Frenchie

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

Mid-day I went down to visit Frenchie, our neighbor next door who had come home to die. Her daughter called because Frenchie needed to be moved and the daughter wasn’t strong enough to do it.

Frenchie is 88, a feisty Quebecois. Her husband, now gone, was from Montreal. Over half a century ago they had bought their cottage in Sebastopol as a weekend retreat and eventually moved up here. She was a devoted gardener who waged perennial war on the gophers. She held dominion over this area as residents came and went and the old Gravenstein apple farmers grew old and went on. In later years she filled her home with stuffed animals to keep her company. Her menagerie, she called it.

Frenchie lay on a bed in the living room, hooked to an oxygen tank. She still had fire in her, and when prompted she could eke out a yes or a no and a fierce yet gentle smile. You could feel the shimmering though, the giving way: her struggle was palpable. I stayed for a bit, and told her she was beautiful and strong. She was a lovely lovely woman.

It was a beautiful California day that felt to me strangely gray.

That evening Anna and I went to hear Jolie Holland at the Hopmonk. A founding member of The Be Good Tanyas, Holland came out of the Gulf Coast and her musical heritage has broad Acadian roots. I told Anna I felt so fragile, that I could feel Frenchie slipping such that any loss, even the closing of the damn record store in Sebastopol, felt like a sharp abrasion. It just felt so sad. Holland’s voice was sublime and provided some measure of relief, but nonetheless Anna and I were tired and we got in one of those kinds of fights that leave one drained and aching.

I fell asleep at home and awoke at 3 and couldn’t sleep. My chest compressed with that feeling of blank dread. I went downstairs and lay on the couch in the darkness, waiting and observing. I dreamt that I was on my way to Telluride but a snow began to fall and impeded my progress. The ache slowly dissipated. At some point I felt a release and opening up somehow and I fell into a thick slumber. At daybreak the dogs went mad with barking and raced to the windows.

Later Anna came and pulled me from my stupor. We should go see Frenchie, she said. I threw some clothes on and we walked down the road. Her son Louie stood in the dewy yard by the fence. She died this morning he told us. It’s funny, the others had all been dying lately. One 88 year old neighbor just last week. Frenchie was the last to go.

I later explained to Mazie that it’s like we’re a fabric, each person a knot of sentience in an immense dense weave. And as any one creature starts to go, unravel, whatever, the area of fabric around the knot shifts and shimmers and vibrates as that knot is unraveled into the nothingness. The description is of course not quite right, but perhaps close enough.

—

I lit a candle for Frenchie and let it burn for most of the morning. What is a flame, but the release of matter over time as light and heat and disintered material? A flame, be it life or fire, is again a verb, less a noun than a process. And when the time came, my breath pressed against the flame struggling to hold purchase on the wick. But the energy of the process couldn’t withstand the prevailing force which always is and it gave way and eventually extinguished. How does a flame go out? First there is the sequence of when it waves and bucks and bows. Followed by a brief flare before disappearing. The ember tip of the wick remains for another moment, burning yet before it too goes black. Then the long trail of whisping smoke that unfurls into space tracing designs and patterns until quite suddenly that too is gone. We are left with the dissipated carbon dioxide to be absorbed by plants and in quick cycle returned to life. And the inert stick of wax awaiting the next spark.

This Life We Were Born Into

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

I just got off a crackly broken phone conversation with my friend, Bill Scheffer. It seems that more often than not that’s how they are these days. He was taking his lunch break from his work in planned giving for Planned Parenthood. He was somewhere amidst the cacophony of midtown, walking between work and Chipotle’s searching for a salad.

I was sitting in the sun on our back porch in Sebastopol looking out toward the oaks and overgrown garden beds.

I thought to myself that Bill should move to California and do development and planned giving work for Spirit Rock, a Marin mediation center that may be mid-stream in a large capital campaign. But I shied away from suggesting it to Bill, thinking to myself that “that’s not the life he was born into.”

And it’s not. At least I’m not sure it is. For Bill, family and friends are very important. And for several generations his family has been deeply steeped in Manhattan. He has lived there, and he’s grown up there. His rich network of friends and his spiritual life are centered in New York. Most of the lines tethering him to this world are anchored there. Moreover, like many of us, his parents are near old yet and it’s more important than ever to remain close at hand. That larger body needs him. It doesn’t matter how nice the job is: I might as well suggest that Bill move to Mars.

What then of the rest of us? I once dreamt of entering the foreign service. Or something like that. I studied Russian. But it was never going to happen. I wasn’t well enough equipped coming out of the starting gate. I didn’t have the temperament or the know how. No matter how much I wanted to escape, I had my own wrecked family tying me to California. I had my own past tying me to my own brand of dysfunction.

My classmate Fareed Zakaria was born to be Fareed Zakaria. I can safely say that I was not.

Which begs the question as to what life I was born into. And to that, I unfortunately don’t have much of an answer. An array of weird experiences and encounters that if not culminating in, have at least deposited me here on this sunny morning in California, not knowing even which way is up. Which is a strange state of being for 47.

It begs a larger question: For all of us, that disparate and manifold and brilliant sparks of sentience that we are, what is this larger life that we all more or less were simultaneously born into? What hope that we ever truly will divine the texture?

Birthdays

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

When I was thirteen or fourteen my mom told me she would kill herself on my eighteenth birthday.

Which she did. More or less. Except the matter is a mess more complicated than that. So much so that I’ve spent a lifetime cracking and shying away from it’s telling.

And so today I’m sad. Today is a lovely California morning. The one we all were born to live for.

Streets of San Francisco

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

A few nights ago my family and I raced through Chinatown on a Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt. Amidst pandemonium, explosions, dancing dragons, strip clubs, smoke and disaster, we cut through the crowds and down darkened alleys trying to decipher small clues on historical placards and scrawled on concrete walls. It’s the hottest ticket in town.

What I liked? It twists your sense of geography as you gyrate up and down the streets from angles. It keeps telescoping your attention from the macro (what street do we go to?) to the micro (a tiny date on a sticker posted on a mirror in a small stairwell leading up to Grant Street. It’s one of the ever fewer activities in this world that renders our devices largely useless. It’s all about pun and metaphor and the deciphering of a physical environment that is best done by humans. It leaves you racing against a surreal dragon. And best of all it makes you feel like Karl Malden running through Chinatown trying to catch a kidnapper or short circuit a bomb plot.

A rare gift to even have the chance to pretend to be heroic.

The 30th Anniversary Party

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

A few weeks ago I was reading the book commemorating the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse. It’s a beautiful compendium of photographs and memories from the Chez Panisse family, illustrating the force of that restaurant and Alice Waters and the tremendous effect they both have had on what we eat and how we do so. I think I’ve loved alice since she first entered my frame. But now I think I’ve fallen absolutely in love with her. As well as with her fantastical mercurial impossible visions that again and again have become her and our reality.

And I especially love the delightfully sour entry by her former general manager describing his experience at the 30th anniversary celebration at Berkeley back in 2001. A small meal for 150 became a feast for 600 chefs and patrons and filmmakers and artists – a soft leisurely afternoon beneath the Berkeley campanile that would evoke the spirit of the Pagnol films that long ago had inspired Waters. In the planning phase, Gilbert Pilgram, the former general manager of the restaurant (and eventual owner of Zuni) kept asking how they would manage the clean up and Alice repeated with ever more irritation that “it was taken care of.” After the big fête, everyone else had retired to the after party and Pilgram was left largely alone with a handful of Tibetans and sullen teenagers to clean up the mess. Very little had been taken care of. And so they toiled away exhausted and alone until the sun rose the next morning.

We may not be able to have a decent life without Alice. But we can’t have life at all without Gilbert Pilgram.

80%

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

A few weeks back, Dr. Daniel Feikin and I sat on our porch and he asked what I would have done if I had learned that a McMansion was slated to go up in the orchard property next door. Would I still have purchased our house?

It was a good question. I still believe that the optimal situation would have been for us to have owned the now gone orchard. And at the time that we lost it, I felt despair and longing and fear of what was to come.

But what did come? If we saw this house for the first time today, we would see a delightful meadow next door slated to become a vineyard. Lovely and quaint. We would not have hesitated to buy this house.

Less than perfect would still be good enough.

But what about the hypothetical McMansion that would have sullied our privacy and views? This house on its own is all that we need and wanted. If something lousy was happening next door, we could have balked and held out and searched for something else. We could have camped out in an apartment for two years. We could have continued to live an unsettled life well into Mazie’s high school years. Our time would have been given over to searching and exhausting real estate drives and questioning and perseverating over manifold possibilities. And whatever we found would have been compromised in different ways. Interest rates would start to rise. The houses would need work. The land would be too big or too small or too wooded. They would have been too expensive or too far from Mazie’s school or the roads too busy. There’s always something.

Years ago I worked for a plastic surgeon in San Diego. I was editing some promotional materials for him and taking forever to do it. I couldn’t stand how sloppy his old stuff was and I wanted it to be perfect. He finally sat me down over dinner at some place in La Jolla.

Andy, do you know why my facelifts come out better than those done by my partner? he asked. Because he aims for perfection, he said. He goes in there and spends too much time trying to get everything right and he bruises too much of the tissue. He makes a mess of it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?

I shook my head.

80% is good enough, he said. Nature will take care of the rest.

Not something you necessarily want to hear from your plastic surgeon. But now twenty-five years, a million miles and a dozen lives later I can see Dr. Manchester was spot on.

Adaptation and survival favor imperfection.

80% of something far exceeds 100% of nothing. Sometimes even less than good is good enough.

A New Year

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Andrew Lewis

Bolinas Alter

The end of one story. The beginning of another.

On the first day of the new year, Anna and I awoke before dawn and took Poe’s remains to Bolinas. We drove through the Sonoma and Marin darkness, past the unseen dairy and cattle hills, toward and eventually into the San Andreas fault zone. As the sky lightened we dropped into the narrow crack that separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate and we crossed over to that new continent that moment by moment is shedding itself northward and away from our world.

We left Poe at the maritime shrine on the main street along with a photograph of his younger self. Afterwards we ran on the rocky beach against the roar of the receding surf, watching the flyovers of the resident ravens and hawks.

We left Bolinas later that morning. Driving out of town, I looked to my right. An open meadow. And across stretched a line of 22 fenceposts. And on each sat a solitary raven, all warily eyeing the world. Eyeing perhaps even our own departure.

Ravens in Bolinas

The Boat

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

As far as this story goes, the boat’s journey began on the back porch of Arlo Guthrie’s farmhouse in Massachusetts. It had sat there for a lot of years. I don’t know how Arlo came to have it or what his plans were. Apparently he doesn’t really like the water.

His friend Jack, though, loved boats. He once took the thing out on Arlo’s pond that was hardly bigger than a small room. And I guess Arlo said Jack could have it.

So Jack drove the thing from Massachusetts to Colorado on a flatbed trailer and the boat pretty much sat upside down on someone’s property for a lot of years and then it was driven down to Palm Springs where it sat upside down for a lot more years. Jack may have floated it in a swimming pool just to see what it was like.

Eventually the boat came to Tomales Bay where it weathered untended to for more than a decade. The gunnels rotted out as well some of the sidings. It had once been a lovely Penguin Dinghy much like a boat that Jack had once owned that had been swept away in the great New York hurricane of 1953.

—

Just before Thanksgiving my boat building friend Brett was driving down the 1 toward Bolinas when he spied a prickly pear cactus adorned with fruit. He pulled over, got his tongs and gloves and set to gleaning a bag of fruit. He was interrupted, though, by a winsome woman, a complete stranger, who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere.

We need help, she said. We need to save Jack’s boat. She suggested that it was in some sort of imminent danger and that she needed assistance.

Well, I’ve worked on boats, Brett offered. He looked around at the neighboring docks on the bay. Where is it? he asked. I can come over and see what I can do.

The woman looked at him incredulously. The boat’s not here, she said. It’s in Sausalito.

Okay, Brett said. Give me Jack’s phone number and I can call him and I can see what I can do.

The woman became very unnerved. You can’t call Jack! she exclaimed. Everyone wants to talk with Jack. Jack calls you!

So she took Brett’s number and told him to wait ten minutes and the call would arrive.

Which it did. And by the next day Brett was in a Sausalito boat yard listening to a day full of boat yarns and traveling history and loading the boat onto a trailer hitch and towing it to Bolinas. And a few days later he was at our house standing outside the chicken house with a sack of apples in each hand, staring in reverie, wondering what our plans were for the chicken house.

Our friend Evan Nichols the writer had christened it the Room of Requirement. Everyone who stepped inside was possessed by a different overpowering vision. For Mazie, it was the ping pong hang out room. I saw a cider pressing and cheesemaking facility. Evan saw a writers retreat room. His wife Amy saw a yoga room. Anne Harley envisioned a singing studio. The vultures have found it quite useful as a dinner plate.

And Brett saw a boat restoration house.

The room is one and all of these things.

And that’s how last Monday Jack pulled up in his three quarter ton truck pulling the boat. And that’s how Arlo Guthrie’s penguin dinghy came to sit inside our chicken house. And why I will spend a better part of my winter sanding and planing and painting wood.

Because if you do things right, all of this, every bit, is required.

The First Feeding

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

The turkey vultures have come to feast.

It took three days. But they’re here now in full force. And it’s been quite the party. They circle low and Mango loves chasing them. Even the horse down in the corral down the way became excited. Our neighbor came over and was wondering what had gotten under his skin – he was prancing and snorting, his tail held high. The vultures, however, had been circling and feeding for much of the morning. In addition to the impression of their tremendous mass, what feelings do they incite in other species? The horse was clearly unnerved.

What other conjecture do the birds summon?

They are patient, keen observers. The splayed open body of the raccoon rested on the roof of the chicken house for two days before I noticed the first flyover. It was near dusk and two vultures flew slowly over the chicken house, circled once and continued on their way. They waited another two days before they began to work the body. I wonder how much they observed before they decided it was safe to eat? And do they use the close flyovers to test the animal to see if it’s still alive? Living creatures tend to run and bolt at the flyovers.
They have at least some semblance of cognition and work their food. They didn’t feed on the roof. Instead one of the birds lifted the raccoon corpse off the roof and moved it 7 feet to a spot on the ground where they could easily circle and rest while picking at the flesh. They ate the first side of the raccoon on the first evening. The next morning they rotated his body a full 180 degrees to more easily get at his other side. Later I moved the remains and hanging entrails to the tree outside our house. Within hours they had removed the body from the tree and once again were working it on the ground just outside our dining room window. Do they have a set routine in how they will dismember and eat an animal?
They may be highly social animals that work collaboratively. So far I’ve seen a primary pair that are sometimes accompanied by a third. Only one bird eats at a time. The other two either perch in the tree, on the backs of the garden furniture, or sit on the ground. In all instances they face outward toward the open meadow, watching it seems for any advancing threats. This morning when the neighbors pit approached from the meadow, the feeding raven stopped and joined the other two gazing outward. As the pit advanced, the birds slowly took flight. Two of the birds seemed to have disappeared for the day, while one remained in the tree. When my friend Danny walked outside, the bird descended from the tree and circled the carrion raccoon as if protecting it. Was the bird guarding the food? Or was it taking flight in self-defense? How do they communicate? How are responsibilities divided among the group? Is their a pecking hierarchy?
They may have an acute sense of hearing. I was watching the birds with binoculars from our dining room window. At some point my cellphone sitting on the far side of the room in the kitchen chirped when an email came in. The turkey vulture outside and 10 feet from the house started and looked up in my direction. I know for certain that I would not have been able to hear the phone from outside the house. How to test their audial and visual acuity?
They can quickly discern friend from foe and react accordingly. The first few times I walked outside in their presence they were startled and flew away. They watched, however, when I retrieved the raccoon and relocated it. And they also watched a couple times as I walked in and out of the house without bothering them. It only took a couple passes before they became accustomed to my presence and ignored me. Mango with all his bark and scampering on the other hand, is another story.
Their necks and beaks may have adapted to small prey. Watching the vulture pick flesh with it’s beak, I thought of the vultures on the Mara. The birds there have long extensible necks that they thrust deep into the chest cavities of the wildebeest, elephants, or whatever other megafauna they feed on. North America hasn’t had megafauna for at least 15,000 years and nothing on the scale of what was in Africa. Did different carrion birds evolve different beak and neck structures that would allow them to feed on different kinds of animals? Have carrion birds evolved different strategies for dismembering corpses? I would imagine that an adult vulture has a far keener understanding of raccoon anatomy than I do. They’ve undoubtedly feasted on dozens of roadkill.

There you have it. Twenty minutes of observation and six questions.

And I haven’t even planted the garden bulbs. Or assembled the apiary.

Where We At?

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

In broad strokes:

We’re set on a low ridge about 18 miles inland from the ocean. We’re high enough that the ridge holds back the maritime fog and moisture, yet close enough to the coast that we escape the summer heat of the valleys to the east. There’s lots of water. Artesian springs seep out all along on this slope, while atmospheric moisture rides in as fog most mornings.

The San Andreas fault – that neat crack marking where the Pacific Plate abrades against and is peeling away from the North American Plate runs just to the west of us. Coming down off the ridge, you can actually see the gash in all it’s violent beauty. You can even drive into it. As you approach the coast, the rounded hills bunch up like crumpled tissue. As you push out you emerge into the narrow strait of Tomales Bay where the ocean has seeped into the San Andreas. Just across the water rests Point Reyes, slowly calving away from our continent at a pace at which we can actually feel it. I hid out there last month, and from the rocks at dawn I watched the tidal pull and stared back at that old land from which I was then receding.

By another designation we’re in the Green Valley sub designation of the Russian River appellation. We have soft sandy soils. The cool moisture and the more moderate temperatures make us good for Pinot and perhaps Chardonnay, though I don’t know much about that.

Just to the south the ridgeline gives way to a wide channel that draws the moisture inland from the Pacific toward Petaluma. That swath, buffeted by cold winds in the winter and summer, is marked by high undulating grassy hills best suited for dairy and grazing. In the spring it looks a bit like Ireland. That’s where you find loads of goat farms, Bill Niman’s beef, Straus milking cows, the Cowgirl Creamery and a wide range of artisinal cheese makers.

But where we are to the north it’s considered the banana belt – a perfect marrying of temperatures that near anything can grow here. Luther Burbank’s original farm sits about two miles to the north. There he developed hundreds of new varieties of apples, stone fruit, cacti, vegetables, ornamentals and what not. He supposedly thought it was the most perfect growing environment in the world. The land we sit on has grown cherries, prunes, plums, apples. It can support Meyer lemons and blood oranges. Figs and olives and grapes and walnuts. Peaches, nectarines, lettuces, winter brassicas. California oak acorns and redwoods. You name it.

And by yet another designation, the north of us is home to a vestigial group of Algonkian speakers – Yurok and Wiyot left over from the ancient middle incursion onto the continent. They most likely stayed put on the coast while their relatives pressed onward to the east, ultimately populating the entire eastern seaboard. The Algonkians are surrounded by a once heavy population of Athabascans – later arrivals from the third migration. They had come down from the Alaskan interior and the Arctic circle, having left their Inuit and Yupik cousins sometime way back. Resourceful opportunists they filled in the territory in north eastern California. Their De’na relatives pushed further, of course, down into Idaho, Colorado and the Southwest. To the south and east of us, it’s mostly Uto-Aztecan, the domain of the Paiute that ranged into the Sierras along with many of the central valley Sonoran tribes: Colorado indians, the Chemehuevi, Mojave. Some were Quechuan. But most, like the folk down south on the coast – the Kumeyaay, Diegueño, Cahuilla – are mostly cousins of the Puebloans – all folks left behind on the great historic primary migrations from the south.

As for us, we’re living on Pomo and Coastal Miwok land. Back in the day, winters were spent on this ridge line where we now live. In the summer, families and clans settled on the perimeter of what is now called the Laguna de Santa Rosa – the enormous seasonal estuary that extends from Petaluma and the Bay tidal marshes all the way up to the Russian River and Dry Creek Valley. The lagoon is the heart of this place. In the summer, the flat oak studded grasslands extend across the valley to the Mayacama mountains and the delightful hump of Mount St. Helena. In the winter, the tidal reach and flooding extends right up the valley, inundating the land near to the Gravenstein Highway. The lagoon is rich land. Our food comes from there. Literally. For the time being we get our veggies from Laguna Farm – a group of industrious folks who have intensively planted a small area on the edge of the lagoon. Right now we’re getting radishes, kales, chards, brussel sprouts, broccoli, an abundance of salad greens, carrots – most of it hauled out of those wetlands or the areas planted on a knoll adjacent to our house.

I was born in California. It’s my native land. And now after decades away we’ve returned as Californians. I explain to my daughter that this ultimately is the place which we are from. But we also return as guests of those residents that preceded along with all those energies still present. In the morning after the fog burns, I look out the window. The possibilities are manifold. The world sparkles in all it’s glorious frission.

The Host and the Kill

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Time to get back with the program.

I found him in the morning while walking Mango. He lay on the side of the road at the other end of the 40 acres, his body fully intact. His chest cavity still had a trace of warmth, though rigor mortis had started to set in. Without any real clear intent, I picked him up, much to the chagrin of a waiting turkey vulture that immediately took flight.

I thought he was beautiful. He was heavy, heavier than one might think. Carrying his dead body, he felt something like a small dog. The pelt was thick, and the tail less pliable than it looks. His teeth and claws are predatory, ready to sink into any small vole – or wounded raven, perhaps – that he might happen across.

It all led to the basic question that ultimately faces everything: how best to send him on?

I could bury him, though that seemed respectful only in our world in which we seek to hide the look and stink of death. A waste of a perfectly good carcass, as Kerry Hardy would put it. I could gut him and do something with the luscious pelt, but I felt his native form was too beautiful to render into ornamentation. I could only screw it up. Kerry suggested eating him. Anna, of course, was worried about hydrophobia.

It took a good day for the answer to present itself.

This morning I drew a knife neatly down the middle of his chest and peeled back the pelt revealing the rose bloom of his chest. Lacking animus, his body now existed nearly exclusively as matter. But not quite. His matter still contains resident within a potency. We call it vitality. Enough that other creatures may seek to take it and draw it into their own.

We call this eating. On one side of the divide: sacrifice. On the other, rendered by consumption, it becomes the sacrament and the eater the sanctified.

Isn’t that ultimately what it meant in the transformation of the Host?

I took the body of that poor coon and splayed it on the roof of the old chicken barn out beyond our house. It’s within clear line of sight of our deck and bedroom windows. In a few days it will begin to stink.

If I’m lucky, the neighboring creatures will be hungry enough to overcome the fear of this place and of us. You all are welcome here I say to them. To the ravens. To the crows and vultures. To all the scavengers. I want them to come to this home and feed.

It really is time for me to get on with it. We have a wonderful home. And I’m back in it.

Here’s the invite. If you’re wild, I’ll feed you raccoon.

For the rest of you, I have a table to build. And things to grow. And kill. And render. It will be beautiful and delicious.

Come. You’re all welcome. It’s time to sate the hunger.

Leaving

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

We left Hopi because a small boy was run over and crushed by a truck.

Because a man killed his pregnant girlfriend and threw her off a cliff. Because a girl and her brother beat their mom to death with a barbell and burned her house to the ground. Because on the rez you can get away with murder. Because non-natives were dealing meth in the villages and no one seemed to care. And even if they did no one could do a thing about it.

Because every week acquaintances would drink themselves to death. Because a neighbor killed a raven. And poisoned an anthill. And beat a harmless bull snake to death with a hoe.

Because after eight years of digging the hard pan, the clay was still bone dry. Because I knew that after all I left, my work would remain undone.

Because our daughter needed to know what it was like to live off reservation. Because I couldn’t drive the 120 miles to flag one more time.

Because I spent my days composing telegrams from hell. Because most everyone we knew had already left. Because children were under served by their own families. Because I was tired of all that I knew. Because I was tired of the lies. Lies told by my community. Or by my own family. Because we didn’t have much more left in us.

Because If you’re a sensate being you one day reach a point where you just can’t take it.

And then it’s time to go.

The Piano Store

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

I had one more trip to make.

There once was a little girl and her father slept with another woman, and her mother’s heart was so broken that she hung herself. What can a father do, but compensate for love lost? And so he bought his little girl a piano.

But the piano never came into the girl’s possession, but instead the stepmother’s. And over the years the hammers and strings deadened and the ivory was picked from the keys by one child or another.

The piano had come from the ABC Piano Store on the corner of El Cajon and 30th. The store belonged to Oleg Gladkoff, a White Russian from the Ukraine. He was a young boy, and during the War he fled all on his own. At the close of 1944, he picked his way across Russia and Germany, stealing uniforms from dead German soldiers. He was once caught by the retreating army, and the apprehending soldiers were set to execute him. Desperate to live, he told them what he could, he told them that he could play Schubert. The soldiers laughed at him and they took him to the quarters of the ranking officer who had with him a piano. Played, they told him. Play your Schubert. And Oleg all of 14 did just that. He played for the German officer, so beautifully, he said, that they let him go.

Years later he came to the States as an aspiring pianist. Once he even debuted in Carnegie Hall. But it wasn’t ever going to come to anything. Call it a crisis of confidence.

Instead of becoming a world class pianist, he moved to San Diego and opened up a piano store and raised a family. He would sit for days alone in the store, playing the piano just for himself. And he sold pianos to families in the neighborhood, but after years, even that came to a stop, as pianos came in and he found himself unable to part with them. So they accumulated around him, piling higher and higher until they formed a tomb of sorts and he buried himself with his best companions.

He had four sons, George, Andy, Michael and Nick. His son Michael was my best friend growing up, and so I in turn I grew up with the family.

Just after we moved to Sebastopol, I called Nick. Anna wanted to have her piano back at last. Would he be able to help us move it?

That’s how I came to fly to San Diego, and rent a truck and load it with whatever remained of my family’s busted up furniture. And how in the evening, Nick met me and some friends at a house, and as only a master could do, effortlessly slipped a thousand pounds of wood and wire onto a dolly, glided it up a ramp and through the house, outside and up to the waiting truck. He ratcheted it down tight with tie straps. And he shook my hand.

I thought of Oleg and the now empty store, and of everything that gets lost along the way, and of true service done well over years and of how guardians present themselves in the most common of men.

I drove that piano all night, up the five, along the backbone of California and deposited the broken heap in our very own home.

But except for one winter day in 1944, I don’t know if a piano has ever really made it any better.

Island of the Blue Dolphins

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Mo was our cat, and at the last minute as Anna was leaving Hopi, he leapt out of the car. Anna was tired, expectant and preoccupied. She wanted to get that cat, but it wasn’t her priority and in the end she didn’t have it in her. She was thinking of other things. She camped by the culverts for a full six hours trying to lure him, but when all was said and done, it was all she could give and so she got on her way.

The book always made me so sad when I was little. To think of the little girl marooned all alone by herself on that island. Left to raise herself into an uncertain future. Even then I wanted to reach out to her. I wanted her to be safe.

Some would say it’s stupid to travel halfway across the country to rescue a scared and bewildered animal. But such as it was. Someone, someone in this wide world has to do it. Otherwise, what really are we here for?

So I climbed into the car and drove 15 hours straight back to Arizona. I spent 30 hours up at Hopi. I found the life that we had built there completely dismembered and gone. The ramada had been ripped to the ground, the gardens dug up, the fencing tore down. There was nothing left of our life there.

I spent the weekend combing that empty neighborhood for the cat. I crawled through mud and across tumbleweeds, caking my chest in bull heads, peering through both ends of filthy culverts. I called out again and again for a white kitten.

And in the while, I learned a little about animal ways. How when they get scared they hide and they dig in for dear life. How we have favorite spots and they nurture us and give us comfort. I found the culvert ends where he crouched in the soft mud leaving hieroglyphs of paw prints. And where he would eat, and the puddles from which he would lap his water. I found two dead birds at the stoop of Pearish’s porch. He was still hunting, and he wanted to please, he wanted to remain connected with humans, with us, and show he was still present.

He was independent and well good enough to fend for himself. Most creatures do. For those of us still standing, it’s what’s allowed us to survive for near forever.

But he was so scared. Too scared to even come out and face me and an uncertain future. Too scared of retribution and fear of what may happen.

In the end we were saved by a Hopi security man. He had spent weeks watching him on the hospital security cameras. His watchful eyes are what saved us.

He was the one who saw him and alerted me to the fenced parking lot where Mo was sequestered.

I climbed the fence with a can of sardines. Again and again he bolted from me. So I lay on the hot pavement and I spoke to him.

I was so proud of him, I said. He had survived for all this time nearly all on his own. He was a mighty animal, fierce and independent, and smart enough to live. But there were some things he did not know, I told him. Winter was coming. And his family was never coming back. And if he stayed here, if he was too afraid to join us, then here he would die.

It was a long way to our new home. I told him that it would not be easy. That this journey would feel to him excruciating and endlessly long, but that Mango the dog and the other cats and the chickens and all of us had already made it. It was just he alone that had stayed here. And our life here was no more. Most people had already left and decamped for other places. The birds themselves would soon be flown, and the mice that he hunted and fed on would soon be burrowed deep in the ground. Come to me. Please, I asked. Please. Trust me. It will all be okay. It will all be alright.

He walked and nuzzled against my arm. And I grabbed him. Loving him so much I gripped him to my chest, and carried him in a near death lock strong enough to defy the sink of his teeth and his clawing scratches.

The End

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

A raven was born, and wounded, and lived for a short time in this world.

He was taken at night by an animal. He could offer no defense. I knew straightaway where to go. I found his severed head at the base of towering redwood tree.

Poe, I write this to you.

I am so sorry I was the cause of your destruction. You believed in me and I kept screwing it up. You did your best and I was the one who pulled the football away.

I don’t know where a raven’s spirit goes when it dies. But I want you to find it within you a way to forgive. But forgiveness may only be in the province of humans, an unnecessary convention unsuited to the ways of birds. I can listen for you and your own. I can assign meaning. It’s only an assignation, but it’s all I know how to do.

And in the end, what all do you care for my mortal shit? You’re birds. You do your justice and sup on the departed.

Final Days

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Our furniture arrived in the middle of September. Two movers hefted and shoved and carried on their backs more possessions than any being should have to bear. They got it all in our house. I brought Poe home that night from Occidental. His eye was blind, his feathers falling out, he refused to preen or care for himself. He spent the night inside, afraid to leave his courier cage. In the morning he emerged and shit all over our dining room table.

He stayed with me while I unpacked boxes. I spread packing paper across the floor and he receded into it. Unable to see, he squawked and panicked whenever I approached him. He could no longer perch, so he sat on the papered floor.

In the day I set him up outside on the lawn and he caught sun. I fed him apples and cheese, that he no longer touched. In the evening, he hopped onto the porch and walked inside. The house was in chaos, boxes and junk everywhere. I felt sick to my stomach and so did he. His watery shit ran across the floor. His sounds were few, just feeble cries.

I apologized, but apologies don’t matter a whit. I couldn’t make it any better. I told him if he could meet me half way, I could help him. But I couldn’t do anything if didn’t want to make it better. It was his choice, I told him. And if it was too much to bear, he could end it.

All he felt from me was chaos and fear and anger. And in the end, perhaps it only left him bewildered.

Anna drove a night and a day to get to us. She had the chickens and dog and two of our cats loaded in with her, and I released them all hoping Poe would find them familiar friends and be happy for company. He hopped away and buried his body and head against the rocks.

I knew Anna didn’t want him in the house. So that night I set him on his perch outside. I gave him a sampling of meat and cantaloupe and water.

I told him everything would be alright. And that’s how I left him.

Talk to the Animals

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Her name was Ariana Strozzi. And she ran a place called Skyhorse Ranch.

I’d been given her name by someone in the coffee shop. She worked with animals, I was told. She knew a lot about birds.

A few days after returning to town, I fetched Poe from Occidental. Penny was right. He looked to be a complete mess, missing feathers, agitated, afraid to come near me. I know of someone who maybe can help you, I told him.

That day, I took Poe to Valley Ford. We descended into that overcast channel west of Petaluma that leads on to the ocean. We drove up to Skyhorse ranch, a horse farm high on the hill overlooking the barren valley. I pulled past the horse corrals to the house. Ariana welcomed me at the door. She appeared collected and thoughtful. She invited Poe and I into her house and allowed me to take him from the carrier.

Ariana led workshops on interspecies communication, primarily with horses. Animals were her thing. They operate on the level of feeling and to be with them we need to quiet the noise inside ourselves. She wasn’t part of the rehabilitation community and was a renegade of sorts. On her own she worked with a whole range of predatory birds. Hawks, peregrines, owls. And ravens.

Ariana had done her graduate work at UC Davis. While there, she had developed a system for wing rehabilitation using intensive physical therapy wedded to bird instinct. When she finished, she had been recruited to help with condor reintroduction on the North Rim. Her job would have been to prevent the birds from human imprinting.

Ariana felt that the ravens see everything and they know in deep way what we’re about. She told me a story. A while ago, her marriage was falling apart, she told me, and she didn’t want to admit it. She was up at the ranch at the time, and the birds would come to her, they would follow her where she went and caw incessently. Until one afternoon in a rage she stood outside her barn and called out what she had known all along and and she shouted and screamed to the birds and the world and the birds were at last silent.

I sat in the living room with her and Poe. He sat on her table and she watched him, unconcerned as he shit over her living room floor. She fed him meal worms. She was concerned about his thinness and his diet. He needed field mice and insects, she said. He sat calmly in her presence and preened. She confidently took Poe by the legs and body and thrust him through diving motions again and again.

It wasn’t good, she said. His right wing was damaged and fused shut. His left wing seemed paralytic also, and his left foot wouldn’t grip properly. In the diving motion he failed to respond instinctively by thrusting out his wing.

I doubt he will ever fly again, she said.

And if I take him to a wildlife refuge? I asked.

They’ll put him down, she said.

He can’t be a raven. But can he live a life, a full life? I asked.

She smiled. He can, she said. Absolutely. It’s clear that you have a special bond, she said. You know one another and he trusts your presence. He can be a happy member of your family. He craves social interaction. You can integrate him into your family. When you eat, he can sit with you at the table. He can be with you as you go about your day. Stimulate him, pay attention, work with him and his life can be as full as any.

I thanked her.

I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to do this thing we call life, diminished though it may be.

Betrayal

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

He believed in me. We were friends, in a strange way bound to one another. Abandoned into this world, I would like to think that he wanted to believe in me.

But I was busy. I was distracted. I was trying to take care of my daughter. To get her to school and coach her on homework. To buy a house and an adjoining orchard. To talk to my wife. To be married to my wife. I don’t know what he thought, but I believed he just wanted to see me. I visited best I could, but it became sporadic. And then I left. I had to go to Telluride and then Hopi to help with the movers. Penny and Michael and their daughter Loren stepped in. Each morning one or the other would try and they would feed and sit with him.

Penny called while I was away. Poe wasn’t doing well, she said. He seemed sad. He was hiding away. He seemed to miss me, she said. He had stopped preening and a wasp had stung him in the eye and it was swollen shut.

He just wanted me to be there for him, to listen to him, to give him hope, to tend to a broken wing.

But isn’t that what betrayal is? Distraction? An increment of cuts?

The Orchard and the Raven

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

It was partway through the transaction that I learned the adjoining orchard was for sale. People had known and no one had told me and I was livid. Like all the old Grav orchards in the area, it was destined to go to vineyard. The water would be drawn down, pesticides would be sprayed.

But it wasn’t just that, can you understand? It was an old way of life, it was the culture of the Gravenstein orchards that had shaped this town for nearly a century. And it was the life itself, one hundred and twenty apple trees, many over 80 years old. Whom do you know who has lived to see eighty years? Termite ridden, some barely husk and bark, they still yielded apples. Year after year giving up their own progeny so that others could drink and take sustenance. A collective 100,000 years of sentience would be taken out because they couldn’t turn a profit. By that measure, I should have been dead a long time ago.

So I had a vision. I’m prone to visions and they sometimes overtake me. Rarely to great fruition. Sometimes to no good at all. All the same I had a vision.

We would buy this orchard. We would somehow find a way to make it work. I would learn how to care for Gravenstein apple trees and we would learn to press our own cider and make our own vinegar. We would have this raven Poe and over time he would get better, we would nurse him back to health and he would be our family mascot and my friend and companion. Our home and the orchard and the adjoining parcels would become a haven where our friends, and the wild turkeys and the quail and deer and ravens, where all manner of life could come and live. We would do this crazy thing and we would do it together.

But Anna would have nothing of it. She was away in Arizona, Mazie and I in California. Me running between her school, and a sick bird, and the county recorders and a West County real estate office. Anna said it was too much to take on and what was the point. She was distracted and preoccupied, and what with all it was hard for her to get the time to listen.

She didn’t want to be tied down, she said. She wanted to be free and unhampered by an orchard.

I finally did figure out how we could get the land, but I was five days two late. The vineyard people bought it. Four days later the bulldozers arrived and began to rip out the trees.

That night I walked out into the orchard, and row by row, I sprinkled homa, and laid my hands on each and every tree standing and fallen. I said I was sorry. It began to rain, slowly, then heavily and I trudged on in the mud and the dark. I thanked them for all the life that they gave, for their sacrifice, for everything they had given.

A house is just a house, my father-in-law once admonished. You are the moveable feast.

You can say that. But it doesn’t matter in the end. The truth? Dreams and dreamers are just slim pickings.

The Transaction

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Fuck it.

The details are boring enough to be spared.

Mazie and I first visited the house alone. Anna had already returned to Arizona.

It was more house than we had ever lived in.

It was rambling and grand and a combination of all that we had ever lived in and anything in a house that we had desired. It had a pool and a sauna and orchard land and acres for vegetables and a dilapidated chicken barn in which any human would care to thrive. It had a treehouse room for Mazie with windows that looked out over an orchard. It was the room that she had always wanted.

It was surrounded by dozens of acres of open land and forest and orchard. Perhaps as time passed, we could purchase some of it, and if we did that, nothing could touch us. We would be protected.

Walking the house, I heard the ravens call out in the trees. Again, I called out to them, Mazie hushing me to be silent. I’m here, I wanted to tell them. I would like to be welcome.

My family and I, we could all live here happily. I could talk to birds here. And no one would hear or judge.

To the extent that Poe, a small black bird, could ever be an auger and guardian-protector, I felt that he had in his own strange way led us to this house. He knew what I wanted and he had made himself present for it to be.

But that is yet again a human construction. The bird himself wants only to leave well enough alone, to communicate with his own kind and bear witness to folly and to live and to feed.

We found the house in the middle of the summer. Anna was home alone with the other animals. Mazie remained with me, but after a few days she decamped to LA to be with friends. I stayed behind in Sebastopol, days filled with inspections and talking with mortgage brokers and moving money around as the world economy markets teetered, slipped and precipitously began to fall. A couple of men covered by umbrellas decided to occupy Wall Street. Nothing new in this story. It’s what the last ten years of this country’s history have been built on. Our nation possessed by feverish desire, digging a foundation pit straight to the very bottom. And at the bottom we would find only sadness and dissolution and rage.

I did everything I could to make it happen.

The House

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

There’s another part that I’m not telling you.

It’s about the little boy who a long time ago lost his father and his mother grew away from him into her new boyfriend or her own sleep and he grew up in a crumbling house with a shitty carpet filled with fleas and stinking of cat spray. Dishes would pile in the sink because no one would care to wash them until no dishes were left and even then it would move no one to lift a finger so they turned to paper bowls and plates. On those days, it would be the boy who would stand on a chair to reach the sink and he would do the dishes, scraping rotting peanut butter from the knife, skimming flies and sheets of mold from the pots filled with putrid water. It would take a full twelve hours for an eight year old boy to clean that kitchen.

There was a brother and once he wanted dog and it came into the house. But no one would take care of it or feed it and it got sick and was kept penned up in the kitchen until the floor became a seething sea of shit and piss and diarrhea. A neighbor visited and put a call out to CPS.

There’s more. I could go on and on with more. I could fill the remainder of my life and a catastrophe of pages with more. But this will be sufficient.

Imagine what happened, how it was, when the boy first read Gatsby and how Fitzgerald seized him with a vision. Just get the hell away. Get as far and fast away as you possibly can. Build a mansion. Populate it with people. Fill it with parties and surround yourself with campfires. Night after night. Go to that place, make that place, with your own majesty and desire will it in to being. Matter not that the story ends in tragedy. That all can be worked out in the details.

How stupid for a boy to be driven by such a silly story.

But he was.

I imagined one day arriving at a house. It would be a grand place and it would be protected from anything bad or sullied that would want to intercede from the world. It would have it’s own water, and good soil and could grow food. It would be surrounded by protected space that would never in anyone’s lifetime ever be developed.

A family could grow and could grow old here. And that’s the way it would be.

A New Life

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

The coming days were flush with the banal.

Mazie and I, waiting for school to begin, shifted our ways to a local hotel. They had a pool which Mazie was hot to swim in. We joked about our big and fancy house. Poe, he stayed put in his hotel in Occidental.

On the last day of summer I took Mazie to the Harry Potter movie in Santa Rosa. It was a dad daughter day and Mazie was pleased and funny and grateful, I think to have her dad’s attention.

On the first day at school, I drove Mazie from the hotel. That first morning, nervous as heck, she asked that I walk her to the office, we check in, and then we walk out and as we did so she would peel away. In that way, just as she dictated, I delivered her to her new school.

The kids were different, she later told me. But she’s grown up resilient, and slowly, in her own way, she set to making friends.

Mazie and I would have breakfast each morning in the hotel lobby. She would pack a lunch for herself from whatever she could scavenge from the hotel breakfast line: a piece of fruit, some juice, a PB&J. I would then drive her to school. In the evening I’d pick her up, we’d settle back into our hotel room, and Mazie would diligently sit and do her homework.

As for Poe, he became my own affair. Some mornings and most afternoons I’d drive to Occidental and up into the meadow, where I would set with him. I’d nap in the straw while he perched near me. I’d feed him and talk to him. He would sometimes mutter back. I called Anna on the phone. I wanted to tell her about the bird, but when we talked he would caw loudly until Anna would tell me to get out of the coop. It was hard to talk with the bird near by, she said.

People seek solace and meaning and fire, and we each seek it in our own way.

I found it in dreaming of and fashioning for ourselves a new life. I found it in Poe.

In the end, I think he just bugged her.

What Happens When You Believe

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

I took a bunch of pictures to share, but now even that seems too much of a bother.

I had hoped that Poe could settle in at the Salmon Creek school in Occidental. The school is set on 20 acres of meadow and redwood forest and wetland. It also has an enormous fenced garden where I fancied Poe could hang out and regain a semblance of self. Mazie and I took him there in the afternoon and set him free.

He enjoyed digging and exploring with his beak. He hopped about in the wood chips and tussled with the greenery. Mazie read quietly beneath an arbor. Other ravens cawed out from the surrounding forest. Lovely clouds piled high in the sky and that afternoon the light felt marvelous and true. I called Kerry. We both were hopeful. Perhaps Poe’s rehabilitation could become part of a school science program. He could stay in the garden and mend. And kids at the school could learn what it meant to be in close proximity to wildlife and maybe they figure out how to engineer some structure that would meet the needs of a wounded raven.

You see, this was all going to work out, or so it seemed.

But school would not start for a few more days. The afternoon waned. We gathered Poe into his carrier and in the setting light we drove up the hill and out of the valley. Penny, the co-owner of the Holy Cow had offered her house up as a refuge. She had an enormous chicken coop – the chicken hotel, she called it. And hotel it was. Ten feet high, fifteen across, open chicken wire walls all around facing out into meadow and oaks. Poe took to the space immediately. He ate and preened and hopped about in the straw. Families and ravens flying over head would call out as they headed home to their roost. Poe listened and called out in return.

Michael and Penny and I and even Mazie were elated. Poe was safe. I was safe, we all were, in the august darkness.

Faith

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Is Charlie Brown believing again and again that Lucy won’t pull the football away from him.

My uncle once said that faith was believing in something that you knew was not true. In this case, though, I really believed. I believed it would all unfold as planned.

That first morning, Mazie and I, the raven in tow, made our way back to the Holy Cow. Mazie and I settled down with cups of coffee and hot chocolate. We waited until Michael the owner came around.

He remembered us from the month before. Excited, grateful to have an ally, I ushered him outside and opened the car. He looked inside and saw Poe inside the carrier.

Holy shit, he said.

He got it. And I was so grateful to no longer be alone. For he felt the awe.

I set to explaining how Poe had been held captive by the rehabilitator and that it was no good, and how –

You fucking stole him, he interrupted. He grinned. That’s so cool, he said, adding that we’d fit in just fine here.

He looked in again at the poor bird. You can’t keep him in there, he said. Bring him into the coffee shop.

And that I did. And like that the three of us set at the table, health codes and wildlife regulations be damned, with Poe the raven holding court over all and customers coming forward and stopping dead in their tracks. My god, each one said.

For those highly social birds are of their own world and not of ours, and though parallel, they scant intersect. To be here in a coffee house on main street sebastopol, why to come full face with his claw-like beak and opal eyes and the impenetrable sheen of his blackness. Poe was the ineffable born into flesh, and that day in the coffee shop, customers wanted only to be near him. They wanted to touch it.

Mazie made friends with Michael’s daughter, Loren. They made plans to get together and hang out. They talked about the schools they would be going to.

Strangers approached and gave us their phone numbers, they had ideas of how to help. They offered homes where he could stay.

That is what home feels like. We had found safe harbor.

Mooring

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

I could go on here forever, couldn’t I?

Although if you go on for too long, your audience goes away. They cease to listen.

What difference? For most of my life, my writing has had an audience of one. What difference does another ten or twenty make?

And in the end, who really does care about a bird and the string of betrayals exercised by and visited upon a single life?

That first night we stayed the night with our friend Hank in Santa Rosa. We set up fencing in the backyard to protect Poe from the two dogs. Once released, he squawked with agitation, pacing the pavement, bereft it seemed in his new environment. I played bad father and bad guest, ignoring Mazie, feeding the bird, wanting badly to calm him, mindless to the shit he deposited all over the patio.

We slept fitfully.

Arrival

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

It rarely is what it seems. And sometimes it holds everything that is.

You might as well all know. Mazie and Poe and I ended up in Northern California.

On that first night, we needed nothing more than safe harbor. Mazie needed some emotional relief. And Poe needed most of all to be released from his confinement.

We drove direct to the home of our friends Mary and Al. They’re family friends and to tell the truth we had nowhere else to go. We parked in their driveway at their small mid-century stucco home. They weren’t home. But they had a decent sized yard and so we took Poe straight back there and let him out beneath a towering redwood. He hopped away distressed and set his distance. I fed him bits of pizza and old meat and whatever I had with. A cat appeared and I barked at Mazie to hold the cat back, but she had a hard time doing it.

I thought maybe Poe could hang out in this yard for the evening and that he would be safe. But I was way wrong. There was no respite to be had here. I called Michael from Holy Cow and then Maryanne, but no one was picking up. Spent, I rounded Poe up and put him back in the dog carrier. Mazie was frazzled and upset herself. She needed as much tending as the bird. Why was the bird getting it all, she asked?

Because if he doesn’t get what he needs, he’s going to die, I said.

We piled back in the car. Because it was now time for Mazie’s school orientation.

We drove the scant six blocks to Mazie’s middle school where, in five days, Mazie was going to settle in to where she was going to spend the next year of her life.

Mazie didn’t want people to see us with the bird. So we left Poe in the car while we entered the school gymnasium. It was filled with a crowd of white middle to upper income folk. Which I guess is what we now were. The principal, a warm and nice man, introduced the school and the various programs and what children and parents could expect. It was going to be a wonderful year, he said.

As we exited the gym, tears welled up in Mazie’s eyes. I don’t want to go to this school, she whispered.

Mazie and I no longer knew how to live in this world.

Berkeley

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

My father came here once and he camped out in the Doe library one foggy summer in the 1960’s searching the stacks for archival material about mining journalism in Nevada during the great silver rush. He found a forlorn journal kept by a woman named Martha Galley in which she recorded her lonesomeness, the absence of her husband and the death of her children. The last thing my dad did in this world was try to publish it, but by then it was too late and he was already out of time.

My grandmother and my aunt came to join him. When my grandmother was a little girl in Philadelphia near the turn of the century she was run over by a carriage and it broke her back. After that she was hunched and stooped and couldn’t play with the other kids and so she set to walking and that she did, up to ten or twenty miles a day. Tilden Park? she once asked me. Do you know Tilden Park? Up in the hills? Every day I would walk from the Rose Garden all the way up the hill to Tilden Park and back down again, she said.

My grandmother was in her sixties at the time and she would walk all the way to goddamn Tilden Park.

I went to Berkeley once.

I had completed my sophomore year in college and all I wanted to do at that time was run fast and far away. I studied Russian during the summer and I stayed on for the fall. I worked at Blondie’s pizza, sometimes prepping in the back, sometimes delivering on a scooter at night. Once I didn’t strap the pizza boxes on right and they flew off the back all over the road. I ended giving them up for free to the college kids who had ordered them.

I liked the feeling of riding that scooter fast through the night. The scooter was red.

I found out that summer that my girlfriend was fucking some other guy. It was my fault, she said. I wasn’t there for her, she said. It didn’t matter. We didn’t have a good relationship anyway. I’d cheated on my first girlfriend to go out with her. None of us were any good.

I was living with a guy named Don at the time, right up there near Tilden Park, and I couldn’t stay down in town past three-thirty because that’s when the Livermore shuttle took it’s last run. I didn’t want to walk up that hill. My friend Kenny wondered what my problem was, why couldn’t I walk up a hill? he asked. You walk up that hill, I told him and he tried and he scarce could do it.

Don was dating Maddie Wegner that summer. He was madly in love and he confided in me that he loved her so much, that she was the one and he was going to propose to her. He had it all planned out. He bought her a ring and later in the summer when they were going to be driving through South Dakota, one sunset evening he was going to propose to her.

And that he did. Except that she had no inkling he was in love with her. She sat there with him somewhere in the midwest, embarrassed in the waning light, looking at the ring he held in his hand. He was a nice boy, she said. A sweet boy. And that’s where she left it.

I would get out at the Livermore Center and walk the deer trail along the hillside and would hunker down by the wind organ and watch the sun make it’s way toward the horizon and at times the colors would be so profound that I would laugh and howl as if I’d lost my senses.

—

But now, on that afternoon, the one that matters most to us, my daughter and I and the bird arrived unclean and tired and needing food. We cut into town and found the Bread Board across from Chez Panisse. We ordered pizza topped with goat cheese and peaches. We ate it sitting on a grassy divide in the middle of the road. The flavors were rank and disgusting and it made me such. Mazie hardly touched it. For Poe it was much the same.

All journeys, all races run, pass through a place of dissipation and I guess for us maybe this was it. Mazie and I ate what we could in this place transitional and transcending as it has always been, and we piled then into the car and we headed north taking wrong turn after wrong turn after wrong turn until we found ourselves passing across the Delta, that swampland once parceled to the wanderings of Jack London and the tin boot fortunes of China camps, and rogue vagrants and bums and residents who had but fled all there was to flee from.

On this evening the light glinted flat across the misty water, posing an ephemeral halo for the yawning dilapidated penitentiary, and for Saint Quentin himself, I guess, tortured and beheaded as he was. And now what stores of the unrepentant, lead and gold alike, were bound and locked tight within his chest, doing time for whatever crimes done unto?

Unseen, hardly a mote we were, Mazie and I and our companion bird passed across those mud flats, past chambered prisoners and flocks of crane set to taking flight. By them all we passed.

Promised Land

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Some of you want to know what all has become of Poe. The questioning, the wondering is fair enough. And the silence and all has been unfair. But some’s too much to tell. But now you can have it. We can carry on.

We – Mazie, the bird and I – we left Barstow at dawn.

But not before absconding with some boiled egg and bread and sausage from the Best Western breakfast nook. Once on the road, Poe set to caching his food amidst the newspaper in his carrier.

We blitzed California, racing up the 99 through that industrial farming hell, past warehouses, processing plants, sprayers, herbicide distributors, and miles of enslaved trees, genes, and soil and vine, Poe the raven himself bearing witness to the near incomprehensible machination and subjugation of all life to sate a specie’s hunger.

I told Mazie that her grandmother came to California because of a book written by a man named Steinbeck. It was East of Eden and had been made into a movie by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean in which he became movement and life and desire incarnate. It was about old California farming communities, and rivalry and lust and inheritance and the inevitable despoiling of the world through our actions. About the Monterrey morning mist and the fields outside of Gilroy, and about old honor establishing itself in a new land. My mother had wanted, I think, to be part of California before it was all gone and now it mostly was, at least this part of it.

And in this moment, we, my daughter and I, came to this place to be the bad kid, to find wildness and prove it upon the world once again.

Ashley, our GPS guidance system gave us a few bum steers, out of malice I think, because we hadn’t been giving her much due. We passed out of the Central Valley, now draped with box stores and outlets for extruded meat, potato and corn products and descended into the Bay Area. Past those quixotic wind mills, harvesting that relentless mass of air pressing itself eastward from the pacific. Past Livermore, that cesspool of life and death, beginnings and ends, where Edward Teller, in all of his fin de siecle Mitteleurop sensitivities, gave birth to the hydrogen bomb. Is that what this state, in so much that it’s a state of being, is good for?

Of these things, though, I couldn’t intimate to my daughter. And lest of all the bird, fragile and innocent and all-knowing intelligence that he may be. Mazie was cranky and tired. The bird was cooped. And so relentlessly we pressed on.

The Bay Area. The Area of the Bay.

Remembering Steve

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Steve isn’t dead.

The most physical and perhaps most limited instantiation of him, of course, is gone. No more will we know that unique conflation of DNA and environment that gave rise to the person we knew as Steve Jobs.

But his larger self, the ripples emanating out from him, those will continue to move people on this earth.

He rode sidecar in the lives of many people. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps it was his motorcycle all along. Perhaps he gave expression to that motorcycle ride that we all dreamed for and wanted.

How have his ripples moved through me?

1979. San Diego. I’m an awkward fourteen year old boy. It’s the first day of ninth grade and my math teacher Virginia Hamilton ushers me into a room that contains some new equipment which she doesn’t understand and has no idea what to do with. She shows me a new Apple II. It’s your’s to play with, she tells me. Earlier that summer I had read about these two guys, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who had invented the first real personal computer. I understood instantly. I took the manual home that night and was on the machine the next day tirelessly. It couldn’t just move numbers and text. It could play sound. It had a color screen. You could do art on it. It could be a musical keyboard. It could be a kind of stereo. I learned to program in hex. I set to writing a program that was like a wordprocessor for music. Why, a person could play and the computer would transcribe the music for you.

1981. Reuben H Fleet Science Center. I sit at a table with the director of their science center. They had live location data on several satellites orbiting the earth, he explained. Could I write a program that could visually display where in the sky the satellites would be visible? Why yes. The truth was I couldn’t program worth shit. But I set to it with David Calabrese, a kid I met hanging out in an Apple store. That was a thing then – kids who couldn’t afford computers would hang out in Apple retailers programming and pimping the machines.

David and I would get together each day and type out code. We were nuts about Apple computers. We also debated who was the stronger genius – Wozniak or Jobs? Jobs was a petulant jerk. And Wozniak was brilliant. He after all was the real inventor of the guts and OS of the first Apple. He invented the first magnetic hard drive over a weekend. But Jobs was the guy who saw what it all was. He was the one to put it together. He drove Wozniak relentlessly. And eventually he drove Wozniak out. David and I worked on our satellite tracking program. We kind of got it working, but a real programmer ended up finishing the work. I had a crush on David’s sister and I just wanted to make out with her. I guess I got kind of distracted.

1982. Biology class. I borrowed an Apple IIe from a kid – I think his name was Eric Altman. His family was pretty well off and they could afford the latest toys. I didn’t have a computer of my own and I needed to do a demo of my science project – something about computer music transcription. I plugged in the computer with the power switch on and I fried the mother board. I stood in front of the class and felt like I was going to throw up. Eric was heartbroken. I took his machine to the Apple store where I hung out. I had no money, but the technician worked on it for a week and fixed it for free. He was so generous, but then he wanted to hang out with me more and I didn’t know what his intention was. I felt the the foreign edge of a grown up world and it scared me.

1983. I stand in my childhood home, decrepit, filthy, largely stripped of furniture. I’m seventeen and I no longer have parents. I hold an acceptance letter in my hand. Would I have gotten into Yale without all that freakish experience with those Apple computers? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Does technology really make a difference?

1984. At Yale my college roommate ended up with one of the first Macintoshes. I could use it whenever I wanted to write papers, he told me. He basically bribed me with his Mac so I would hang out with him. Regardless, never again would I write a paper on a typewriter. And the sheer terror I felt at having to write on the page began to dissipate just a little. I could write, and erase, and cut and paste. Back then the words, “cut and paste” still connoted glue and scissors. How strange to think that in our minds the words now evoke the clicking of a mouse. And what would the mouse have been without Steve Jobs? And by extension, to think that our very vocabulary and the parts of our brain that support that vocabulary have been rewired by that one individual.

1987. I camped out in the basement of our residential college for much of the spring, sitting at a bank of Macintoshes, writing my senior thesis on the Diggers, a counterculture anarchist group in San Francisco. Why did history have to be constituted only of old stuff, I wondered? What about recent history? The 1960’s? Cultural history? I wanted to write about something that hadn’t been touched yet. And so I looked at something so new and so insignificant, that real historians hadn’t gotten to it yet. For hundreds of hours I stared at the screen of a Mac. I thought about those machines of loving grace, of how that generation of tech pioneers, Steve in particular, came out of the counterculture, how parts of their visions were fueled by acid.

1988. Seattle. I’m out of college by now. My first years at trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but I was alone in the world, and if I’d ever chanced to look down, I would have been terrified. I read biographies of Steve Jobs, looking for guidance.

I inherited the stories:

Steve in India being pulled aside by a guru who, laughing hysterically, shorn his hair off.

Steve tracking down his birth mother. He had little to say publicly about the matter other than that he believed in nurture over nature. I wondered over the years what that encounter must have been like. Who was she? What did they share in common? What did they not? Why should I even care? But care I did.

Steve inviting John Scully to his Woodside home. Over thin crusted pizza, asking if John wanted to continue selling sugar water to children, or if he wanted to change the world?

Steve being exiled to some lone building on the Apple campus.

Steve being fired from his own company and following his departure, retreating to his Woodside home where he raised a pirate flag and another sporting the logo of the NeXT computer.

Steve throwing crying fits, insisting that the robotic arms assembling NeXT be painted the proper shade, and then his eyes welling up again as he watched those arms moving in unison. Thinking machines building other thinking machines. This was poetry. This was art.

Steve commenting years later that technology in the end doesn’t change the world. People live for an instant and then they die. What does technology really change? All those widgets and gadgets and gizmos, they make the world different. But do they really make it better?

1989. I sat in an auditorium in Seattle as Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT computer. I saw OS X in it’s very first incarnation. It had a Unix kernel and full sound and graphics and an amped up graphic interface. Why did I still care about this stuff? I wasn’t a computer guy anymore. But I loved Jobs. Watching that demo, I wondered why no one wanted to buy it? None of us knew that 10 years later we all would.

1994. I have an MFA by now. I’m writing. I scratch out a living with low-end desktop publishing. Why that and not something else? Because I have loads of experience on a Mac. All on Mac’s. Steve made the best tools I have ever touched. I have a Sheffield digging fork. And an Apple. And in a way they are the very same thing. They allow me to do most of the work I do.

1996. Vermont. My wife and I have just moved to the northeast. I’m referred to a woman who’s having problems with her Mac and needs some tech support. I end up helping her and afterwards we go for a walk and she asks about my life and she listens in a way that ranks that afternoon on the shores of Lake Champlain as one of the most important conversations of my life. I tell her that I don’t sleep at night because there are too many things left undone. Left undone, she said. One day that will be the title of your autobiography. We had a chance encounter because of a screwed up Mac and our deep friendship has lasted to this day. What difference, really, does technology make?

1996. Vermont. Driving through the snow with my wife. I had heard about a new codec called MP3 and was thinking through the implications. The physical medium for content was now obsolete, I told my wife. We no longer needed vinyl or CD’s or tapes. All music could be shared digitally. I wrote out a 2 page summary for a digital jukebox that would exist online, and you could purchase songs and play them on some device. I tried to find interested people. I met with some guy from the Media Lab. I got a job working for a start up telecom company, thinking it would help. I was employee number 7. The company took off and I dropped my idea, an idea which I now realize I was in no position to execute.

1998. Steve returns to Apple. It’s not the hardware. It’s the software, he insists. And the dictum becomes apparent. There’s no reason to have buttons and physical widgets on our devices. Practically all of it can be done by software. The ideal computer wouldn’t even exist physically. It would be pure software. Pure instruction. Pure energy.

2001. Apple releases the iPod.

Why did Steve Jobs do it? And why not me? Well, because he was Steve Jobs. And I am me.

2007. The company I worked for got the contract to provision the iPhone on the AT&T network. And the company screwed it up immeasurably. Probably the single greatest failure of the iPhone release was AT&T’s botched turn up of the service. A small number of former coworkers got pretty rich off it, though. But I had already left three years before and had moved to the Hopi reservation.

2005. I stand in a parking lot in Flagstaff before a meeting with a prospective funder. I’m trying to get money for a youth farming project. I have my Mac Powerbook on the trunk of my car and I select 30 photos, choose a Hopi planting song, and within seconds have a slideshow. I sit with the funder as luscious images materialized on the screen, showing kids planting ancient terrace gardens. At the end of the slideshow he sits there in silence and then announces that he’ll commit ten thousand dollars.

2009. I have a recurrence of a tumor on my parotid gland and am undergoing radiation treatment in San Francisco. Unbeknownst to me Steve Jobs is getting his liver transplant in Knoxville. Late one night I hole up in a sushi bar in the Sunset district, seeking some morsel of food that won’t make me sick. I chat with a woman next to me – an attorney specializing in real estate law. Her boyfriend is an oncologist in Palo Alto. He’s been working with Steve. It’s not good, she tells me. But didn’t we all know that? Not just for him, but for all of us? Isn’t life itself a terminal condition? I drink my sake and eat my toro. I don’t want him to go.

2011. Sebastopol where l now live with my family. I have struggled for the last few weeks to buy an apple orchard next door, but my efforts come to late. It’s sold to a vintner. Several days later bulldozers arrive and plow down the 80 year old trees. Even as I write I can hear the sound of the dozers. I take a break to watch a movie on my daughter’s Macbook Pro about the mining of blood minerals used in cellphones and wonder what Apple’s stance on the issue is. I think of small boys mining colton deep underground with small hammers. Of women being raped and mercenary groups demanding taxes on the minerals used in all our electronic devices. Small drops of blood tainting perhaps even the devices popularized by Steve Jobs. Does technology change the world? Ask the boys in the mines. I consider their lives and their terminal conditions.

I turn on the radio and learn that Steve Jobs has died.

1955 – 2011. Apple could have said it so many ways. What was the most simple? They could have said, “2011”. But that just tells you that he died. It doesn’t tell you that he was. They could have displayed the exact month and the day of his birth and death. But what really do those other pieces of information add? Nothing really.

Steve Jobs. 1955 – 2011. He lived. And now he is dead.

I once wanted to be Steve Jobs.

And in the end we all will be. Steve admonished that life is about the detours. That we never know how those detours will add up. But what if your life has been composed entirely of detours?

It took me too long of a time to realize that Steve Jobs was not the life I was born into. I can have visions with the best of them. But everything depends on execution. And in the end, focus.

Intense, excruciating focus.

:-)

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Andrew Lewis

Snowflakes Edge

floating and falling in this world

Category Archives: The Puzzle of California

Frenchie

This Life We Were Born Into

Birthdays

Streets of San Francisco

The 30th Anniversary Party

80%

A New Year

The Boat

The First Feeding

Where We At?

The Host and the Kill

Leaving

The Piano Store

Island of the Blue Dolphins

The End

Final Days

Talk to the Animals

Betrayal

The Orchard and the Raven

The Transaction

The House

A New Life

What Happens When You Believe

Faith

Mooring

Arrival

Berkeley

Promised Land

Remembering Steve

:-)

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