Mineral Point (Part 10)

On the upper-floor of the Barn there was a wood burning stove. It wasn't essential since the Barn had central-heating, but sometimes in the winter my dad would fire it up, just for effect. The black cast iron stove was set close to West facing wall and a shiny metal stove pipe ran up from the exhaust, through a portion of the exposed ceiling, then bent at 90 degrees, extended, and exited through that wall. One morning that Spring I heard a clunking, waking me up. It kept happening and I got up to look for where the noise was coming from, something to do with the stove. I couldn't imagine what it was. Maybe a branch had blown into the chimney and was banging around in the wind. I went and got my dad who assessed the situation and began dismantling the stove pipe, taking it apart near the elbow. A bird flew out of the pipe, small enough to have found its way down the chimney. A chickadee is normally grey and white with a black beak and head, a touch of tan on its sides but this one was all black and covered in soot. We opened the window and shooed it out.

**

One morning my dad came up the steps. It was a little bit before seven. The Barn's steps were simple wooden steps, slightly wide, slightly deep, and not too steep. The trudge up the stairs echoed in the empty rafters and so one would always be warned that someone was coming. He had gone to Wal-Mart that morning and bought the movie Gladiator on DVD to watch with me. That meant that he left the farm before six, drove to Dodgeville, bought the movie when Wal-Mart opened, and then come back to share it with me. I was sleeping. He was excited and I felt bad to tell him that I wanted to sleep a bit more and asked if we could watch the movie later. Or the time I was in college, a sophomore, and he called at five in the morning just to chat. Dementia messes with one's sense of time, the rhythms of the day, what's appropriate and when, to whom. 

**

One morning he came up the stairs with a copy of the day's Wisconsin State Journal. I was sleeping. He was excited and started to read the headline but stumbled over the words and stopped. He tried another headline and the same thing happened. I sat up and asked him what was going on, why he was reading me the newspaper, if something had happened. At that moment he seemed to realize that I was sleeping or trying to sleep and left me to it. 2008, a poem-like thing:

An alarm clock is one way to wake up. There are others, like gradually, with the sun rising in the East, to be shook awake by your step brother, or by you mother in the early early morning. To be sleepy until one jumps in the water; to sit on the warm grate while the freezing cold festers. Mornings like these.

 

I could wake up from the sound of a garbage truck, from the need to pee, a dream where I'm looking for the bathroom, an elbow touching mine. I could wake up from voices, a roommate or a couple walking by, a bright afternoon sun and the sudden feeling of sloth. I could wake up because I'm cold, wander through a house looking for blankets until someone else's parent hands me one. I could wake up in a tent, to rain, or wake up on a train going south, on my way to Los Angeles. I could wake up with drool on my pillow, with a boner or with a crick in my neck. I could wake up with the realization I've been sleeping on a wadded up t-shirt, dreaming that a biker had just stabbed me in a ballet studio. I could wake up with a dream in my head or a Stereolab song and listen to it on my way to work.

 

I could wake up from the a-tonal hum of a tea pot, in a panic, in a sweat of anxiety about teaching and work. I could wake up as a wire strung between fence posts, humming or laughing at a joke in a dream, goofing with friends. I could wake up in a foreign country, in a closet converted into a bedroom, look at the wall and not know where I am, a single moment stretching out in my memory. I could wake up to my father trying to read a newspaper headline, or a bird trapped in the stove pipe. I could take a nap and wake up twice in a day, wake up sick, and wonder what it feels like to not feel sick, shake Tony and wake up from the dream. I could wake up to a friend's voice wishing me a good day, wake up to my own voice wishing him good luck.

Or the time that Spring my friend Molly had come out to visit for the weekend from Iowa, where she was finishing up her senior year. We were sitting in the Barn, talking and figuring out what we were going to do that day and my dad came up the stairs with two tennis rackets wanting to play. I said something like, "Dad, Molly is visiting. We're going do stuff in town. Let's play after she leaves." And he got upset, saying that  I was always busy and didn't have time for him. Reacting to his sudden anger, I asserted again that we'll play when Molly leaves, forcefully and with a look on my face, an angry bird. It was embarrassing and unfamiliar. It was like I was scolding him, as if I was the parent and he was the child. Driving away from the farm I spoke to Molly, saying, see, this is the situation. It's strange, a cliché, and I don't know what to do with him, that he is not quite my father as I knew him and therefore I am not quite the son I know to be. 

**

It was always difficult to communicate what was going on to everyone but for Susan and Ted and the folks he saw on a regular basis, folks that had seen the decline first hand. Even my brother and sister didn't quite grasp how quickly he was deteriorating. That Spring in DC, sitting in a Mexican restaurant waiting for our food I talked a little about what we were doing on the farm, that dad was getting bad and that if they're going to spend time with him they should do so soon. They responded with annoyance, not about my father but about me; that I, the baby and youngest child couldn't possibly say something that they didn't already know; that it was not my place to make recommendations or judgments. These pre-dementia family dynamics reasserting themselves, our defensive biases and habits shaping the means by which the present moment arrives, reaffirming again and again that it's not the ideas that matter but the ethos of the person presenting them.  

My mom lived in Madison, about an hour from Mineral Point down the 151. My friends Aric and Aaron were still finishing their undergraduate degrees at the university, five-years to graduate as an engineer and I'd go into Madison on the weekends sometimes to see them, sleeping at my mom's house. She'd ask me how he was doing but I didn't quite know how to answer that. What I wanted was for her to ask me how I was doing. I wanted everyone to ask me that. I was mad at her for a long time after this period, an anger that I couldn't begin to articulate until years later. Being in Mineral Point and spending my days with my dad, no job, momentum, and somewhat isolated put me in a mood, a mood that followed me back to Seattle, then down to Portland and then to Providence at Brown for poetry school. It wasn't until the summer that I had graduated and started to see a good talk therapist twice a week with the last vestiges of my grad school health insurance that I came to realize how much that Spring had impacted me, how much a sense that I couldn't talk about those experiences had been fossilized.

Of course I could talk but most of the folks I knew didn't seem to relate to my experience, still mostly unknown even to myself. The early onset of my dad's dementia meant that the timeline was off, that in another twenty or so years I may have gotten a different reception though I'm skeptical that anyone can really understand another's hardship, whatever its nature. Though perhaps this sentiment merely demonstrates the particular strain of cynicism that lead to my silence in the first place, this cynicism a vestige of some mysterious civilization that had to fortify its walls against a long forgotten barbarian invader, its defensive encampment leftover from another era. But I could not blame my friends for not understanding my situation. I could not blame my mother who had her own issues with my father. I could not blame my sister and brother for living their East coast lives. And so I blamed myself for how I felt, that my mood was a result a directionlessness. That my loneliness was a result of my relationship with Amy. That missing my father, wanting to ask him for some advice, what to do, who to be; that this sense was a result of weakness, a fault of my own making. Like a sestina, kneading the dough,

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 told me over dinner.

 

I began to think about the past and make revisions to my memory and the logic of events growing up. There was a time in Seattle after I had come back from helping take care of him, jobless and isolated in a moldy apartment, when I thought about his disease and our relationship constantly. In retrospect I think this could have been considered mourning, but I had nothing to show for it: no funeral or artifact, no sign that anything real had happened.

Mineral Point (Part 9)

That Spring we also had a new litter of Jack Russell puppies that I took care of, puppies we sold. In addition to Sterling, the alpha Jack Russell that we bought as a puppy in the Summer of 1991, we had two female Jack Russells: Nell and also that spring had bought Tuck. Nell had the puppies about a week before I arrived and Susan set up a little fenced in area in the lower floor of the barn. Nell could jump over the fence but the puppies couldn't go anywhere. Jack Russells, popularly known at the time as the kind of dog on the television show Frasier, are small, short haired hunting dogs that are known for 'going to ground,' meaning, digging wildly into the ground looking/hunting for ground-dwelling cuties such as badgers and gophers and dens of foxes. Sterling was good natured, a friend to all, dogs included, and literally rippled with muscle. His balls and raw masculinity were always present, his studliness. He was not a dog that one could pick up and hold. He'd squirm out of your arms and didn't seem to care much about being cuddled. But he was sociable, attentive, always ready to engage but also always receptive to what we asked him to do. Andy, the Airedale, who was about three times the size of Sterling always deferred to his alphaness. Andy was his larger and stupider sidekick and companion for further adventures around the farm. 

The newborn puppies were about the size of guinea pigs. It took a couple weeks for them to open their eyes. Near the end of my stay, when the puppies had gotten a bit bigger, had grown legs enough to waddle around I took them out with my dad for pictures one day, sitting in the sun in the grass. 

In the first picture you can see the top of Sterling just above my dad's right thigh, Andy looming in the background. In the second, Nell making sure her brood is being handled appropriately. Not too long after I left the farm, maybe a year, Nell disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to her, but disappearance is one of the dangers for farm dogs. Pros and cons: farm dogs can always go outside and do their thing. They can roam without limits (though of course one has to train them a bit when young to not go too far) and live a bit closer to their working dog roots than a dog can in the city. However, sometimes they get into trouble, exploring places they shouldn't. Susan speculated that maybe some coyotes got Nell, one night when she wandered off. Or maybe she wandered down the to road and was hit by a car. There's no way to know. She just disappeared. 

Tuck (not pictured) was an all white Jack Russell with a light coat of thin curly hair that gave her a bit of an aura. She was a too young to have puppies when I was there, not too far removed from being a puppy herself. I don't have any digital pictures of her but she was a joy, my favorite of the dogs. Running and playing and letting herself be held. Nell was a dog I didn't know, a dog that my dad got when I got into college. Andy and Sterling though were my old friends. When Susan sold the farm and moved to North Carolina to be closer to her children and grandchildren she took the dogs with her, Sterling, Tuck, and Andy. Because the entirely of our relationship with Susan ruptured over the sale of the farm and the court case, my sister suing Susan to gain guardianship of my father and his estate; once Susan left Wisconsin we didn't hear from her until my father's death in 2014. Still the emissary of us kids, now adults, I was tasked with calling Susan and telling her about the plans for the memorial. We chatted for a bit. I'm not entirely sure about what, but I asked her about the dogs, what happened to them. I wondered about this for years. She said Tuck disappeared like Nell did. But Andy and Sterling got old and died, like real dogs, my old friends. Ron Padgett, "Bluebird":

You can’t expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from the picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he’s much older
now, can’t carry those
bottles ‘neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don’t think I’m
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.

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,

Mineral Point (Part 1)

On the way to my father's farm for the weekend, as my brother and I would always do on the weekends of the school year prior to high school, sometimes with my sister, sometimes not, an hour from Madison to Mineral Point on Friday after school, an hour from Mineral Point to Madison on Sunday afternoon, we'd usually stop in Dodgeville, eat out, and go by the Farm & Fleet or later when it was built, the Walmart. Farm & Fleet was and still is a wonder of a store. One part farm implementations such as feed and ropes and tractor tires and tools, one part general store with household products from sporting goods to candy to sponges, and one part clothing store selling jeans, boots, gloves, and flannel shirts. To this day when I am back in Wisconsin I try and make a pilgrimage for the jeans (nothing fancy but a lot of sizes that are a bit bigger, to comfortably fit my hockey player thighs and butt) and sometimes a flannel shirt, plain styles in durable if not particularly soft fabrics. My father took frequent trips to Farm and Fleet as he was always working on something out on the farm, sometimes the buildings, sometimes the tractor, sometimes out in the fields. Sometimes he'd just go to find something to buy, like one goes to the mall. The farm was not a horse farm (though in the early days Susan kept a few horses there) or a farm to grow food, but the farm was originally a one-hundred fifty acre plus expanse of rolling hills that we planted Christmas trees on, first in the Spring of 1985. I was seven years old. 

My brother and I were standing at the cash register with my father at Farm and Fleet. The registers in those days had a coin machine that would distributed the coin change. So as, one gives the the clerk cash (though my father would usually write checks) and then to the right of the customer was a coin machine synched to the register that would release the appropriate amount of change once the clerk opened the register cash tray. I remember the machine as a slim beige rectangle whose front was partially opaque deep brown such that you could see the coins stacked up inside it. On the right of the machine was a kind of slide that curved around to the front of the machine into a little cup such that when the change was released the coins would roll down the slide and land in the cup. Because my father always paid in checks, and later, used credit cards, I didn't often see this machine close-up and in action. Also attached to the machine was a little metal lever at the top of the right side. One day, standing to the right of my father with my brother, waiting for my father to finish the transaction or finish talking to the clerk or finish whatever it was that was taking him so long, I reached out and switched the little lever on the side of the coin machine. Suddenly a set of alarms went off. Red lights on the walls above the exist and entry doors started flashing and spinning and a loud alarm, not a ringing bell but a siren, blaring. I don't know how long this moment lasted, perhaps not more than a second or two as I quickly switched the switch back down, and the noise and lights stopped.

What happened after this moment is what I always return to. What happened after was nothing at all. Nobody said anything. Not the clerk and not my dad. Not my brother, to my memory. I've always wondered if anyone saw me switch the alarm on or if they saw me switch it off, and if they did, why didn't anyone say anything? Underneath this memory of what happened and this question of why, if my flipping that switch caused the alarm to go off, is an uncertainty that this actually happened. There was no confirmation, either though some kind of admonishment or joke or observation. No eye contact or smile or frown. Part of me wonders if my switching this switch caused the alarms to go off or if that was just a random event that my action happened to co-occur with, or if it happened at all. This doubt then is kind of a reoccurring theme, a question as to if what I remember and what I felt is real, that if the way I experience an event shares any resemblance to how anyone else experiences the same event; a question of if my experience is entirely singular. This lack of confirmation then is a constant, one that underlies much of this kind of writing, these attempts to reiterate an experience a confirmation of my own existence. As an adult I've since asked my brother if he remembered that day and he did, yet I still wonder. Endless wonder. 

On the Phenomenon of Basketball (Part 2)

In China pick-up basketball works different than it does in the United States. Full court is rare in public parks. Most of the hoops are set up as half-courts and when there is room for full court it is typical to see two half court games playing simultaneously rather than one full court game. I imagine that this is for two related reasons: the first is that there are more people that want to play then there are in the United States. This is about population density and the urban spaces here as much as it is about the popularity of basketball in China which, like the popularity of basketball in cities in the States, has to do with the fact that basketball doesn't require much space or resources in comparison to other sports such as baseball or swimming. One only needs a ball to play, without or without a crew. Though of course, basketball's popularity is also because it's cool; hip-hop, black athletes and musicians, Nike, and the intersections between basketball and style, style and status and swag.

The second related reason for difference in pick-up games is less geographical and a bit more cultural, that is, that folks here seem to come with a group of friends and play only with those folks. This is not a rule but a tendency I first noticed at Purdue, where some groups of Chinese students would prefer to play with the group they came with. If you needed someone to run with you in a full court game and asked one of these folks standing by an adjacent sideline, they'd decline in order to wait for the next available spot in their game. It was the rare Chinese student who preferred to play in the pick-up games rather than show up at the Co-rec with a crew. So 'culture,' maybe, but I think this tendency of young Chinese men attending college at a large American mid-western university to play basketball within insular groups is more complicated than essentialized notions of a particular orientation towards thinking or acting. Case-in-point, over the Summer in Shanghai where I’ve been playing pick-up on invitation from friends, two different regular games, the half-court that the group rents for two hours is only so big. If anyone could just walk on and play then the folks who organized would get less chance to play. Maybe this particular geographic and demographic fact, one defined by a high population and a lack of space has as much to do with the groupish-ness of Chinese pick-up games as a particular way of thinking or relating to others.

Regardless, and in contrast, pick-up basketball in the States is a winner-stays system. So as, if there are enough people to run five-on-five and have folks waiting, then the rule is that the winner of the game stays on the court while the losing team waits in line for the next game. Though this is how it worked at Purdue, this is also how I've experienced it in San Francisco and Oakland. The next in line is whoever claims next, which is usually a gentleman's [sic] agreement depending on who got there first. So as, for example, if there are thirteen people on a court, ten playing at a given time, upon the completion of that game, typically “1 & 2s to 15, win by 2”, then the eleventh person, however determined, would have the right to form the next team. So as, they could choose the team who they want to play with which would include three people waiting and two from the losing team. The reason I put all this into words is to make a contrast with from how it's done here, which is less winner-take-all and more oriented towards the broader participation of those in the group. Thus, in the half-court games favored here there are shorter games played such that everyone will have a chance to play. If there are twelve people then maybe three teams of four will be divvied up playing quick games to 5 or 7 points. Plus, at least in my experience here, the 3-point line is usually not used, so as, each basket, no matter where it is scored from, counts as 1-point. Another more mysterious difference is that it's always 'loser's ball,' meaning, the challenging team or the team that lost will start with the ball. Like giving more people more chances to play, there is a common sense here that is easy to grasp but it speaks to assumptions of who should be given the advantage. Whether this difference was a conscious choice or historical inheritance is probably impossible to know.

A more significant difference in Chinese half-court pick-up is the absence of check-ball ritual which instead is replaced by a non-stop flow that more closely resembles football/soccer. That is, in American pick-up when the ball goes out of bounds or after a point is made the ball is returned to the top of the key, just beyond the three-point line where the team who does not have possession of the ball initiates play by passing to the opposing team, usually as a bounce-pass, sometimes accompanied by the phrase, “ball-in,” as in, the ball is now in play. This allows the defense to get set; to find their man [sic], and initiate the start of play. The check-ball-less game creates ambiguity as to when to start playing defense as it’s unclear, at least to me, when play actually starts. For example, say the ball has gone out of bound on the hoop side. In the American game the ball would be returned to the top of the key, checked in by the opposing team, and play would resume. In the Chinese game, say the ball went out on the hoop side. The ball hits the wall or fence and bounces to the ground nearest a teammate of the team who just threw it out of bounds. This teammate then picks up the ball and throws it to their teammate who is out of bounds and then this teammate in-bounds it to their team and play resumes. So as, in this example nobody from the opposing team touches the out of bounds ball. Or, a person from the opposing team picks it up, passes it to the person out of bounds who ten inbounds the ball to his teammate to start play. Sure. This is fine. However, what tends to happen when this convention is followed is that it’s ambiguous when the defense should start playing or when the offense should start moving, i.e. cut towards the hoop or set screens or just stand there, anxiously waving their arms around. So as, it is not until the person gives up the ball after the in-bound does it seem that play actually starts. Though in some cases, the person who gets the ball on the in-bound will shoot or cut towards the hoop. In broad terms, what this means is that a bit of space is given to the person who receive the inbound which then may or may not be taken advantage of. Or in even broader terms, it lessens the importance of defense and physical contact. All said, if I am playing a half-court game on my ‘home court,’ i.e. the university court or with a group that I played a part in organizing, I will insist on playing with check-ball conventions. I get stressed out by the constant motion and ambiguity.

These conventions then also set parameters for styles of play, though style is always case-by-case, ungeneralizable to the individual or the specific situation. Relating to the constant flow of Chinese pick-up and the idea that more folks should have the chance to play is generally less defense and more room for shooters, where the unspoken goal of basketball is a beautiful jump shot on an isolation play more than winning the game. It's possible that I'm just bitter because I don't have a reliable jump shot, but the joy in this style comes not from an unrelenting control of a given court but from the opportunities for all to have their moment, no matter the winner of the game since even if one loses they will get back on the court in no time. So as, the game is less physical, less closely played when amongst friends in good spirits though there are many exceptions to this in that if the game takes on a more competitive edge, more at stake as far as who wins and loses such as in the tournament, the intensity picks up. But the causal game, the common game, resembles folks standing around taking their turns at making a shot or a drive. It is important here, as I've been told, that in any given game that one ends on good standing with everyone, that this is more important than winning or losing. If one is playing half-court games and one team is beating the other team consistently the winning team won't intentionally lose the final game, but it might not play as hard to give the other team a chance such that everyone can leave with some feeling of accomplishment. Maybe this is culture, maybe this is basketball. Maybe this is a function of playing mostly with your friends and acquaintances who you will inevitably see again, and soon, but it is a different than how pick-up works in the States and these conventions effects how the game is played and the experience of the players therein.