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Artifacts

May 31, 2012 by Tim McKee

My mom and I were talking recently about the resurgence of traditional names in American culture: Eva, Hazel, Virginia, and Ida are back! As I gushed about how sensible it is to hold on to your dated clothes for the next cyclical trend and ranted about the cinematic remake of every good movie from my childhood, my mother got quiet for a second: “Yeah, all the names have come back – except mine.”

Yes, it’s true: Doris seems to have resisted the redux. My mom complained but also understood: she’d never really liked the name Doris. I was shocked when I was a kid staying at my grandparents’ house when I found my mother’s old high-school yearbook: “It’s been great to know you, Dottie!” her classmates had scrawled in the autograph section. I knew even then that my mother had never really liked her name and had done what she could to escape it.

“Bertha hasn’t made it back either,” I offered weakly.

So it goes the ebbs and flow of what’s hot and what’s not.

It got me thinking about other fashions that have fallen by the wayside. Recently at work, a photographer sent us a thick envelope of images that were clearly all from the seventies. I appreciated the grainy quality of the film, the large hair and sunglasses, and the preponderance of stripes. Among these gems were several photographs of men with mustaches. They looked so normal! When a guy sports a mustache these days it’s like a joke for Halloween that he shaves off the next day. But for these guys, and for most of the men I knew growing up, including my father, the mustache was a critical part of their eternal and dying quest to look good. My dad’s mustache was so ubiquitous that when he shaved it off we squealed “Ew!”

Occupy Upper Lip!

What else has gone wayward? Surely the smoky bar, which disappeared the day California passed the first anti-smoking ordinance, bless her heart. I certainly don’t miss coming home from a night reeking of cigarettes I didn’t inhale. But I do miss the cultural reference: the smoky bar was a place where anything could happen; where reality was obscured by slants of smoke and adults cavorted in some sort of divey harmony.

Last night, as I rose to clean the kitchen after Annie had cooked me and Rio a stellar meal, I flashed for a second on the mid-century man: “I’ve worked all day! I don’t need to do a thing!” I fantasized about  standing up from the table, walking out the door, and making a beeline to my friend Jeremy’s house to watch basketball and drink beer. Yeah, damnit! Dinner, clean-up, bedtime, dog care: why should that be my concern? Surely Annie could handle it. I thought of my mother in law, who’s always been impressed that I even know how to do the dishes, let alone iron shirts. But then I came to my senses, remembering that cohabitation and shared duties actually build collective freedom because all parties are invested and passing the baton and finding time to sit on a chair and do nothing, which these days I consider the closest thing to nirvana. So I cleaned the damn kitchen. Well. And then I recalled Annie’s standards and wiped a few extra corners. I had a wifebeater on. And a goatee.

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The River in Our Eyes

May 8, 2012 by Tim McKee

Last weekend I attended a beautiful wedding at a farm near the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania.

As the crowd quieted and the groom and wedding party looked out from under the chuppah, our friend waltzed down the cottage steps in her flowing white dress. At the bottom of the stairs, her father waited for her in his wheelchair. As they began their walk down the aisle, I felt the familiar gush of warm tears falling slowly from my eyes and down my cheeks. Simultaneously, I felt an opening in my heart that rose like warm air through my chest and up my throat until it met those tears in some sort of emotional thunderstorm.

At the reception later, in two separate conversations with female friends about our favorite parts of the wedding, I mentioned how affected I was by our friend’s grand entrance, how quickly it brought me to tears. One of the friends responded, “Wow, Tim, I didn’t know about that side of you.” The other said, “It’s refreshing to hear a man talk about crying.”

All I can say is: What’s up with that? It’s not that I judge the women I was talking to; it’s just alarming that male tears are so rare that women take such note of them. I say this because crying, to me, is something I am infinitely grateful for. When I cry, I feel gratitude that I am touch enough with my heart that it can supply water. When I cry, I feel gratitude for feeling, because my mind can so readily chase away my heart’s evocations.

When did crying become something to be ashamed of for men? When Rio cries, I hold him to give him a safe container to let them flow, as opposed to hastening him to halt them. I know a mother who chastises her son when he cries — toughen up, dude — and I can’t help but imagine those stifled tears coming out later as angry outbursts, or at best reclaimed sadness on a therapist’s couch. The truth is that when I cry, I tend to walk away from whoever is around because I have internalized this association of male tears with weakness, but in secret I cherish each and every one. In fact, I’d say that crying for me is one of the most exquisite feelings in the world; it means I’m in touch with life’s shadow, which let’s face it deserves to be in the light. I don’t want a merit badge for crying: I just want it to be as common as a smile, for the world, and the human condition, is a trying place.

Sometimes when Rio and I watch videos, he takes a look back from his perch on my lap and takes note of my tears. At first he seems confused, because he associates water from the eyes with sadness. “Why are you sad?” he often asks. I tell him it is because I am happy. He has noted this apparent contradiction. We have usually watched something that bolsters my faith in the human potential. I am crying in part because goodness is not more of a norm, just as shedding tears isn’t. Tears come because I taste what could be; there is a hope and bitterness to that. A friend of Allen Ginsberg’s once described him as a “man with leaky eyes.” A mentor of mine once copped to a similar tendency, admitting to me that he is often “that guy in the car you see crying.” Damn I love a man’s tears.

May my destiny, and all my brothers, be so bold and  real.

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The Adventure of Misadventures

April 1, 2012 by Tim McKee

Me and the kid. Photo by Anna.

Leave it to me to romanticize any undertaking, even if it’s a just a drive to Charlotte with Rio.

I had long wanted to watch a professional basketball game in North Carolina, and I noticed that my beloved (but terrible) Sacramento Kings were coming to Charlotte to play that city’s team, the Bobcats.  People I know are sometimes surprised to learn that I’m a sports fan, but I see no contradiction between reading poetry and reading box scores. I grew up in a sports-centric household. My father loved baseball and would tell me stories from that sport’s long history: how Ty Cobb used to slide with his metal spikes flying; how Nap Lajoie was a great hitter even though he batted with his hands in reverse position on the stick. My father was an ardent fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and one of my fondest memories of childhood was going to Los Angeles Dodgers/Pittsburgh Pirates games. My father taught me how to keep score in the game’s printed program, and he and I would always bet $5 on the game; if the Dodgers won I was elated; if the Pirates won I usually cried.

My father was a very busy man, often working late or traveling on business. But for many years he coached my Little League baseball team. He would work on the batting order for our next game the night before, explaining the strengths and weaknesses to me of each hitter as I wondered where he would put me. My father was a great coach — thorough, committed, smart — and we were champions almost every year he served that role. When my parents got divorced and we moved across town from each other, I kept playing baseball but he could never make it to any of my games. Years later Papa told me that his boss had always rolled his eyes when my father would leave early to go to coach; in that corporate environment, choosing family commitments over work was frowned upon. To this day, I am grateful to my father for his sacrifice. I’m also thankful to baseball  — a remote man came whisker-close when a ball was in play.

All that said, I deplore that sports is such a big, commercial business: here in North Carolina, to find a new basketball coach for one of the local colleges, last year that institution conducted a nationwide search and created a review panel to hire a coach that ended up getting paid a six-figure salary — so many financial and mental resources are put into sports. But I am shamelessly a fan of the heart of it: athletes working for years on their game, physical prowess being honed and tested, the fact that anything came happen in the spontaneity of live action. Last-minute victories and unlikely heroes are not public-relations stunts.

And so I bought two tickets for the game, envisioning a night of father-son bonding and adventure. I even booked us a hotel for the night, since we’d be driving two hours to get there. Rio was excited, but early on, he began chipping at my fantasy. For one, he insisted on rooting for the Bobcats, even though he literally has no connection to Charlotte. I explained that I had lived in Sacramento for five years, that he might consider engaging in something I explained as “solidarity.”  When that failed, I tried to bribe him with promises of a Kings cap, but still he wouldn’t budge. At one point before we left, I told him I was disappointed he wouldn’t be cheering alongside me. Annie looked on with humored interest. Rio replied, “That’s not fair for you to be disappointed in me for that. It’s my heart, and I can do what I want with it.”

Attaboy, right?

The evening went exactly as I hadn’t planned. Rather than getting there two hours early to check in and eat at the mom-and-pop pizza parlor I’d picked out, we hit stop-and-go traffic. We arrived at the hotel with ten minutes to spare to find a drab high-rise with a mediocre room with a stunning view of the freeway.

Inside, the game was a yawn:  The arena was only half full. About halfway through, Rio, still cheering for the Bobcats, said, “Instead of watching this game and sleeping at the hotel, I want to drive home right now and be with my mama.”

Ah, the lure of the maternal breast.

But we stuck to our (my) plan, and we watched the lackluster game and headed back to the hotel where I watched bad cable TV after Rio fell asleep. I derived a strange satisfaction from watching no show for more than five minutes, the click of the remote like some twisted lever of pleasure.

The next morning, we talked up the big plate of pancakes we’d get at the cafe, but the one I’d chosen ended up being closed for renovation. We settled on bagels and drove out to a park where a tow truck blocked the entrance for 20 minutes. I sat there astounded by the lack of fortune. But we finally made it to a green field which is all we really need and Rio and I jumped around and found that wide open space when past and future fall away and just the smudge of wet grass on the knee is enough. When sweat well-earned marks a path well-chosen. Wasn’t it in Deliverance that Burt Reynolds’ character said, “Sometimes you’ve got to get lost to find your way”?

Holy those moments when linear lines get erased and quandary steps up and says Bounce the ball and don’t worry about where.

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On this Spring Day

March 24, 2012 by Tim McKee

The flowers have arrived. It is the beginning of the party. Everyone is looking their best, having just emerged from the winter doldrums. The wind stops by and shimmers some skirts and shirts and then is off. Wisteria wine is served, and the bumblebees catch up on the months underground.

Rio and I and Stella head out to the path by the river, and it’s so lush I’m ready for snakes but only the thought of them arrives, even that making Rio and I shiver. It was a lazy morning, the kind where time seems to halt and become a giant vessel to climb into.

Now Annie and Rio are making cupcakes, and I look at a poster of Obama next to our window and I think of his graceful words to two parents grieving their murdered son and I think of Ram Dass in Fierce Grace how he reached out to those who had lost and opened up his hand which had inside a flash of light and I come back to my general belief that the world is good. I can get hot under the skin, and I’m a brittle pane of glass if I haven’t breathed in a while. Yet one big inhale and wellness clears its throat and says Glad you’re back.

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At the Keys

March 5, 2012 by Tim McKee

Eyes closed, fingers on the board, Letting what is around me and inside me come through me. Warm house. Sleeping son. Sleeping partner. Dog sits on the rug by the fire. Dryer turning, offering its warm sound. Inside: also a pearl. Not sure from where; why I found it today. Why now but not always? What is covering it when I feel a void instead? I remember reading how Eckhart Tolle just sat on a park bench one day, spending the entire time watching the people pass in front of him and the leaves shimmer in the wind, and how he just smiled, suddenly aware of life’s bounty. He said he stayed there all day and was never the same after.

And so my eyes are still closed now, because somehow I worry that if I open them the pearl will go away. I’ll look at what I’ve written, critique it, erase it, doubt it, and then the long line of anxierty that stretches toward uncertain futures will light up, and the thick roots of regret and pain that go into the past will surge again. No, I want to compose from this open place, where more truth than I can edit in or out resides.

What is it that I did today that brought me this gift? Nothing unusual. Perhaps just a bit more patience, a bit more restraint, a bit more kindness than was necessary. I apologized to someone today for saying something cold and mean. I listened to my son’s complaint instead of dictating it away. I kissed a dog. I wrote a friend and told her I needed her help. I sat down here, even though I didn’t know what I was going to say and believed I’d find something waiting to come out. I believed in my mind, and in my fingers, and in my knowledge of these imperfect vessels called words. I believed I could keep the barking voice … no, now I want to open my eyes to erase that, but I won’t.

I remember that on the first day of ninth grade, I learned that an eleventh grader had killed himself the day before. The whole school was shocked, and for first period I had an English class with a funny, charming man named Mr. Vedro. He told us to pull out ten sheets of paper, a pen, and to just write. To not hold back. And I filled those pages with my confusion, not caring about traditions or arcs or lessons. I wrote the pain. It was not pretty. But I still have those pages in a box under my bed called “memorabilia.”

There is so much talk in writing about editing, about revisions, about going over and over something until every word sings. I believe in that. I often help writers with my pencil when they haven’t done enough with their own. I cudgel my words into neater packages. But sometimes I just want to let the first truths drip onto the page, to believe that their crude essence holds something worth their unwieldy weight. That sometimes a pure chunk unfettered can do the job of fifty leaner phrases. (Already, I want to modify that: I’ve already thought of a better way to say it. But I’m keeping my eyes closed, and the delete key is too risky up there in the corner. So I need to write myself out of it. Kerouac once said that On the Road was so multilayered because he was writing it on a typewriter and therefore couldn’t erase anything. If he lost track of his narrative he had to write his way back to it. That’s how his trip had so many turns. Some Asian cultures call this “fish soup,” telling stories in wide, roundabout ways, all the ingredients thrown in.)

This is not my preferred way of being; I like order, tidy lines, doing one thing at a time, well. But tonight, I didn’t know what to say yet wanted to write. If I didn’t let myself go completely I wouldn’t even turn on the machine. And so I will open my eyes in a few moments with a promise to correct only misplaced keys and stray punctuation but nothing else. To have faith that sometimes the channel is opening, and delivering words that don’t need distillation.

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Graffiti Wars

February 7, 2012 by Tim McKee

The bridge near our house no longer hosts passing cars, but it does host lots of other activities: kids learning to ride bikes; teenagers tripping on Saturday nights; dog walkers and shit talkers and even stilt-walkers when a nearby festival strikes.

The bridge is the gathering place for our town on almost any major occasion: we host a Fourth of July fireworks show where locals roll their grills down for a potluck barbeque and banjo pickers circle up with fiddle players and jam bluegrass until the rockets fill the air. Also notable is Halloween when thousands of people stroll along the bridge to wonder at the hundreds of pumpkins that local artists carve and place along the bridge’s cement ledges. These are no run-of-the-mill Jack o’ Lanterns: artisans use special tools to thin and shave the pumpkin skin so that the scene created resembles an intricate woodcut, the candlelight illuminating it from within.

But the bridge is also the scene for a drama that unfolds 365 days a year: graffiti wars. With the preponderance of loitering that takes place on the bridge, it’s no surprise that spray cans get sprung and silly phrases get gunned across its grey walls. Most of the graffiti is proprietary in nature and largely inoffensive: “Go Tar Heels” or “Steve was here” or even “Eminem Rules.” Still, occasionally someone will write something obscene, usually scatological or sexual in nature.

When these “bad tags” strike, there are usually three responses. One pings around the e-mail list that serves the area. A message will be sent detailing how sick the citizen is of the graffiti and how it’s time to do something about it. Someone will mention the possible formation of community patrols. Someone else will furnish the Sheriff’s department’s phone number and the criminal code for vandalism. Of course stopping graffiti in a public place is about as easy as dictating the river’s roiling rapids.

The second approach is less punitive, more realistic, and more positive: it entails spray-painting “good tags” to combat the negative ones. I’m not sure if these come from teenagers who are doing Ecstasy instead of whiskey or from steadfast Bynum bridge walkers, but there are countless tags that are unapologetically cheery: there is a “hope” and a “happiness” and a pink dragon and even the green footprints of a mythical platypus that local lore says sometimes hops onto the bridge.

The third approach is my favorite, and it happens without a word. At night, a loose network of ragtag community activists embark on guerrilla missions to alter negative comments into positive ones. To my confusion and horror, I once ran across the word “Catpoop” scrawled across the bridge’s floor in thick red letters. The next day I bought a can of red spray paint and returned that night to the site. I figure “Catpeople” may be enigmatic but at least it’s an improvement. Really all I had to do was change one “o” to a “e” and add “le” to the end. No one was probably the wiser. “Fuck It!” in black was quite easy to change to “Rock It!” (I even had the black paint in my storage shed.) But others are trickier. There was one that said, rather bluntly, “My favorite things are pot and porn.” Rather than figure out an alteration for that honest admission, someone just crossed it out, which seems just plain lazy to me.

Some tags defy categorization. I like to think of them as cultural commentary; they are not offensive but not innocuous either. “I am not addicted, just committed,” made me chuckle, and think. My current favorite has sat unscathed for several months right in the center of the bridge in huge white letters: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” When I got home and settled onto my couch next to the warm woodstove after my walk, I wasn’t sure how comfortable to get. I call that provocative, which I almost always applaud.

The tags that stay in my craw are the ones I want to change but can’t figure out how to. Right now, there is one I’ve stared at for quite some time: “Fuck bitches. Make $$$.” I abhor this one, for obvious reasons, but it also captures the misogyny and materialism endemic to our culture. Does the tagger deserve credit for inadvertently making a sociological statement? I think not. But I won’t mess with the tag until I’ve found a way to doctor the message.

A friend once asked me, “If you found a sidewalk of fresh cement, what would you write?” I don’t know what my final message will be, which is the same reason I’ve never gotten a tattoo: I’m wary of trying to unify the multitudes. But I do know I’ll keep using my small arsenal of paint cans and the cover of night to transform ugliness into tiny patches of hope.

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Chasing Windows

February 1, 2012 by Tim McKee

Photo by Anna Blackshaw

Sometimes I just want to see the world like I did that once.

“That once” wasn’t just one specific time. It’s all the times I’ve seen, really seen, the splendor of life right in front of me. I remember last winter: I had just lit a fire in the wood stove, and it was casting its amber glow. Rio was drawing, Annie was reading, and I was watching them. It occurred to me that I was witnessing clearly what I actually have in my life: a home, a family, health, love. There was no questing for more, no castigations of why not, no clouds of regret or self-doubt. No, I was watching a beautiful scene in a film unfold, and it was from my own life.

Ah, but how quickly it fades. Even though I have enjoyed almost 365 days since then with Annie and Rio in this very house, the number of times I’ve caught this same glimpse and really felt it in my bones seems paltry. I often think my own experiments with bending reality — I have a few tired tricks I use — are simply attempts to get me back to this blessed view.

Recently I was driving around a college town, worry on my mind. I was waiting for a light to change and saw two students smiling and laughing as they stood on the street corner. I recalled my own days in college towns, how much easier the world seemed to me then. I was more insecure, sure, but I had less weight on my back; there were days I could just fritter and float. As I drove off, I had the urge to return to those streets; to take the place of these young men and have a view of the world that was perhaps more naive but bright.

The most pristine vistas are the childhood ones, the ones I’m still trying to climb back into. The poet Coleman Barks describes “those two minutes at the end of the day when a golden light would fall across the floor. . . . I would lie down in it and hug myself. One time when I was doing that, I told my mother, ‘Mama, I’ve got that full feeling again.’” For me, such moments came when my grandfather and grandmother would drive my sister and me “down the lake” to the tiny fishing cottage they’d built there; as soon as we hit the gravel road I’d lean forward in my seat to get a glimpse of the water through the trees. When the lake finally appeared in slivers between birches I’d feel a joy I’m not sure I’ve ever relived, even though I still return to that lake every summer and relish it with as much gusto as I can muster.

One of the pleasures of having a child in one’s life is getting to re-experience some of this wonder. When we visit the same fishing cottage these days, I watch Rio’s face closely in the rear-view mirror to witness it register some of the same anticipation I felt as a boy. But it’s not his job to serve as a hope chest for my mislaid dreams. And I can’t be a kid again, just like I can’t return to that college town. But Rio gets me close; and there is some simple pleasure in nostalgia, that bittersweet proximity to experience that memory grants us.

Perhaps the best I can do is to be patient with the pace of beauty; to not fret that the spot at the window may only come to me now and again. And to not curse the ephemeral nature of joy but rather to say thank you for even experiencing it. Otherwise I’m relegated to a life hunting shadows.

The other night I took Stella for a walk down to the bridge after Rio and Annie went to sleep. The evening was unseasonably warm, and a faint orange marked the billowy clouds blanketing the sky overhead. The river was rushing high due to recent rain, and I could see the lights of our little town through the trees. Stella was off leash and smelling this and that, and suddenly I felt a swell of satisfaction, of just knowing that I love and am loved, that these wayward ingredients somehow make a feast. I called out to Stella and she came running, and I hugged that darn canine and inhaled her musky scent and felt a warm quiet rush of the unadorned goodness that life sometimes slips in my pocket.

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