Mineral Point (Part 8)

One thing my dad and I would do during that Spring was play tennis. Research on how to slow down dementia was pretty limited about twenty years ago but they had found that exercise helped, and so I bought a couple of rackets and some balls to hit around the courts down at Soldiers Park. This activity echoed things we'd do when we were all kids and dad would take us there in the summer evenings, after work. We'd play doubles, myself, brother, sister, and him and maybe then go have ice cream afterwards. It was fun then, and fun again, the most normal, non-dementia hindered activity that we could do together. As opposed to other activities that required us to interact with folks. Going to Pizza Hut and having my dad tell the waitress that he had dementia. Or Wal-Mart, again, my dad first asking a stranger where he was from and then telling him that he had dementia. He'd tell them, and then announce, proudly I suppose, that most folks couldn't tell that he had dementia. They'd respond to it the way one could respond to that kind of comment, with polite bewilderment. 

Or the time on the airplane in May that year, the last time he ever left Wisconsin when I accompanied him for a coordinated visit to see my sister in DC, staying in the old Georgetown house of the judge she was house sitting for. My brother had came down from New York to join us, the four of us together. Before getting on the plane in Madison my dad and I had bought a bag a cheese curds from Hooks, a famous cheese maker in Wisconsin. Or maybe Susan had given it to us for the plane ride. I don't remember. What I remember are two things: the way fresh cheese curds squeak when you bite them. Dad leaned over to the man sitting in the aisle seat and offered them a cheese curd and told them about the squeakiness of fresh cheese curds. That it only lasts for a day or two at the most. That's how you know they're fresh. These are fresh curds. Most folks have never really had fresh curds. And then he told them that he had dementia, that nobody would ever know if from the way that he behaved, and that he was on his way with his son to visit his daughter and his other son in DC. The man had a cheese curd and then talked with my dad for a while. Wished him good luck as he exited the plan. 

When we were kids dad paid an old man named Mr. Eckstein to give us tennis lessons. I think I only ever went to one of them, maybe two. Mr. Eckstein was quite old. He lived alone in the motel like little houses behind the Quicktrip. I didn't know much about him but he was pretty good at tennis. He played with a wooden racket and though he couldn't really move around the court, he'd just stand in the middle and hit the ball back no matter where we hit it from. He used to be a pro of some kind. He'd teach us how to grip the racket, how to swing with a straight elbow. Occasionally a string of drool would slip down from his cheeks and he'd slowly wipe his wrinkled hand across his bottom lip to catch it. At some point later, maybe about seven or so years, he fell and broke his hip and got put into an old folks home. One day my dad took me there to visit him. This was a thing my dad did, always talking about how important it was to visit people when they were alone or sick, how important it was to see your family, even if you didn't feel like going. We sat in Mr. Eckstein's room with the television on. I had nothing to say to him. At some point my dad wandered out and it was just him and I. We watched television. I might have been fourteen years old. My dad and I left and not too long after Mr. Eckstein died.  

I always wondered what my dad's relationship was with folks like Mr. Eckstein, how it came about that he gave us tennis lessons. Or rather, given my brother and sister tennis lessons. I wasn't really into tennis and I didn't have much of a relationship with Mr. Eckstein, not that I said this to my dad. Or my dad's relationship with an old lady named Florence that we'd go out to dinner with in Dodgeville on Mondays. I don't know who she was or why we spent so much time with her. She wasn't someone who watched after us kids and wasn't someone we were related to. She had a blue Chevy Nova hatchback that sat in her driveway and a police scanner what I'd ask to turn on if we had to sit in her quiet living room while her and my dad chatted about things I couldn't follow. She'd always laugh at something my dad said and say, "Ohhh, Bob" and a thick Wisconsin accent. I wonder what my dad was doing. Why we were there. Who these people were to him and if there was some plan as to what kinds of relationships he was trying to help us build. If he was acting as a kind of emissary of anti-loneliness. Always talking, driving around and talking to people. It was important, he'd insist. It's important to say hello. 

Mineral Point (Part 7)

From what I was told, Susan's father also died of Alzheimer's and she spent some years taking care of him before he was shipped off to a care facility. Us kids had a contentious relationship with Susan that eventually ended with Susan selling the farm to a stranger. Of the three of us, I was typically given the job of talking with Susan on our behalf. Plus, my sister, post-law school took a clerkship in DC and my brother had just started teaching school in Brooklyn, thus I felt like I was the only one of us who was free enough, i.e. not tied to anything resembling a real job, to go back to the farm to help out. Though I can't confidently characterize the tension between Susan and in particular, my sister, I believe Susan resented that even after my father's diagnosis us kids had been of relatively little help; the whole, Mother Hen thing, that if one does not cut the wheat or grind the flour, one is not entitled to eat the bread. The bread in this case being having a say in what happens to my dad. That, and her previous experience with her own dad. That one can only bear so much, to watch the people you love deteriorate, to forget your name and their own. That care takers need also to be taken care of and even now I respect what I'd characterize as her decision to not let my father's illness consume the later years of her life. That as an American I grudgingly accept the trope of looking out for number one. 

Susan and my dad married when I was thirteen years-old. The wedding was held at the Jones House, an historic bed and breakfast that tourists would stay in when they came to Mineral Point. Adam and I were tasked with the job of throwing rose petals from the balcony above the bride and groom during the "I do" moment. Susan and my Dad knew each other in high school in Pikeville, Kentucky and started seeing each other following a class reunion, both of them now divorced with three children, Susan's youngest daughter older than my older sister. During the lead up to the wedding Susan would come up from Kentucky to stay on the farm, the house on top the hill. One evening my dad had taken us to Dairy Queen and on the way he mentioned that Susan was coming up yet again from Kentucky for the weekend and to stay the week. Naïve and young, I asked him why she had to come up to Wisconsin since she doesn't seem to like us kids. From my perspective, eleven years-old, Susan didn't act particularly motherly. When she was there my dad was more or less with her, doing things one does when one is in love. Thus, Susan coming up to the farm meant that my dad would be unavailable and occupied. Of course I was too young to understand that my parents were also human beings. My dad responded to my question with anger and no answer, sending me to the car and no ice cream.

That dynamic, of Susan politely demonstrating that she was not our mother and my dad enthrall to the task of keeping her happy, was present at the beginning and continued to the end. My role as I saw it when I was a kid then and even to a degree now, thirty some years later, was to serve as a bridge between warring parties. I took on the same role with my step-dad J at my mom's house when she remarried a few years before my father, that when my brother and sister were being hostile or dismissive that it was my job to do the opposite, to show that that in fact this person was appreciated and welcome. Not that Susan needed that from me, or J, or that I was even in a position to make someone feel welcome, these projections of what someone needs an obvious marker of what I must have been feeling myself, at least that is what an analysis via psychology might come to. Simply though, I tried to be nice even though her role in our family was confusing, that if she wasn't a caretaker to us then who was she? Why was she there? My coming to the farm during Spring of 2001 was an attempt by me to do the right thing, to empathize with the other in hopes of smoothing relations between those with the power to act, which in this case was my sister and Susan. When I left Mineral Point, around four months after I got there, it was because Susan had told me that one of her sons was coming up to stay for a while and that I'd need to leave the Barn to make room. I was not kicked off the farm but politely shown the door. 

Mineral Point (Part 6)

When I moved from Seattle to the farm I moved into the Barn with a duffle bag of clothes and a laptop made in 1995 that my dad had bought my sister when she started college, the best valued laptop of its day, no doubt. Amy accompanied me on my drive back across the country. With Joel I first drove down to California to meet Amy and had a weekend somewhere in Napa valley at a rented house with Amy's friends and our friends. Amy and I then drove down to Oakland and picked up a mattress from her place and delivered it to her parents in Los Angeles. From there we drove to Mineral Point, stopping in Arizona and Colorado, making it a trip. 

When we arrived in Mineral Point the first thing we did was go to dinner at a new brewery in town with my dad and our old family friend Ted and his sons, Matt and my oldest friend Adam. At dinner my dad acted strange. It was the first time I had seen him for about nine months and though I had been talking to him every week it was clear that he was not able to track our conversation. Ted watched me as I learned first hand that my father was not himself and gently stepped in as needed, someone who had experience being around this new version of my father. When we got back to the farm and Amy and I went up to the Barn was suddenly overcome with emotions and I cried while Amy hugged me, perhaps just then realizing what I was doing and realizing that after tomorrow Amy would no longer be there and it would just be me, my dad, and Susan in a somewhat isolated countryside compound. Perhaps I was just tired or perhaps I was disappointed that my dad didn't really acknowledge that I was there at dinner, already lost in another world.

Me being there allowed Susan to relax a bit and not worry too much about my dad getting into trouble. At that point she was still teaching elementary school in a nearby town and needed to go to work during the day. I was tasked with very little by Susan other than to watch after my dad and to see if I could sell my dad's 94 Mazda MPV. Its ten-disc CD player was broken such that it played the same track over and over, "Somewhere over the Rainbow" by the Hawaiian singer Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole. There was no way to change the settings other than to turn it off. Every button broken, including the button to eject CDs. You couldn't even switch it to the radio. The only thing one could do was to turn it off. My dad, however, didn't notice that it was repeating or at least didn't seem to mind. When I arrived in the Spring he was still driving, though only really driving around town. This worried Susan and part of selling the car was really to get the vehicle off the property so he couldn't drive, which she wisely predicted would eventually get him into trouble. An account of that time I wrote ten plus years ago,

He used my blue truck to drive down to the mechanic and check on the status of his vehicle. It was early and I kept sleeping until the phone rang, the mechanic asking me to bring the fire chief's truck back. Confused I looked out the window to see my dad pulling up in a tan truck. After returning the tan truck and bringing back my own, I scolded him and barred him from driving my truck ever again. 

My dad loved cars. Not new cars but all cars, always reading about them in Consumer Reports, trying to find the best car with the best value. When we were younger, probably on a Friday after picking us up, we'd drive around farm equipment lots and used car lots near Dodgeville. It was unclear what exactly he was looking for but was always looking. He often traded in one used car for another, suddenly and surprisingly showing up in a vehicle none of us had ever seen before. During my senior year of college one day he was supposed to pick me up. It was late on a Friday and he was late. I was sitting in my dorm room and kept hearing a car alarm outside. Eventually I got up and went into the hall way where one of the jock types who lived down the hall informed me that there was a guy in the parking lot asking for me. I went out to find my dad in a white Nissan Ultima sitting in the driver's seat trying to turn the alarm off. Somehow we turned it off and drove back to Wisconsin. This was a year after he was diagnosed, a year before I went back to Mineral Point. Instances like these were frequent while he was still in the nebulous zone of post diagnosis and pre-institutionalization. He knew he was getting worse but could still almost go about his business. He traded in the Nissan for the MPV and wanted to trade in the MPV for a Toyota Rav4. This never happened. 

Mineral Point (Part 5)

When we came to farm we'd stay in the Barn, which has a misleading name. It looked like a barn but the lower floor was essentially a large garage with concrete floor, room for four cars and a work bench at the back. There was a closet, always locked and with the light on underneath the stairs that lead to the upper level that I think Susan and my dad used to grow pot, but I could never get into that space to know for sure what went on in there. In practical terms the lower floor was a space for the tractor, tools, and shelves of things that might have a use one day. The upper floor was where we would stay, which was a huge open space with bathroom walled off in one corner. It had a full kitchen, a little living room area, and three beds. All of it in the same open space with a vaulted, exposed wood ceiling. 

Late Spring, 2001. The barn in full sunshine, the dark blue Ford Ranger that I drove to Seattle and then back to Wisconsin and then eventually back to Seattle and then Portland and then to the East coast, to Providence for graduate school, where I sold it to my Brother-in-Law's brother and didn't own a vehicle for nearly ten years after that. The light blue truck on the right side of the photo was a manual four-gear GMC that we used as a 'farm truck,' an old beat up machine to drive around the farm without needing to worry about if we hit something or drove into a ditch. Not that that happened. 

About a year before my dad was officially diagnosed with dementia, one weekend, during my sophomore year of college I got a ride back to Madison to visit friends and my mom and on the way back I got dropped off to visit my dad in Mineral Point, about a two hour drive from the small town in Iowa where my college was. It was getting to be late afternoon on Sunday and I needed to get back. My dad had said earlier that he'd drive me back to my campus. When I asked him, reminded him that we needed to get going, he seemed to not entirely remember that he agreed to do this, or maybe he remembered but decided that he didn't want to do the drive, or who knows what he was thinking. In retrospect there are many instances like this, blurry lines between my dad being selfish or reneging on promises and what we'd come to learn was certifiable cognitive decline. That there is a fine line between one's personality and one's mind/body complex, a personality something we are responsible for and the latter, something out of our control, at least according to modern divisions of the material world and our subject position. After acknowledging that I needed to get back, my dad said, well, why don't you take the truck. I said that I didn't know how to drive a stick shift. He said I'd figure it out, gave me a brief lesson, and then I got in the truck and drove, a stressful two hour drive on highway 151 through South-West Wisconsin, across the Mississippi through Dubuque, and down into Iowa.

My point is not so much to paint of picture of me figuring out the stick shift (which I guess wasn't all that hard but was stressful, especially the massive hills that ascend out of Mississippi river valley on the Iowa side, the stop lights on these steep hills and to release of the break while simultaneously engaging the clutch fast enough such that I didn't crash into the cars behind me), but my image of my dad was that of someone who wouldn't just cast someone out to fend on their own. That image is probably not entirely true, even when my dad was in good health, but upon reflection it's hard not to wonder if his odd behavior that afternoon was something of the dementia, something causing him to not 'be himself.' He was not the kind of dad, at least as I knew him, to teach his kids 'tough' lessons, the sink or swim kind of lessons. That wasn't really how he conducted his dad business. He made us work, and I'm grateful for that, but he didn't ever do so in ways where we'd struggle to the point of failure. He'd push us to do things we weren't comfortable doing. And we'd whine about tree planting or whatever farm or building project he enlisted us into, complain about to church or not wanting to go yet again to Farm & Fleet, but there was always a choice it seemed. If something was too much then it was okay not to do it. His behavior that afternoon was odd and distancing. 

My father standing in front of a burn pile of brush and wooden junk. Myself, standing just down the hill from the burn pile, circa 2001. That is not to say that my father was a deep well of compassion at all times. He had a terrible temper at times and raged suddenly if my brother and I weren't listening to him or doing what he asked. This kept us on good behavior for the most part when we were around him. Whether or not our 'good behavior' could have been achieved without a fear of him whacking us on the butt or punishing us with some forced labor task is not something that we could ever know. I can think of three times when his patience ran out, the first when we were young on our way back from a trip to Kentucky to see family. We were close to home, past Chicago, and my brother and I were horsing round in the back of the van. He warned us a couple times and then he pulled over. He went to back of the van where I was laying on top of my brother, doing what I don't know, and he smacked us in the butt. We sat in our seats the rest of the way. Or another time, probably middle school, when my brother and I were out cutting brush with him, he with a chain saw and the two of us tasked with moving the wood bits into piles. It was a bit boring and cold, and we were repeatedly riffing on commercial jingle for a kids game named 'Thin Ice' we had heard on television. The only verse that I can remember us singing, going something like, "If you're sitting in the tub and you need a belly rub / you're on thin ice / you're on thin ice." After about fifteen minutes of our variations and laughing at them to the point that we were neglecting the work, my dad snapped at us, telling us to shut up, that it wasn't funny, to do the work, etc. At that point we were a bit too big to be whapped on the butt but we listened to him and did what he asked. 

The time that I remember most vividly, however, in terms of getting into trouble with my dad was when we were tasked with painting a little shed that he built next to the original farm house, a shed to keep a lawnmower in and other garden tools, something a little closer to the house than the machine shed. We were painting it white with a roller and brush, my brother and I, in the summer, it was hot and sunny. I might have been eight, my brother ten. Bored with the monotony of painting (though ironically, or maybe fittingly, later in my life I would come to like painting and did it as my primary income source for a number of years after college and then after graduate school), bored with the monotony of painting I was goofing around and rolled some paint onto the low hanging roof of the shed which I though was funny at the time, an eight year old sense of humor. My dad had come out to see how we were doing and he saw the paint on the roof and became furious. I remember him saying to me, asking me, "Do you think this is funny? Do you think this is a joke?" I guess those were rhetorical questions but I remember him yelling something about not taking the work seriously which was something that I thought about a lot when I was a kid, how mad he got in that particular instance. The idea that I was not someone to depend on, to rely on for a serious task. Regardless, I think eight years old is too young to paint things, where painting is partly about making a judgment on and an investment in what looks good and I did not care about how that shed looked when I was eight year old. He removed me from the task and I think my brother finished it on his own. 

Mineral Point (Part 4)

The farm was not an animal farm or a crop farm but a tree farm. After first planting in 1985, the plan was that we'd first start selling the trees around twelve years later, the time it takes for a white pine sapling to grow six feet tall. The Frasier Firs and Black Hills Spruces, the 'money trees' that could be sold for twice as much as the pines, would take longer to grow. Over time, the trees would help pay for my brother and I's college tuition. So said my dad in response to our complaints. It was unclear what the trees and this work would mean for my sister, however, who would be out of college by the time we started selling them. Simultaneously, as we waited for the trees to grow, the farm was enrolled in a nature conservancy program such that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources would pay us to mow the fields and maintain the land as a bird sanctuary. This meant that there was always work to do, mowing the hilly acres that weren't planted with trees. We started with one 'Persian orange' Allis Chalmers tractor, mid-size, wheels taller than my seven-year old self, but not huge like the kinds of tractors with tires as tall as a full grown man. A tractor just big enough to pull the tree planter or the large mower. Later we bought another tractor, a cherry red Case that was slightly smaller, new, and a bit easier to drive. It was primarily just for mowing the fields. Susan, who before she divorced my father, sold the farm along with tractors and left Wisconsin, preferred to drive the red one.

For the first five years or so we lived on top of the hill. The house on top of the hill was originally a manufactured home with a dug in basement. My dad did a serious remodel on it when we moved in, redoing all the walls and adding a large addition on one end that he used as his bedroom for most of the time we lived there. Adjacent to the house was a large metal building, a barn really, that we called the machine shed, and was where we kept the tractor and tree planter and all kinds of other rusty junk. A bit down the hill to the South were two barns that we didn't use much and silo that we didn't use at all. The farm used to be a cow farm and one of the barns had an upper and lower level, the upper to store hay and the lower to keep the cows. There was a little shed to process milk just off one side of the barn that my brother and I broke all the windows in the first days we set out to explore the farm. We threw rocks at the windows, one by one. I'm not sure if my dad knew we did that or just didn't mind, our fun more important than the windows in a useless building.

The other barn was a horse barn and before Susan sold her horses she kept them there, Shadowfax and Domino. From Google maps, circa 2021. The hay barn on the left side of the picture, the horse barn torn down sometime ago and replaced by what looks like a little shack with a white roof. In the center of the picture are pine trees, a mass of green as seen from above. They were planted to be Christmas trees but when my dad got too sick to manage the operation they all went to seed, growing too big to be trees anyone would want to cut down and put in their living room. 

In the lower right corner of the top view photo a hill drops sharply into a valley. On both sides of the valley we planted trees on the steep hills. The hills closest to the house were planted with Black Hill Spruces and on the opposite side, about a 10 minute walk from the house to the base of the hill, we planted pines. On top of that opposite hill was an expanse of land that levels out into trees, some small fields, and eventually a little apple orchard that produced mostly inedible apples. The farm consisted of dramatic hills that originally was 160 some acers. Most of the trees were planted on an incline of some kind as there was hardly any flat land anywhere on the farm, which is why it was available for sale in the first place. There were other fields, other rows and nooks and hills we planted, but this pictures shows the trees just South of the farm house.

The masses of concentrated green, the one on the middle left just below the road are the Black Hills Spruces, below them some rows of pines we planted later. The dark mass on the bottom center-right is a huge hill where we planted pines. The rows of trees still vaguely visible. The upper right is another field on top of a hill for pines. I remember each one of these sites while we were planting. The left and bottom trees earlier in the evolution of the farm when I was a small kid following behind the planter closing the dirt around the trees with my feet, the upper-right a bit later but tasked with the same job. I preferred to walk behind the tractor rather than sit in the planter and get covered in the cold, goopy gel we dipped the saplings roots in before we put them in the ground. 

Later, in the summers my dad would pay me and my brother and other local kids seven dollars an hour to trim the trees with large machetes. To do this he would buy us white button shirts with French sleeves from the Bargain Nook, the second-hand store that stocked returned items from the Land's End factory in Dodgeville, the next town over. The shirts often were perfectly nice but someone had made an embroidery error, getting someone's initial's wrong on the right breast pocket. The French sleeves meant that there were no buttons on the cuffs and therefore were easy to roll up or could hang loose over the hands. All this to protect us from the sun in the hot and humid Wisconsin summers. My dad seemed to be proud about these shirts, talking about their French cuffs and that they cost a few dollars with vaguely humorous enthusiasm. There is a joke there that I can understand but I'm not sure if I can explain it. 

South-Western Wisconsin is home to one of the few 'unglaciated zones' or driftless areas in North America. Meaning that the glaciers, when they ploughed over most of North American during the Ice Age didn't plough over these areas. So as, South-Western Wisconsin's features a bit more delicate and dramatic than a lot of the Mid-west, instead of large flat areas or wide, smooth hills, there are clumps of exposed rocks and cliffs and many little creeks and valleys. This picture, dated 2002 though really it was 2001, taken in the Spring, is a view from near the top of the hill where the original house was, facing south-ish towards the hill were we had first planted the most trees. 

The new buildings, built in the early 90's, the Cabin and what we called the Barn, were nicer and more intentionally designed than the old house on top of the hill. The cabin was two stories and built into the side of a hill such that the upper-floor was really the ground floor and the lower-level a basement that opened into a outdoor space that was never really used. It was sunny and warm, lots of exposed wood and a nice bathroom that had a somewhat large tub with water jets. There was only one bedroom on the upper-floor but another bed was eventually put in the lower room. The Cabin was never a place that any of us kids lived in. It was for Susan and my dad. An adult space, a kind of bachelor pad for two.

This is the only picture of the Cabin I have a digital version of, facing West, the back edge of the cabin on the left side of the image. Sterling the Jack Russel Terrier is running with a ball the size of his head. Why Sterling is running or where is going will be an eternal mystery. Andy, his running mate, a goofy Airedale can been seen in the background above to the right of Sterling, sniffing at something on the ground. They were puppies during in my eighth grade and I helped to take care of them both when they were little. In the foreground is a hitching post that I never saw used, but that's not surprising as by the time the cabin and barn were being lived in my brother and I had entered high school and didn't come to Mineral Point on the weekends, my sister already in college. 

Mineral Point (Part 3)

In the Spring of 2001 I moved from Seattle to my father's farm just outside of Mineral Point, Wisconsin to help watch after him. After graduating from a small liberal arts college in Iowa in May of 2000, I moved to Seattle to live in a house with a couple friends from high school, folks who went to school at the University of Washington and were finishing their fifth year of engineering college or starting graduate degrees. They had a spare room in the large, non-descript ranch house they rented in the Northgate neighborhood and after a very short stint working as a video game tester for Nintendo I found a job at the warehouse of a small book publisher in downtown Seattle doing menial labor for ten dollars and hour and health insurance. Every Sunday I would call my father to say hello, to see how he was doing. 

In the Winter of 1999 he was diagnosed with an early onset dementia at the age of 54, or so. At the time the doctor's best guess was that he had a dementia named Pick's disease, which was characterized by its early onset, amongst other things. With dementias, at least at the time, they only way they could really tell what the exact kind of dementia a person has was to slice into their brain and examine the particular brain plaques that were held responsible for suffocating brain neurons, which is something that could only occur after the person had died. Thus, in 2014 when he died and we agreed to let them do the autopsy, they told us that he had early onset Alzheimer's. Not that it really mattered to any of us or him what it was called, but at least we could say that instead of a rare disease that was difficult to pronounce he had a recognizable condition. 

At the time, in my early 20's, not even a year of working, I decided that if I were going to spend some time with my father before his condition got worse, that I needed to do that sooner than later. A couple of things went into my decision too go. My job, obviously, though I liked the people I worked with it didn't really feel like a 'career' but just something to sustain me as I worked on poetry and my long distance relationship with Amy who lived down the coast in Oakland. I was getting tired of both working and our relationship and so moving to the farm for a bit I thought would be a good thing to do, a break from what I was doing and a chance to get time and space to focus on writing. My old friend Joel, who moved to Seattle into that same house a few months after I arrived told me that he admired my decision to go help with my father. Amy said the same thing but at the time and even looking back now it felt more like a duty than a choice, one that I rationalized to make the best of. That if I didn't go now then I might regret it later. Plus I could quit my job. 

Talking to him on the phone that first year in Seattle gave me the impression that his mind was deteriorating quickly. I'd call every Sunday, usually in the afternoon. He'd usually be sitting around what we called 'the cabin,' one of two buildings he built on the farm after we sold the original farm house sometime in the early 90's. He and Susan, his second wife, might be watching television or chatting and smoking pot with their artist folk friends. Or maybe he was out mowing the fields or had run into town and Susan would have him call me when he got back. I don't really remember what exactly we'd talk about but I remember that it became harder for him to talk about anything. Eventually, every noun he knew was replaced with the word 'thing' and every place he knew was replaced with the phrase 'over there.' So as, "that thing over there" was a phrase that he came to frequently use. I could tell him what I was doing but over the year it became increasingly difficult for me to understand the references he was making. And he knew that and was frustrated. Sometimes Susan would get on the phone to clarify or maybe at the end, to summarize and clarify what he was trying to tell me. At the same time he was happy to talk to me and I was happy to talk to him. A regular date that Susan said he looked forward to, something to help anchor him and I wanted to be good.

My dad was an interesting man. Maybe a bit controversial, a person that folks might have mixed feelings about. What I can say about him are stories, not so much generalizable personality traits because I didn't know him as an adult and can't judge him by the archetypes of adult types that color my presumptions and interactions. What I choose to remember was that he was a new age 80's dad, someone who read Peck's self-help classic The Road Less Traveled, Bly's treatise on being a contemporary man Iron John, and Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the latter of which I tried to read in high school, searching for wisdom, but couldn't make sense of. He took us to family therapy after the divorce and would proclaim that he was trying to be a good dad, an admission made possible by the discourses of the sensitive 80's man. He was a builder as well, always working on a new project, be it building the houses and buildings he built (numbering four in my lifetime) or tinkering with something out on the farm or refinishing the steps to the basement, or whatever, he always had a project. He was always what seemed to me endless talking to everyone, with the folks at Farm & Fleet, the manager's at Hardee's, or driving around and stopping by randomly at the houses of people in Mineral Point. As a kid I was always waiting for him to stop chatting with folks so we could go home. All of this just a toe in the water, rose-tinted and incomplete. I increasingly admired his generous qualities as I became an adult though by the time I became an adult these qualities were merely memories, my relationship with my dad never an adult relationship. 

Me, my brother and my dad, circa 1984, taken in the garage of the house we rented in Mineral Point before we moved to the farm. A photo of a photo. My memory tells me that I was scared to be on the ladder so I am holding onto my dad's arm. My brother not scared at all, sitting on the top step. I am five years old. 

I used to miss him all the time in my 20's after I had come back to Seattle from Mineral Point, after graduate school and New York and then California with Amy, and then eventually to Indiana for PhD school. It wasn't until he died and our pilgrimage's to the care facility in Juno, Wisconsin ceased, where he spent almost ten years of his life wandering and then stumbling around in a version of hell, one part incommunicable mental fog and confusion, one part institutional prison surrounded by the hopelessly sick and dying; it wasn't until he died, the pilgrimage's stopped, and we were finally able to hold a memorial ceremony did I stop thinking of him as frequently. Days can go by where I don't think of him at all. But here I am, thinking of him, thinking through him to get back to the present.

Mineral Point (Part 2)

There is a connection between my father getting sick and when I started to write. This sentence is based on a sentence I wrote fifteen years ago in the square little memoir-ish prose poems, a belief that the act of recovery can provide clarity and a belief that the thingness of poetry is an end in itself. I wrote,

There is a connection between when I started to write, or at least become aware of the desire that writing was something I wanted to do, and to my father's illness. It's difficult to make this connecting explicit. There were times during my sophomore year of college, before the diagnosis, when he would call to chat at five in the morning or appear unannounced at my dorm room on a Tuesday afternoon, a long two-hour drive from the farm. Later, watching him fold laundry, each item, a t-shirt or a pair of socks was put into its own pile so that the laundry room was completely covered in a single layer of neatly folded clothes. Like reading a sentence so closely you forget the beginning before you reach the end. "That's a good way of explaining it," my mother said.

Regardless of poetry, whether this block of text does or does not posses a life of it's own; and regardless of my intention at the time of writing it and aesthetics, it seems to me that if I want to write about the phenomenon of being foreign and all the other beings available to me here in China, or in Kunshan or my apartment or my mind/body complex or whatever physical forms one imagines themselves as; it seems to me that if I want to write about basketball or language learning or my mixed feelings about living here or really just the mixed feelings of being alive, then I need to again try and articulate the desire that pushes me to write, the part of my identity that wants to make monuments to my desires. If these desires are what shapes my experience then it follows that to understand my experience I must understand these desires. I set out to write about basketball and China but again I find myself writing about my past in hopes that I can set things up to better understand the contours of my experience without blame or pathos. 

Instead of poetry then I attempt phenomenology, where phenomenology is about bringing an experience into view and making previously unarticulated aspects of this experience visible. I consider these attempts to be a kind of phenomenology so long as they bring forth the architectures of feelings and sensation that underlie a given narrative; that is, so-called the structures of consciousness that give rise to the particular ways I experience the world. To be clear though, narrative is not phenomenology though ultimately I think phenomenology is just another narrative, a way of making sense. What happened earlier to this blog, maybe about a year after I started it was that the newness of my experience was covered over with narratives of the occasional event, i.e. a kind of record of my life here, diary like so I stopped writing in it. I lost the thread. Maybe these stories and attempts at phenomenology will eventually also result in piles of clothes scattered around a room, no sense but the sense of the creator who made them. A worry that I too am like my father in early onset cognitive decline, a worry that I felt much more acutely when I was younger but a worry that still hangs around, maybe pushing this writing forward. 

**

What is different now then when I was younger is that instead of spending part of my time working on poetry I now use those three or four free mornings in a week to work on academic stuff. I started my PhD almost ten years ago and after about three years into the process, poetry, especially the regular time I'd put into it, diminished to the point of only something I worked on during the summers or on an occasional weekend. Like anything, one cannot be good at something unless you put time into it. What this gradual transition into academic work and 'trying to make sense' for particular audiences has done to this kind of memoir-ish writing has a) made writing in lettered bullet points fit within the logical flow of my writing, b) made me feel that I need to justify my 'method' by giving it a name recognizable to an academic audience, i.e. phenomenology and c) most importantly for the writing itself (and actually what I wanted to write about); what seems to be manifesting these days is an ignorance of the kinds of formal constraints that I used so frequently in my previous prose poetry writing, that is, not writing into three blocks of prose or a single block or prose with fully justified margins in order for a thing to be a complete piece of writing. While this may seem like a trivial and slight constraint (and also something that you can still see if you look at pretty much any entry in this blog prior to this summer with a few exceptions) what it meant for the writing itself is that I would need to start and finish any given piece during the same session and/or I would need to 'end' a piece after three paragraphs. No more or less. There have been some variations on this form over the years, but the difference in terms of the actual writing process is that the sense made is not constrained by a kind of word limit. Instead, one writes until the impulse has been satisfied or in terms that I still have reservations about, until the argument has been made. 

This form however, this set of three paragraphs has been baked into this variety of writing such that I cannot escape it or the poetic symmetry it requires; one part a mildly OCD desire for control and one part, which is maybe the same part, a habit formed over many years of writing. A prose poem I wrote around the same time as the passage above,

Window

 

Because everything is right here an ending is right here. I snap my fingers and listen to the aftershock. I pick my head up to hear the sounds of traffic. I don’t mean to be obvious but I stop for a second to think, and air goes out the window. And I hear somebody driving by. There was an idea to work through, to not stop until something happens.

The 'something' in this case could be conceptualized via what Zen Buddhism calls the 'satori,' a sudden awakening or enlightenment. Or perhaps more famously (and citably), what Roland Barthes in the essay "Exemption from Meaning" from Empire of Signs calls the satori is a momentary emptiness of language where the meaning of a given poem/photograph/moment in a song is secondary to the time stopped stillness it creates in our mind/body complex. Regardless of if the poem above provokes a satori, I put it here as an example (which is what one provides when trying to make sense) of what I was often trying to go for in my blocks of prose, often failing but occasionally achieving. That is, I was trying to write poems. In some versions of poetics this what a poem is supposed to 'do.'

Another difference is in the writing process itself, a more temporal difference, that is, a movement away from trying to finish a piece in one session. Back at Brown, eighteen years ago, I was hanging out with Mark, a fiction writer, one day and we were talking about writing processes. He mentioned that one thing he always does is avoid ending a writing session at the end of chapter or scene such that the next day there is already some momentum or unresolved opening present on the page to pull him back in. I've thought about that. Whereas, the short form of poetry pushes towards closure, that I stop when something happens. This is something I learned in CD's workshop at Brown, where she'd often say something like, "I like those last two lines. You should throw the rest of the poem out and start over with those lines." The idea that it would often take an entire poem to just open up the space where something happens and that the poet should then proceed from that point. That a lot of what we write is a necessary warm-up to discovering what we want to say. In a way this contradicts what I was saying earlier, to end when something happens, but I think one takeaway for me from those days is to recognize those moments and assume, rightly or wrongly, that what strikes me as an insight will also strike others. That poem, "Window," I sent to CD about a year after I left Brown. She was on a writing retreat at the time and said that the poem was generative for her, that she printed it out and put it on the wall above her desk. Knowing that sustained me, her validation an encouragement to keep writing. 

And now I've drifted away from phenomenon into narrative, piles of socks and t-shirts strewn around the room. My point was that I don't always try and finish everything, setting things down until I have time again, a process dependent on picking up the previous thread. Like Mark, I find myself stopping in between happenings. This has a direct bearing on not just the process but the writing itself. The pliers and clamps I'd use to construct poems have grown rusty and instead I have come to rely more on the string and glue of the sense making language one uses to connect one thing to another. Yet, however, for example, and thus this feeling that I-must-write-these-things-down continues to manifest.

Summer II

After about six weeks of being away from Kunshan I am back, in my office at home, and settling in for the rest of the summer. I had a plan to go to Yunnan province but canceled a few days ago, one part the recent Covid cases along the Myanmar border that could make travel more complicated and one part the desire to get some more writing done before the start of August and the school year. This summer, a summer where I am more or less stuck in China due to the fact that it is very difficult to get back into China if I were to leave, was about figuring out how to make the most of my time here on my own. In June I rented an Airbnb in a hip neighborhood in Shanghai, writing and watching basketball in the mornings, meeting my Chinese teacher in the afternoons. It was great to be in a vibrant city again, to see strangers and eat burritos and sit on air-conditioned trains. While I don't have a huge amount of what I'd consider close friends here in China, I had a relatively busy social calendar, playing basketball, wandering around, or going out for drinks with the folks I knew or who happened to be in town. 

City life, reminding me most of when I lived in San Francisco on Valencia, a place where tourists and hipsters would come to shop, eat, and hangout. But I was the tourist in this case, living in Shanghai's French Concession. The second picture is a view of the little alley my Airbnb was in, the third picture some tired guys, and the last a picture from the commuter ferry that crosses the Huangpu river, which I loved to take. The basketball game I played on Sundays was near the terminal and so outside of my neighborhood, I ended up spending a lot of time in the area along the river. Not in the over crowded Bund but on the more mellow Pudong side watching the shipping boats pass, big and small, and wondering what it would be like to live on one. 

At the beginning of July I went up to Inner Mongolia with a group of work colleagues, now friends, and spent a week traveling around the south-central region, starting in Baotou, then to Ordos, then to Hohhot, a few days in each city and the near regions. In Baotou and Ordos we had the benefit of having some family connections, the uncle of one member of our group arranging a travel itinerary and a car to take us places in Baotou and the cousins of another member connecting us with a driver and some family dinners in Ordos. We went to a couple grasslands, museums, the desert, temples, and all kinds of restaurants, mostly Inner Mongolian food and barbeque. We ate a lot of lamb.

The desert is the South-Eastern most edge of the Gobi desert that runs south of the Yellow River, just West of Ordos, specifically the Xiang Sha Wan (响沙湾) Desert . Our second day in Ordos we visited the 'Ghost City,' so-called, Kangbashi, a district of Ordos that became somewhat famous, at least in Western Media, for being a large and empty city where nobody lives, another example of something strange the Chinese were doing as measured by the tastes of upper middle-class newspaper editors living on the East Coast. Ten years later Kangbashi is not as empty as the reports would have folks believe though it was pretty empty. We rented scooters and drove around the huge monument malls and parks.

The picture of food is a traditional inner Mongolian stewed dish, lamb, noodles, potatoes and sour cabbage in the winter version, green beans instead of cabbage in the summer version. It was present for a lot of our meals and delicious. Nothing fancy but hearty and comforting. One could eat it everyday and from what I understand that's what people do. The last picture is a one of the grasslands we visited, a slightly unusual grassland on top of Chun Kun Shan (春昆山). We saw sheep and other visitors, took a hike into a valley with large, thick ants and walked around the Aubao three times (pictured last). The first time one is supposed to wish for oneself, the second for your work, the third for your family and friends. And the clouds and skies. And the clouds and skies. 

After inner Mongolia I traveled back down South to visit a friend and collaborator in Jinan, staying at a modern hotel in an area cluttered with snack stores and barbeque and bikes on the sidewalk. It was a bit of a shock to thrust back into what felt like an anonymous Chinese city, lights and noise and crowds. But my traveling mind, primed by spending the previous week with more experienced travelers, sought some continuity, seeking out the local food and going for a hike on an incredibly hot day with my friend. We stumbled on some old Buddhist carvings on a mountain in Jinan's south-east, not that we were looking for them. Jinan is famous for fresh water springs, not for swimming but for drinking and making tea. There was a temple in ruins on the mountain built around a few of these springs, ancient economies and intersections with religious belief that remains entirely mysterious and foreign to me. 

We watched an elderly man slip behind the barrier to prevent people from going into the cavern enter the darkness to and come out closing the lid on his water bottle. Meanwhile, we chatted about how little we knew about this place and speculated as to what it meant for this temple and these Buddhists to control access to a spring, the temple estimated to be about 1200 years old and rock carvings just around the corner even older. 

**

Those are just a few moments of the last six weeks but I'm back in Kunshan and rested a bit. Not so much physically as much as mentally, exhausted as I and many people that I know have been from the previous year. Thus I feel a bit refreshed though I am not entirely ready to get back to school. There's more to say and I'll maybe I'll say it in the coming weeks but for now I'm off to meet some friends for lunch. Onward,