever and cry whenever I find it again.
I traveled alone last week. Something I’ve been doing for years. I’ve always enjoyed it, even as I grumble to a rental car dashboard about loneliness. But never have my trips been so productive as they are now, since I have apparently unwittingly given myself license to enjoy the solitude, and to craft something of the experience. “Something” is whatever story comes from the meandering, whichever local trail i trudge that shows me a sore spot in the area’s history. Whatever local remembrance i find that isn’t featured in a tri-fold brochure when entering the hotel lobby. I investigate, like a journalist.
One doesn’t always get a good photo…..
A country road was marked with 50 mailboxes, all clustered together at the rural junction of pavement and dirt. They were a willy-nilly tapestry of country life, and spoke of ceaseless prairie winds, letters from family, and the big deal that for many americans onvolves driving from a way out rural homestead into town for milk and mail. Behind the mailboxes loomed an epic sunsetting cloud miles across, rising up as if the ochre prairie was being vacuumed into the sky, and screaming pink across the gray dusk. So I pulled over, knelt in the road to take some photos of the cloud behind mailbox row. A farmer drove up and stopped, asked quizzically why I was photographing his mailboxes. He had seen my figure in the road when i hsd seen his headlights, a mile off. I was inappropriately courting his mailboxes, it would seem. I explained that they were in the foreground of this beautiful composition with those clouds off yonder as a backdrop, waving my arms to express the scope of what was to him just the end of another faceless day herding cattle or mending fence. My gesticulation and animation sufficiently convinced him that I wasn’t Taliban bombing his USPS receptacle, although he was still stymied. So, he reluctantly yielded, dumbfounded by my enthusiasm, and emitted an uncertain “welllll, okay then”, and drove off.
Water Tank Hill
Later that day, I stood atop Water Tank Hill, where Colorado National Guardsmen machine-gunned striking coal miners a century earlier. I ripped my jeans crotch getting over the barbed wire into the historic landmark, camera in hand trying to push down the wire to ease my approach. The hill was marked NO TRESPASSING, but not in the way that a sensitive cultural heritage site should be, the scene of murder and a pivotal historic point at which corporate enslavement of workers became unacceptable to a young 20th century American collective. This was just a regular country marker. Some farm hand wanted to keep out cattle rustlers, not students of obscure, tumultuous American history. Never has a history-drunken writer knocked over a sleeping cow for a laugh, right? Instead, the spot was marked the same utilitarian manner that any farmer’s land would be: periodically on barbed wire strung to old gnarled wooden posts flirting with desert shrubbery.
Later at the hotel I realized that, in fact, all my denim crotches are torn, so many fences I’ve climbed. Always to get somewhere and see something, against the will of a fence and unseen farmer, but always in the interest of a local bit of story. And who is more prone to telling stories themselves than a cowboy or farmer with nothing but time and distance and a lifetime of solitary travel on his horse’s odometer, talking to the wind and congregating with a gathering of mailboxes, the only neighbors for miles. Stories like how a ranch hand’s great uncle mined coal off over those hills to the south and shot back at the feds on Water Tank Hill in 1904, or how he once came across a city kid photographing his mailboxes as if they were works of art. I shit you not, friend…crotch all tore up and all.
Boarding the plane, I lucked out when they checked my bag for free. That meant I wouldn’t need to lug the cumbersome thing around like a misbehaving child during my layover in Denver. Nor would I have to pay the check fee. I had gambled and won. Newly unburdened of my accoutrement, I stood in first class waiting to follow the line to my coach seat. First class passengers get nifty little tables and armrests between pillowy seats with lots of leg room, but before take-off, they get second class asses in their faces. As I stood in the stalled line, a first class stewardess contorted herself around me to take the pre-flight drink order of a seated flyer, and to offer him roast beef or shrimp for lunch, none of which would be offered to the herds of utility passengers sequestered behind the curtain.
I’m a grown-up adult with strict ideas of etiquette when enclosed in a plane with a horde of strangers. In general, I find flying to be unsanitary, urgent, and unpleasant. Commercial flight is a twisted and ugly view of society’s least graceful display; it’s the inflamed sweaty crotch of public places that civilized society willfully pays money to habitate. Regardless, however, of my standards regarding polite public behavior and sanitary civility, I couldn’t help think as she took his order “Sir, would you also like a fart appetizer, served quietly at head level, while I wait here in queue?”
Seen through the beams of an old expanded metal bridge whose rust is painted over silver, the water swirls in impatient circles. Its eddies come up from an impossibly deep bottom tinted a deep earthen green. Around and downward the water stirs, as it leaves the power station boxed in a perfect, square concrete moat for my viewing pleasure. It does what water does, given these parameters of human meddling; it moves along slow and agitated, tamed by hydroelectric generators and concrete routing, until freed back into the Missouri River. Upriver stands the gothic concrete form of the power house, politely rectangular, a wide, formidable bunker at the bottom and a historic sculpture up top.
The power house of Great Falls, Montana’s first hydroelectric generator is a dignified example of old-timey municipal archeology, stern and upright, 19tth century hubris given form. In the late 1800s, the town that celebrates Lewis and Clarks’ laborious historic portage down their namesake Great Falls had finally beaten the old river. They corralled it with a 175ft dam. They would drink it daily and light their new electric lamps with energy harvested from its momentum. They would dump hundreds of tons of poisonous slag into it every year for damn near a century.
Although the power house lacks Grecian columns, it wants them. Instead of ornate columns, it was given 6 tall windows, each several stories tall, arched at the top with a hint of decorative molding. They soften the façade’s concrete utility and create slender collonades out of the negative space between them, the resultant neutral gray concrete pillars. The scene’s green slurry water and classic architecture make it reminiscent of the art on a $5 bill. I’m standing on that bridge, immensely satisfied with the scene ahead and the water underfoot, having found a story that nobody else seems to be aware of. But I’m antsy because my mission has failed. I came looking for The Big Stack and found this scene of historic surplus, but they took The Stack from me years ago.
As a youngster, I made subconscious note of the smokestack at the old CF&I plant in Pueblo, CO. It can’t be torn down because it’s lined with asbestos and in a now residential area. Soon thereafter, I dreamt youthful, confused dreams in which I repeatedly fell down into its burning heart, scraping on its blackened brick walls along the way, cooking as I fell towards unimaginable heat. When I first tipped off the lip at the top, the heat raised me like a sail in the wind, charring me all the while as it floated me before gravity and the depths stole me off. It was monumental, that stack, obsolete and beautiful for the same reason the Washington Monument is beautiful, because it’s tall for the sake of tallness, an affront to gravity and ground dwelling normal folk, a phallic wart on the surrounding plains. Its entire purpose was height, and it was a round shape made of square bricks. Absolutely incredible. Much like The Stack of Black Eagle, Montana.
The Big Stack in Black Eagle, Montana was demolished in 1982 while tens of thousands of locals watched from across the river in Great Falls, weeping in anger and grief. A lifetime later, the gravesite of one of American’s tallest brick structures lured me like sirens, and I headed in its general direction in a shitty rental car, eventually finding no tower, but pausing at the power house for the above indicated reflection. I’d hoped to stand where The Stack had, to see some rubble or brick, maybe take a souvenir. It didn’t have a proper address, The Stack. I assumed it was simply forgotten and left standing, as are so many archeological treasures and triumphal manmade structures of the past. Disappointing though, to find that it had actually been demolished and swept clean as a superfund site, one still very much toxic. Nothing remained, and I couldn’t snoop around.
Heavy metals lace the ground around it, I’m told. Wealthy locals golf a few hundred yards away. Arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, chromium… all those insidious elements with heroic names that accumulate ceaselessly in the closed circuit of the human body as do memories in the mind have also accumulated in the surrounding earth. I got as close to the stack as I could get. It was no coincidence that the stack was sequestered so succesfully…those fences are modern and well maintained to keep people far away from the contaminated site, to keep them from honoring the nasty, dead pillar of poison. Too much awe is dangerous in a small town. Looky-loos and students of history and nostalgic smelters, and even lovers of a good local story, like me, can all be tainted by the dust stirred up where its giant footprint once plodded unmoving.
Photo courtesy Great Falls Tribune
When they leveled the thing in 1982, the town was still sorely bruised by the cessation of smelting in the area. Witness the same old story: a company town abandoned by the company, which had sold out and then shut down the local works, introducing the term unemployment to the place. ARCO left a wrecked economy in a town that had, up until then, existed solely to provide smelters to the Anaconda Smelting Company. Those skilled workers were so poisoned over time, and their wives and children and yards, their lungs and hearts and livestock. Generations of toxic American workers were jobless suddenly, homeless, hopeless, and toothless from lifetime exposure to toxic pollutants. So of course they watched when The Stack was brought down, many elderly and accordingly sentimental, from across the river where it must have looked like a miniature toy, an unfun toy. And of course they cheered when all that dynamite failed to level it after the first blow.
It earned consolation that moment, that day. The Stack woudn’t fall. Its final gasps likely poisoned onlookers exponentially more than in previous years, by raining stored deadly chemicals down on them. Eventually she fell, but not before some restrategizing by frustrated demolition experts. And not before reinforcing its permanent looming memory as Great Falls and Black Eagles’ dirty, sooty poisonous local hero. The entire community celebrated the demise of a structure that had become the town’s pinnacle, geographically if not ethically. It paid and fed the town’s workers, but also poisoned and enslaved them. A little bit of Stockholm Syndrome by the bedraggled residents of a beaten town.
Off yonder, mid center photo, is the hill where The Stack once stood
Months later, after standing by the Power Station, I had forgotten about The Stack. But aimless salesmanship found me in The History Museum of the town, with an afternoon to kill. And there, sure enough, on a wall in a dimly lit and amateurish museum, was The Stack staring back at me from a sepia-toned aerial view, an exhibit in the museum. Friendly little scraps of paper, hand labeled, had been affixed to the landmarks: “the flue”, “laboratory”, and “power house”, they said. That was the power station, there in the photo, whose façade I had watched as it quietly, passively belched water under my feet. And surely, off North, an imperceptible distance by scale map, above the rise that had been so carefully fenced off from me, stood “The Stack”, as rudimentary a structure as was ever pinned to the suface of the earth. It was a giant tack appended on the map and onto its poisoned hill, near a gravel quarry and rows upon rows of parked antique cars. From far off, the perspective of the photographer, it seemed anything but inert, white smoke emitting from its mouth, a black obelisk to attract aliens maybe. Colorless sepia scrub climbed at its flanks from the surrounding landscape, as stacked sandstone ramparts separated it with a final surge of elevation. It would have been a hell of a hike, up those cliffs away from the depression of the riverbed. The trains in the photo would all be gone, the parking lots, the roadway, the guardposts. But I never would have made it up that fortified superfund hill.
And so there I found myself again, having piloted a crap rental car out to Black Eagle, so close to The Stack, knowing now that I would never find it. This time, the water exiting the power station was placid like a jell-o mold. And It all made sense, the ramparts and the fencing keeping me away from where the stack shit its grounds. The signs and the fear and the park that had been artfully drawn around the dismal site. It was all beautiful, and the town of Black Eagle itself was a consolation prize for me, a history hunter. It is as rustic and sentimental as a nonhuman entity can be.
Smelter Avenue: this town only knew one thing
I’ll never understand how The Stack could have held such power, having not seen it. A local radio station is named after it. 103.9FM, plays classic rock to the busy laborers of today’s Great Falls residents, descendants of The Stack, as they wear coveralls and work less hard and more safe than their grandparents did under The Stacks’s shadow. I miss it, and I never even knew it. Was I The Stack in a past life? The Stack is gone, and the power house quiet.
The house across from me was dark and abandoned for many years. Careful gardening by the owners had made it once into a cultivated museuam. But their absence transformed into an ideal “the world without us” scenario, in which nature slowly breached all the little boundaries that the previous tenants had once vigilantly upheld. Every night the broken window facing north was visible to me as I sat at my desk looking up out my own window. It was always dark, and I imagined plants growing in the carpet from seeds that had blown in there. In the daytime, I sometimes snuck into the abandoned pool to photograph the ducks for whom it was a nice respite. In the springtime, they owned that pool more than any human owned the house. It was exclusive to them over any other resident migratory waterfowl.
For a whole summer, I snuck in, mingled with the ducks, thrilled to the otherworldly abandonment of the scene, and ate the small white grapes off resurgent vines that were reaching for the backdoor more every day. I snacked on the light green-skinned plums from the tree that reached on over to my driveway across my trash receptacles, from the day they ripened to the shaky autumn day when the last one was plucked. The Asian pears seemed never to be ready, and I had hoped to learn their delicious rhythm next time around.
One day, the upstairs light was on. Somebody had bought the house. They filled in the pool with gravel, and it’s still a fucking mess of a pile of dirt and concrete. It’s a big nasty pile of refuse. And all winter the fruit was gone and the upstairs light was on, the window bare, nobody ever in it, not once. I’d prefer if once I looked up and saw somebody in there, instead of lit emptiness. Show me a ghost, a new tenant, somebody painting the walls in there, my dead mother. Show me something, window.
Now the plum tree is blossoming again, reaching out to me and my car in the parking lot. And I wonder if I’ll be its sole fruit benefactor this season, or if the night light in the upstairs window bothers it. I wonder, really, if it bothers me. And whether the ducks will be confused, disheartened, I can only guess.
There’s an urban legend that a weary business traveler returns home and, as we sometimes do, feels dazed by his return from the road. He travels enough that his suitcase is never really unpacked…his weekend life is a spacer, a placekeeper purgatory between hotel stays, in which he continues living as a traveler, pulling clothes from his suitcase to dress himself. He does some laundry as an obligatory service, in which he pulls dirty clothes from his suitcase spread on the floor, then places the cleaned, finished laundry directly back into the waiting suitcase. He never unpacks his shaving kit, merely restocks it every saturday, and on this morning he stands in front of the mirror brushing his teeth idly. He’ll have to make his own coffee and breakfast this morning, which he ponders disregarding altogether. The hotel won’t be providing those. Those breakfast rooms at the hotels are murderously annoying anyway, overcrowded with screaming kids and too-loud phone ringtones, a blaring news channel overhead, that terrible “good enough” coffee made from a bag of concentrate. He hates it all, but is accustomed to the single serving ubiquity they offer: commercial, institutional sustenance, on demand. There is no coffee maker in his home bathroom, nobody folds the towels while he’s away, and nobody makes his bed. He brushes the teeth lazily while flipping through his dopp kit, cataloging the stolen hotel soaps that he collects and regularly donates to the local womens shelter. He finds he has left his deodorant in some other state. While fumbling his fingers through the kit, he finds something out of place, something that is not his. It’s a shiny Polaroid photo. His fingers close on it and he withdraws it from amongst the multivitamins and Cologne, flips it over as toothpaste dribbles down the brush and his chin: the subject of the photo is a maid, in light blue housekeeping garb, bent over so as to clearly show his toothbrush up to its hilt in her rectum.
I was accused recently, in a juvenile Instagram confrontation, of being willfully ignorant. Nevermind why. The phrase stuck with me later as a tv commercial showed me slow motion Stouffer’s lasagna being allegedly prepared. Cheese was being grated by hand, tomatoes sliced with a humble knife. The whole steaming presentation of pasta luxuriated in a glass pan, set to cool on a wooden table in a warm, inviting kitchen of wooden hues. It was your kitchen, or your neighbor’s kitchen or your grandma’s. Any kitchen BUT the commercial factory in which we know these frozen lasagnas are assembled by workers dressed as if in radiation suits. Every viewer of that ad is participating in willful ignorance by indulging the fantasy on the tv screen they all know to be false, and by not holding Stouffer’s accountable. As with Trump’s fake news allegations, we just allow it to go unchallenged, and thus it persists, and becomes seemingly harmless. Thusly does a mass produced chemical mess of slop become a seemingly wholesome option for a family to eat. These ads have been on tv for years, because they work, even though the dimmest viewer amongst us knows that these pasta pies are made in a factory that we wouldn’t want to see, work in, eat at, or spend any amount of time in. It’s a food factory, fighting infestation of all the things that like to eat the scraps: mice, rats, insects, bacteria. People get injured by the machinery and the industrial lighting buzzes all day while, hopefully, the FDA inspects conveyor belts for listeriosis contamination. We all know damn well that a block of hard cheese wasn’t carved up using a wooden-handled cheese slicer on a butcher block by an elderly matron in an apron, as in the commercial. The ad makes no implicit claims, but charms our sentimentality with wholesome golden tones in a dreamlike scene, in which the family isn’t actually shown, but the viewer is left to insert their own family in the idyllic, bucolic splendor of the imagination. In Medford, Oregon, is one of these factories that manufactures pre-made tv dinner-type meals. They’re supposedly natural and wholesome. One day the facility will smell like onions. The next, potatoes. Being in logging country, the building sits outside of town, faded green corrugated steel in the sun, sandy soil around it, a concrete plant across the street. A big asphalt parking lot is full of working class country cars. The brand is Mary’s, or Amy’s or some such name (again with the matronly imagery). Despite the fact that it appears to be a particle board factory or a lumber mill, it’s pretty reputable and apparently its food is high quality. A village of tarnished stainless steel apparatus live on the roof, emitting steam and smells and heat, all the things that a factory can’t sell. It pays its utility bills and probably has a grungy break room for the workers. They go outside to smoke in the prairie wind during lunch break, and while some of them may look like your grandma, nothing is made from scratch. We watch the Stouffer’s ad and allow it to show us all these falsehoods about handmade meals: blatant fabrications, thus perpetuating the lie. We are willfully ignorant, and it’s just so delicious.
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